In relentless pursuit of freedom.
Over at the Praxis blog, I challenge anyone interested in education, entrepreneurship, career success, wealth, happiness, or personal growth to read five books this summer.
Each book is described with an endorsement from someone in the Praxis network. Check out the article.
The books are:
The same way you do everything else well. Practice, then reflect, then practice some more.
The common, conveyor-belt education system has a pretty bizarre approach to learning. It doesn’t mirror any learning pattern that high performers in any field use. It looks something like this:
Theory–>Theory–>Theory–>Theory–>Theory–>Practice (end)
In other words, you sit in classrooms studying things and memorizing knowledge from “experts” for nearly two decades. Then you’re supposed to take all that theory and successfully practice it in the real world and live happily ever after. Education is done, now you just go live well. You’re supposed to succeed in the marketplace and life after only ever thinking about it. Unless the theory is the practice – unless you’re learning to be an academic – this is a very bad way to learn.
I’ve written before about how absurd it would be if we taught bike riding the way we teach careers. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about an even better comparison, and one I know more about than biking. Basketball.
How do you learn to play basketball?
First, you practice. Maybe on a mini hoop, maybe on a full-sized hoop. But you just start shooting and dribbling. After you have the basic motions and movements and muscle memory down, you start playing with other people in actual games. You play a lot of pick-up basketball. Maybe you play in an organized team setting. The coach might have you focus on specific aspects of the game or skills as you drill and condition. You’ll scrimmage, run plays, and plot your approach to offense and defense. You play, then a new concept is introduced, and you immediately play some more and try it out. Then you stop to reflect and get feedback, tweak your approach, and play again.
At the highest level, this pattern is even more pronounced. Good players practice a lot. There is no world in which merely theorizing about basketball teaches you to succeed on the court. Practice is always the first step and vastly more important if you have to choose one. But when you go from good to great players, something else happens. Theory comes into play. The learning pattern for playing most successfully looks something like this:
Practice–>Practice–>Theory–>Practice–>Practice–>Theory…(ad infinitum)
Great players spend more hours in the gym than anyone. But after they play they also reflect on their performance. They review film from previous games. They study what the offense did. They observe what happened and theorize about why they were stopped in the paint by this or that defense. They plan for the next game. They review film of the next opponent and plot an approach to match. They constantly reflect on the feedback they get from the real world of practice and play. They seek out other achievers who have struggled with mental toughness, or strength building, or recovery from injury. They employ motivational tactics and specialized training.
Notice the pattern because it’s very important. Hours of film study and offensive scheming are of no value to the novice. If you’ve never hoisted a ball in the air, learning the perfect placement of your index finger or the optimal use of trash-talk to gain a mental edge isn’t going to help you. Theory is hugely important. But it becomes important only when it has past practice upon which to reflect and future practice for which to prepare.
Notice also that, unlike the conveyor-belt education system, the basketball model is never done. There is no end point. It’s an ongoing process. There is no graduation. Michael Jordan, at the peak of his game and dominating the greatest ballers on the planet, famously came back from every offseason with something new. He practiced. He reflected and theorized. He tested it with more practice.
In this model the role of teacher fades almost entirely. Specialists with knowledge of the history of the game or the mechanics of the human elbow can be employed in specific situations when needed, but they are in no way the key ingredient to learning the game nor are they valuably employed until a whole lot of playing has occurred. Instead, coaches and trainers emerge. People who don’t tell you which facts about basketball are correct and must be memorized, but people who challenge you to get off your butt when you don’t feel like practicing. People who help you in the process of reflecting on your unique game and keep you accountable to your unique practice process. They are observers who watch you in the actual act of playing the game and provide real-time feedback from their vantage point. They aren’t your authority – you can find a new coach anytime – but there for motivation and insight. Some of the greatest players are famous for ignoring their coaches as often as listening to them even though they deeply respect them, which strikes me as a pretty normal and healthy way to see the relationship.
Another important thing about learning basketball is the value of mimicry. How did the hook shot join the common arsenal of post players? Because someone did it well and everyone who played against them realized how effective it could be and began to copy it. How do you learn to crossover or headfake? By being crossedover or headfaked at the playground and determining to do the same.
Learning happens more from being around people and environments than it does from consciously thinking about them. You have to be immersed in the actual play of the game.
My friend and colleague at Praxis – TK Coleman, our Education Director – loves the game of basketball probably even more than I do. We don’t view this analogy as just a cute comparison. I think success in any career is far more like success in basketball than it is like success in a classroom. The principles of learning the game are the principles of learning to perform in just about every other arena. This is why we are so focused on apprenticing at startups and small businesses – practice – and reflecting on the experience and how new skills and mindsets can make it better – theory – and trying them out – practice – and discussing…etc. This is why our advisers have coaching sessions with participants, rather than giving them lectures. Philosophy is hugely important to success in any field. But only if you’re already in the field trying things out.
Kids aren’t practicing for life or career by sitting in the classroom taking tests. They’re theorizing about it. They’re not observing those who are successful (except, best case, at teaching) and mimicking them. They’re reading what other people said about the successful. They’re being introduced to a few fragments of the history of the game or uniform design or what one conditioning coach thinks about one approach to calf muscles. They’re not being transformed into great players, they’re simply checking the memorization of lifeless, contextless knowledge off a list of assignments.
You can’t expect to win by studying. You’ve got to play the game.
Here’s a really fun article TK Coleman and I wrote for a new publication called Design 4 Emergence. Check out the beautiful layout on the original!
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Isaac’s Take: The Mind a Blender
It was cliché. I took a walk on the beach and my life changed forever.
I like to imagine ideas as tiny physical objects sloshing around in my skull. The heavier ones sink to the bottom and the rest separate based on weight and viscosity. They mostly find their resting place and stay put, or at least in the same stratum.
Yet in order to create, make personal progress, discover who we are, and do what makes us most alive we need ideas to bump into each other. We need more than prefabricated plans and processes. We need disparate concepts to pair in unlikely, unpredictable ways. We need ideas to not stay in their place.
The rhythmic jostling of a good walk is like a blender. All the layers of ideas begin to move and shake and mix and mash. Walking is like a stirring up of the brain and the soul. Just 20 minutes into a quiet walk and you’ll begin to notice weird things happening. Seemingly random thoughts and thoughts about thoughts will move up and down, side to side, from the back to the front of the mind.
Back to my story.
I was frustrated, restless, and in a rut. Even though it was inconvenient and disruptive to my busy day, I made myself drive 15 minutes to the beach and go for a walk. I needed that endless horizon. I had no specific goal for my walk, which is kind of the point.
Five minutes in and I looked up at the horizon and saw in my mind’s eye a word floating in all caps just above the water.
“PRAXIS”
The bouncing of my steps had shaken this word loose and on its way to the front of my mind it had bumped into a bunch of other ideas long dormant. My decade-long dissatisfaction with the higher education system. My personal knowledge of dozens of entrepreneurs who were hungry for young talent. Recognition of my own skillset and network. It was too perfect. How could I have failed to see this for so long?
Within minutes an entire business model came into view, crisp and clear. I ran to my car, drove home, sat at my laptop and typed for a few hours straight. What is now my business and my passion was born.
Looking back, it all makes sense. I disliked my own college experience and envisioned a radical new model some 12 years earlier. I didn’t know where to go next with my idea so I put it on the shelf and pursued other things. In the dozen years that followed, I mostly pursued whatever was interesting to me personally and professionally with no long term plans. I managed to accidentally accumulate a near perfect mix of knowledge, skill, experience, outlook, and a network to launch what eventually became the higher ed. alternative I once dreamed about.
But I didn’t know any of this stuff was in there. It was all hiding in its own layer. Some nestled deep in the subconscious. Some associated with entirely different aspects of myself. I could never have purposefully made the connections necessary to see what I was capable of building. It had to emerge.
I took a walk. It’s the best way I know of to create the space for emergence in your own life.
You live much of life on a conveyor belt. It’s a structure created by others beginning with school and following you even onto the Internet as your newsfeed is curated based on assumptions about what’s important to you. But you’re hatching ideas and ideas about ideas all the time, whether you know it or not. The trick is accessing them and giving them space to mingle.
All the networks and technology at our fingertips is amazing. But it cannot on its own bring about the great epiphanies and acts of creation.
You can’t deliberately plan emergence. But you can remove obstacles. You can create conditions conducive to it. For me, that’s the simple act of walking. An act as old as our species.
Let your steps stir up your soul.
T.K.’s Take: The Mind an Ocean
One of the concepts that radically changed my life is an idea called “noble boredom.”
According to Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man noble boredom means, “No anticipation of action. It means having the ability to be present without needing something to happen.”
You don’t need to live very long to discover that busyness is the bearer of many luxuries. Being busy makes you look important. It gives you a good excuse for avoiding unwanted commitments and helps you deal with guilt, inadequacy, and the belief that you’re not working hard enough. Busyness protects from messy confrontations with the thing you fear the most: boredom.
When you consider the primary form of expressing boredom (“I don’t have anything to do”), it’s no wonder that we seek salvation in the experience of perpetual preoccupation. We dread running up against the fact that we often have no idea where we’re going and why we’re traveling in relation to all the stuff we do. If we stop being busy we’ll be bored. And if we become bored, we’ll see how uninteresting and uncreative our lives really are.
But inactivity need not be boring. The stillness and solitude that we look at as evidence of us not being creative enough is the very source of creativity.
Our subconscious mind is like the ocean. Our everyday waking-state consciousness is like the surface of that ocean. The activities of the mind and the external events that demand our attention are like the wind and the waves. Go to the shore of an ocean on a windy day and what do you see? You see the waves on the surface but what lies beneath is invisible.
The ocean is teeming with life, filled with all sorts of exotic and interesting forms waiting to be discovered. But as long as the wind is blowing and the waves are doing their dance such things remain hidden to the observer.
What if you return to the ocean on a quiet and calm day? The ocean doesn’t change but your experience of the ocean would be profoundly different. When the surface waters are still you see into the depths. You encounter astonishing things. You can reach for things that you previously didn’t know were there.
This is a metaphor for the relationship we have to our own interior depths. As much as we hail the marvelous powers of imagination, that power is often drowned out by all the external noise and busyness of day-to-day life. Our souls are not empty. They only seem to be because we haven’t learned how to look beyond the surface.
The simple act of taking a walk creates a bridge from busyness to stillness that allows us to penetrate the depths of our mind without completely disregarding our strongly conditioned need to “do something.” Some teachers of meditation describe walking as a mantra for the body. The purpose of a mantra is to get our reactive thinking and the incessant activities of the reptilian brain out of the way. It’s like giving a dog a bone. The dog ceases to make noise and it has something to do. This allows you to get on with your work.
Walking allows you to get into a rhythm or a groove that makes it easier for your reactive mind to settle down and open itself up to deeper insights and creative ideas. Many people try various forms of meditation only to find themselves uncomfortable, bored out of their minds, or quickly falling asleep. This is often the case because we’ve come to associate meditation with making the body still. The essence of meditating isn’t, however, about being in the lotus position or bragging about your ability to close your eyes and sit still for an hour. The true purpose of meditation is interior stillness.
You could say that walking is nature’s meditation hack. By involving your body in the act of meditation through casual walking you create a gentle transition to inner stillness. This kind of walking is different from the kind of walking you do when you’re trying to get somewhere. This is the walk of noble boredom. It’s a form of boredom because you’re not doing anything in the typical sense, yet it’s noble because this simple act of non-doing holds the promise of offering greater meaning, creativity, efficiency, and substance to all you do.
I’ve spent many years studying and practicing various forms of meditation. From Osho’s First & Last Freedom to Jean Houston’s The Possible Human, I’ve experimented with many different ways of exploring my own consciousness. All of the methods I’ve tried have been useful to some degree. As a student of philosophy, I love approaches to contemplation that emphasize the importance of taking a break from the world and sitting in silence. As an entrepreneur who enjoys the pressures and challenges of creative life, however, nothing has provided a better balance of satisfying both my need to relax and my impulse to be on the move than the fine art of walking.
When I played basketball in grade school my coach would often say “walk it off” in response to one of the players catching a leg cramp. That advice stills rings true. When I have a problem or puzzle I need to resolve, I walk it off. When my thinking is cramped, I walk it off. It’s never failed me yet.
A friend emailed me the following question yesterday:
“What are the most important attributes of leaders?”
I thought about it for a few minutes and sent this reply. This was off-the-cuff, so don’t hold me too tightly to it.
Patience, impatience, perspective, morally neutral disposition, and a sense of humor.
Patience is pretty self-explanatory. You can’t be frustrated with everyone all the time and pressuring them.
Impatience is equally necessary. When you have a vision, you have to be unable to sleep until you make progress on it.
Perspective allows you to weather the bad stuff. I lost a customer early on and was feeling defeated. My brother (a successful entrepreneur) asked me what the big deal was. “So What?” he said. “Cornelius Vanderbilt had steamers sink and people died. Yet he was able to continue on and create value for millions. What if he had quit? You don’t win everything.”
Moral neutrality doesn’t mean you have no morals. It means you approach other humans with a rational choice lens. You assume their actions are taken not out of goodness or evil, but rational self-interest. This helps you understand how to change the incentives they face to get cooperation, instead of being bitter at what you think their motives are or what they “should” do.
A sense of humor is the only thing that keeps it fun, and if it’s not fun it’s hell!
The fourth and final installment of the startup series features Evan Baehr, Cofounder of Able Lending and Coauthor of the bestselling book, “Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams“.
Evan lays down the essentials that you need to think about when you are preparing to ask someone for money. He provides some tools and tips that can help you find the right investor(s) for you and your team, and how to get to that crucial point – meeting with investors.
Evan also talks about why he thinks that business plans are dying out and how the pitch deck supplants it. We dive into some of the pitch deck building blocks. Evan stresses the importance of storytelling when the time comes for you to pitch.
This episode sponsored by Praxis and the Foundation for Economic Education. Check out FEE seminars to learn about economics and entrepreneurship this summer!
This and all episodes are also available on SoundCloud, iTunes, YouTube, and Stitcher.
Stop leaving doors open. Start burning bridges.
There’s an idea that keeping doors open is inherently good. I’ve written before about how obsession with options can blind you to opportunities. I’m going to make an even stronger claim: Not only do you need to stop looking for so many options, you should begin actively slamming doors to ensure you can never again walk through them.
If you know a door leads you to a life that would make you unhappy shut it.
If you’ve peeked through a particular portal and seen something that makes you a little dead inside slam the door and burn it behind you. Otherwise you might be tempted to go through it later if someone dangles the right price in front of you. You might be tempted to say yes to something you hate, which might be the saddest of all fates.
I’ve met a number of young people who spent a summer interning in Washington, DC and told me after the experience that they hate the entire political scene and would never want to become one of those people. Many of these same young people, when the fantasyland of subsidized education comes to a close and the need for a steady job begins to weigh on them, confide things like, “I can’t publish that blog post or I would never get hired by policy group X in DC!” They are careful not to burn bridges, “just in case”.
But if the bridge takes you someplace you know you don’t want to go burning it should be a top priority! There’s a reason Odysseus had himself tied to the mast.
How many people live lives they hate because they couldn’t say no to the salary? How many wallow in misery because they left the door open too long? How many knew a particular path wouldn’t make them happy but they failed to cut off the option and when push came to shove they couldn’t say no to the status or short-term gains in the moment of weakness?
Go try things. Lots of things. Be open minded before you try something. The minute you stumble on something you hate, slam the door. Cut off your return route.
Realistically you’re not likely to arrive at a life you love by picking the one thing that’s perfect for you and going at it. Instead, try stuff and shut down everything that’s not it. Arrive at the good life by eliminating the bad. I’ve written about this frequently and it’s something of a life motto for me. Just don’t do stuff you hate and the rest is fair game.
I have a friend who says the only reason he does what he does is because there is nothing else in the world he can stand or is good at. It might not sound noble to you, but I think this is one of the best reasons to do something that I can think of! Some of the best entrepreneurs admit they have to keep starting companies if for no other reason than that they hate being an employee so much. Find what you love by getting to the point where there’s nothing else left. If you keep slamming doors behind you it will be easier to narrow your field of options. Eventually, all that’s left will be perfect for you.
As soon as you realize something makes you dead inside, saps your energy, or kills your joy make an escape plan and get out of there ASAP. It doesn’t matter to where, just anywhere but the bad place. As soon as you realize it again move on again. It might take two days it might take five years. It can be hard to exit a bad situation. But when you know it’s not working blaze a trail and don’t leave breadcrumbs.
Maybe you’ll die with an incredibly wide range of things still on your list of potentially good ways to spend your life. Maybe by age 20 they’ll be almost nothing left. It’s different for everyone. But if you’re like most, you never could have found your “bliss” or “passion” if you set out to or treated everything as perpetually possible. You only find it by slamming doors on what it’s not.
This is going to sound repetitive but it bears repetition. Don’t do stuff you don’t like doing. Not only don’t do it, don’t even leave yourself in a position where you’re tempted to.
If you discover you hate law one month into an internship or three years into law school, stop right there. Leaving the door open, finishing “just in case”, is the surest way to end up with a life that bores you. “Yeah, I realized I don’t like law, but I can always fall back on a life I’m guaranteed to dislike if nothing else works out.” If you leave yourself the option you’ll take it.
Close the door and burn it. You know what’s behind it. There’s no question. Everything else may or may not lead you to happiness, but not this. You know it sucks. Leave the other doors open until you peek through, but not the one you know is wrong. Knowledge of what you dislike is profoundly valuable, but only if you act on it. Inaction – not doing those things – is often not enough. You need to prevent yourself from ever doing them.
This is not about being closed minded or rushing to judgment. Be open minded about what may or may not make you happy. You might be surprised. Take the time to try things out, don’t just look at some stupid career guide or list of college majors and claim you know what’s a good fit. But once you’ve tested something and you really know you hate it, slam the door.
The more possibilities you can eliminate quickly the faster you’ll get to a life you love.
I asked three of my best go-to’s for reading recommendations when I’m in Ecuador. I’m going to try to read ten books in the six weeks there. We’ll see if I can do it. To create my list, I took two recommendations from each of the people I asked plus four of my own.
First, here are the books I’m trying to finish this week before we embark:
And these are the 10 selections I’ve loaded up on my Kindle for the time away:
I’ll be reviewing one of these selections in the next monthly newsletter. If you’re not signed up for it, join today!
Yesterday I listened to an episode of the James Altucher Podcast with FUBU founder and Shark Tank star Daymond John. It was awesome.
John talked about his new book, “The Power of Broke”. What a great title. The subtitle is, “How empty pockets, a tight budget, and a hunger for success can become your greatest competitive advantage.” The concept is as straightforward as it sounds. Being broke is an advantage in many ways. The power of broke is the power you harness because you have to. It’s the creativity you employ when you can’t buy your way to the next step.
I’ve written before about the advantages of being broke (with a much lamer title, “Your Lack of Income Can Be An Asset“). While I focused on the freedom and flexibility to experiment and the low cost of failure, John talked in the podcast more about the clearer decision making and enhanced hustle when options are constrained.
One particularly poignant example was when he was selling hats on the streets of Queens. LL Cool J would come to the neighborhood frequently, and John would stalk and harass and beg him to wear his hats. He finally did, and it resulted in an explosion in demand. John said if he had $500,000 to spend at that time he would have spent it all…on getting LL Cool J to wear his hats. Because he didn’t have the money, he found a way to do it without.
One of my all-time favorite TED talks is called “Embrace the Shake“. It’s about how creativity can often be unleashed if you give yourself constraints. An artist who lost his ability to do his favorite technique was forced to find other ways. He eventually began a series of experiments in creating art with ridiculously tight constraints. He could only use paper cups and ink, for example. The results were as much about what it did to his mindset as about the art he produced.
If you launch a startup with no money, you’ll figure out how to move forward with no money. If you raise $1 million in venture capital, you’ll figure out how to move forward spending $1 million. The activities you engage in may even be the same. Or worse, the money blinds you to problems with your model or assumptions and creates a lag in the feedback loop. Test small and quick, fail small and quick. Money often makes that harder.
This is obviously not about any kind of moral superiority to poverty. It’s not about pretending fewer resources always provide an advantage over more. It’s about a powerful mindset shift that occurs when incentives and desires are tightly connected. When you don’t have a backup plan or the ability to give up after the first setback or buy your way into the next step, you have something most of your larger, better funded competitors don’t. You have the power of broke.
Since it’s a mindset, you can employ it even if you are rich, but it’s definitely harder. Take advantage of the time you have now as a young upstart and get every drop out of the power of broke.
Last week I asked for people to send me some bucket list items – things they want to do before they die.
I got some great stuff in response. Matthew Hartill won the books via the random selection process (my ten-year-old kid picking a number).
Thanks to everyone who played! Here’s a compilation of submissions. I’ve anonymizes, slightly edited, and combined similar items. Maybe you can take inspiration from a few of these…
The podcast is back and better than ever!
Happy 2016. Let’s get this mutha rollin’. Time to dive in to an exploration of ideas about education, entrepreneurship, freedom, self-knowledge, self-honesty, progress, and whatever other words make you feel more alive and intrigued.
We kick off season two with my most frequent guest, my good friend and colleague TK Coleman. We intended to discuss why education is more than knowledge but, true to form, we couldn’t resist delving into several other topics. We talked about the value (or not) of New Year’s resolutions. We examined the concept of conflict of interest and whether it matters. We made bad jokes and made fun of each other.
Huge shout-out to the production intern, Lav Kozakijević, for his editing, posting, and show-noting on SoundCloud! We have a new logo, courtesy of Julia Patterson’s awesome design work. We have new intro music, courtesy of Tim LeVan Miller. We have new show sponsors, Praxis and FEE. The season is just getting started.
You can submit questions for me anytime via the Ask Isaac form and I’ll try to answer them on future episodes. As always, this and all episodes are also available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.
As I mentioned at the end of 2015, Praxis is launching some exciting new things this year.
In addtion to the Teen Entrepreneurship eCourse, we’ve also launched a local version of the full Praxis program, starting with Pittsburgh, PA.
It’s awesome.
This is the same 12-month experience – paid work at an amazing company, intensive personal and professional development, hard and soft skills, and liberal arts education – but with a local cluster of business partners and participants. This allows those in a particular region to get all the benefits of the program AND stay close to home and have more time interacting in person with their fellow participants.
Zak Slayback is the director for the Pittsburgh program. I couldn’t think of a better person. A PA native and Ivy League dropout, Zak has done nothing but crush it since he left the confines of the academy to join Praxis nearly two years ago. He’s a great example of exactly the kind of work ethic + bold thinking we look for.
The cool thing about this model is that Zak can really put down some roots and connect with local networks of young people – high schools, colleges, clubs, homeschool groups, etc. – and local businesses over the long term and offer an amazing opportunity for them to get out of the classroom for a year and learn entrepreneurship from successful Pittsburgh entrepreneurs.
It doesn’t stop there. This model can be replicated in cities across the country and the world. It takes a network of young mold-breakers and great companies with the power of the unique Praxis coaching and education process. Stay tuned as we continue to grow.
Check out Praxis Pittsburgh, and reach out to Zak if you have any connections in the area or want to learn more!
The entries are in. Take a look and help me decide the new logo for The Isaac Morehouse Podcast.
Three talented designers submitted logos, for a total of 10 variations. If you’ve listened to the podcast or followed this blog, you’ve got a pretty good idea what it’s all about. Which logo do you think best captures and communicates the ideas?
After you’ve looked them over, submit your vote on this simple survey.
Designer: Julia Patterson
Logo 1
Logo 2
Logo 3
Designer: Kelsey Crockett
Logo 4
Logo 5
Designer: Lauren Hicks
Logo 6
Logo 7
Logo 8
Logo 9
Logo 10
Thank you to Julia, Kelsey, and Lauren for awesome designs!
Alright, my good friend and Praxis colleague TK Coleman convinced me to share this personal recap in a blog post after I shared it with him in an email. It feels a little weird or narcissistic, but I guess a little reflection is permitted this time of year. Besides, I had nothing to write today and I’m not going to miss my daily post!
Praxis is the main driver of my activities and goals, and our continued growth, amazing network of business partners, totally awesome alumni and participants, and expanded offerings (about to be announced!) make me proud of what we’ve done in 2015 and excited about 2016. Beyond the business, I also have a few personal goals, all still very much related to my mission of freedom and progress.
What was my 2015 like? Mostly laying groundwork and exploring new ways to create. Here’s some of the stuff I accomplished that I’m most proud of:
I certainly had some shortcomings in 2015. I missed my goal to do one form of exercise a day probably 5% of the time (which is embarrassing when you realize I consider even a few pushups sufficient.) Though I hit my daily blogging goal, too many days I churned out something less than what I think I could have in terms of quality. I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to, and almost no fiction, which I planned to read a lot of.
Most of all, I feel like my efforts at being a good, peaceful, calm unschooling dad fell short in everything but theory. I now know clearly what kind of parent I want to be and why (both huge improvements over the last few years trying to figure it out), but I still struggle every single day to translate that head knowledge into daily habits and behaviors. Hopefully my kids are as resilient as I suspect they are.
Again in 2016 Praxis is the focus. Outside of my family, it’s what I live and breathe and I’ll be focusing even more tightly on our goals for the business and everything we stand for. I do have a few personal goals I’m thinking about for the year ahead as well. Possibly another book, growing the podcast, perhaps changing up my writing routine to do longer pieces weekly instead of shorter posts daily (still trying to decide on this one), etc.
Regardless, thanks to every single one of you who has read, clicked, liked, shared, listened, commented, loved, critiqued, and even openly hated what I’ve been creating. I’ve always said I do this for me, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it feels great to connect with people over the ideas I love!
(In case you’re wondering, by far the most popular piece in 2015 was this article on why playing LEGO is better than learning algebra. The most popular podcast episode was this interview with my son on being unschooled.)
*UPDATE: 12/31/15 – For unknown reasons, a few old posts of mine got picked up again and generated a ton of views right after I wrote this. Just after noon on December 31, I broke the 500,000 mark. Here’s to a goal being met!
My friend has a theory. He thinks when people ask unbelievably dumb questions it’s not because they don’t know the answer or couldn’t find it themselves. They’re capable. It’s that they want the attention that comes from being answered more than they want their own power to independently get the answer.
There are a lot of examples of playing dumb as a way to get attention. Emailing questions that are already answered on a website. Asking how to listen to a podcast that’s already linked in the post being commented on. Pretending to not notice when someone does something nice for you just so you can demontrate your surprise later in a more attention-grabbing way.
It’s a weird thing, and disempowering. It’s actually kind of gross to observe. I think a big part of it comes from the schooled mindset. When you spend the first twenty or so years in a system based on pats on the back and ribbons and Dean’s lists and other forms of manufactured recognition by authority figures you learn to seek that kind of psychic and emotional reward. There are few things teachers and experts and authorities with official sounding titles like more than being reminded that they know more than you. They love an eager, pliable pupil. When you ask them how to do things, raise your hand for clarification, ask them to expand on a point, or request a refresher on their material, you get positive attention. So you develop a kind of learned helplessness.
It’s stupid and you should identify and shed it right away. Operate at full power. If you can discover or do something without anyone else’s assitance, do it. If you can achieve goals without appealing to experts and authorities, all the better. If you can create your product, start your business, write your song, or publish your book, do it. You don’t need to focus group your supposed betters or ask every person you look up to to coffee for feedback.
It’s great if people like you and what you create. It’s great to learn from others. But get their attention by being the most you you can be. Create something new and powerful, don’t pretend to be powerless in hopes of luring them in for a quick hit of, “She talked to me!”. This is why mentorship can be dangerous. Spend all your time seeking awesome mentors and you’ll forget to master what’s uniquely you and just build things.
Don’t play dumb. The attention isn’t worth the loss of power.
Praxis participants and alumni are pretty prolific and I love reading their stuff. Check out some of their posts and other projects.
Some Current Participant Blogs
Some Praxis Graduate Blogs
*Interesting observation: The ladies are far more likely to give their blog a name other than their own. Maybe men are more narcissistic?…