Tag: ideas

Who’s Calling the Shots, Your Future or Your Past?

I heard an interesting talk from Dan Sullivan on why 10x growth (in business, life, whatever you choose) is actually easier than 2x growth…if you get your mindset right.

He described 2x thinking as fundamentally controlled by the past.  You look back at what it took to get where you are and you attempt to do more and better of the same activities, approaches, and processes.

10x thinking is controlled by the future.  Since the future hasn’t yet happened, you first have to imagine the future you want.  Once your idea of that future is firmly in place you work backward from it.  You deconstruct what it takes to get there.  You let this vision of the future determine what you do in the present.  The past may occasionally provide lessons, but it’s mostly a distraction.  What does the future demand?  If you are to grow 10x, what would have to happen to get there?

It’s amazing how much this little insight helps.  So many things we do unthinkingly just because we did them in the past.  We assume they are necessary because they were before.  When you ask only what the future wants, instead of replicating what the past was, your entire mindset shifts and you begin to focus only on the truly key activities and those that are scalable.

Are you a slave to the past or are you letting your vision of the future lead?

“Millennials” and Entrepreneurship

I hate the term “Millennial”.  For some reason, it makes me want to vomit.  Still, it’s a widely used label for people in the 20-30 ish age range and I must admit that there is enough cohesion to some of the traits of this generation to warrant a unique label.

I’ve written before about some of the characteristics of this generation compared to others.

I was just asked a few questions about Millennials and entrepreneurship yesterday.  Here are the questions and my thoughts.

What challenges do they face?

The single biggest challenge is in the mind and habits.  This is the most schooled generation in the history of the world.  Nearly every second of their lives has been planned, structured, poked, and prodded by external authorities.  Intrinsic motivation has been all but suffocated by positive re-enforcement and praise.  Learned helplessness is the norm.

This is a tremendous struggle for this generation.  They have never created their own structure or built things without preset guidelines and lots of “good jobs”.  It’s sad, and it’s not their fault, but they’ve got to unlearn a whole lot of garbage before they can unleash the entrepreneurial spirit they were born with.

What special concerns do they have?

This generation is very concerned with doing work that they find meaningful and enjoyable.  That is a huge plus.  They also have a big concern for doing things that are popularly viewed as “good for society”, which is a huge negative.  It results in a lot of signaling and posturing to be “sustainable”, “social”, with little understanding of what the terms mean or the causal relationships involved.  But the underlying thrust is still a legitimate, positive concern, and that’s to gain more than just survival, but meaning and self-actualization.

What do you think?

Do you think I got it wrong?  I’d love to hear thoughts, objections, and questions.  Submit them via the Ask Isaac form and I’ll try to respond on the blog or in the podcast.

Who Are the Philosophers?

When I think about some of the famous philosophers throughout history I notice something about most of the early ones.  They were always by the side of powerful, successful, wealthy people who sought counsel on how to handle success and how to grow.

Some of the great works of philosophy come out of what we might call today personal coaching or consulting sessions.  Philosophy has its origins firmly rooted in efforts to help those who are serious about it to achieve their best life.

This is not to condemn any form of disinterested speculation or claim that philosophy must always be clearly connected to living a better life today.  But the observation does highlight the fact that those who are called philosophers today, almost exclusively college professors who specialize in quite obscure topics, might actually be less like the ancient philosophers than people today who are considered “cheesy”.

Tony Robbins, for example, spends most of his life being paid by highly successful people who want to find the good life.  As non-philosophical as his language and marketing may seem to a college professor, what he does is primarily provide new mental models and conceptual tools that help his clients progress to their next goal.

This isn’t a matter of better or worse.  I don’t think a professor obsessed with solutions to hypothetical ethical problems found only in academic journals is better or worse than a consultant or life coach obsessed with getting clients to achieve “exponential growth” or whatever the phrase of the day is.

The realization is more interesting to me as a way to put the old revered thinkers in perspective.  Most of them were not crafting their ideas in the abstract, but were doing it with specific goals and often for specific clients.  It’s a reminder that truly profound and enduring insights are not only to be found in disinterested analysis, but can also be found in practical attempts to solve present problems.

I’ve met a number of entrepreneurs who I think have truly original philosophical insights.  Most of them would never dream of writing them down or sharing them in the abstract, outside of specific applications to their work.  They have been trained to believe that philosophers do that, and they aren’t philosophers.  There are some brilliant, potentially breakthrough ideas trapped in the minds of practical people.  There is a lot of deep wisdom to be found if you’re patient and willing to look.

This doesn’t mean it’s everywhere.  It doesn’t mean doing philosophy well is easy.  I don’t think it is.  I think most stuff – academic or not – isn’t very good.  But it does mean it can be found in more than one place.  After all, Machiavelli was writing a paper for a client.

Related: Steve Patterson and I discussed what it means to do philosophy outside of official academic circles in this podcast episode.  Check it out!

You Have Permission to Use Ideas

A good friend told me when he was younger he would dive deep into all kinds of topics, from philosophy to physics.  His dad was an intelligent guy who took some interest in these subjects, but also a practical man focused on results.  He was a businessman and a pastor, and looked for direct application of ideas.

My friend had a book on quantum mechanics sitting in the house, and his dad asked him what it was all about.  A minute or two in to giving a breakdown, his dad said, “That sounds really interesting”, then moved on to whatever he was doing next.  My friend assumed his dad was just humoring him.  The next Sunday during the sermon his dad worked in some profound points relating concepts of quantum mechanics to the topic at hand.  My friend was amused, impressed, and also a little frustrated.

How could his dad hear two minutes on the concept and then start using it to illustrate a point?  My friend had read dozens of books on it and still did not feel the permission to write or speak on it with laypeople, or attempt to draw life lessons.

Here’s the thing.  You don’t need anyone’s permission to use ideas.  You can dive into new concepts and start playing with them and putting them to use the way a kid might if he discovered a new type of Lego block.  It’s true, you may misunderstand or misuse them, but isn’t that what you did when you first jumped on a bike or first picked up a baseball bat?

Ideas people are so passionate about truth and understanding that they sometimes become slaves to expertise and fear any efforts to describe or utilize ideas.  What if they’re wrong?  It’s prudent to desire a firm grasp of something before you start spouting off, but there is a real danger in believing you can’t act until your understanding is complete.  It’s a paradoxical kind of arrogance to keep your nose in books until you’ve mastered every angle of an idea, because it assumes that you can master every angle of an idea.  You can’t.  It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but it does mean you can give yourself permission to play with ideas, discuss them, test them, implement them even while you’re exploring them.

Yes, if you read the book instead of watching the movie version, or worse yet the preview alone, you will understand the story better.  Still, a great many stories can be understood enough to be useful based on just the trailer.  As long as you believe only experts can engage certain ideas you will operate with an extremely limited paradigm.

Go ahead, tackle a new topic and see how you can use it right away.  Sometimes the novice understanding opens up new avenues the experts are blind to.

Demanding Too Much of Unconventional Wisdom

We place very high demands on wisdom, ideas, or advice that bucks convention.  There is certainly some logic behind this, in that ideas widely held might be more likely to be useful, otherwise they wouldn’t be so popular.  Yet usefulness, longevity, and popularity certainly do not equal validity or truth.  An idea may be widely adopted because it is useful in making one less of a pariah, even if it is in fact false, or even evil.  The belief that bloodletting was the best cure for many illnesses was common.  So were beliefs in the necessity of slavery.

In other words, I think the logic that common ideas are more likely to be correct is only one small part of our reason for being less demanding of them compared to uncommon ideas.  Our desire to imitate others and be perceived as “normal” (even, sometimes, normal in misery) also drives us to demand far more of unconventional ideas than conventional ones.

One of the more popular demands made of unconventional ideas is that the believer in them must be rich, happy, and super successful.  If some unconventional idea about how to succeed in life is true, it goes, those who espouse it had better be rich and famous or else their lives are living testimony to the falsehood of their ideas.  Let’s just take an absurd example.  If you heard someone claim that planting all your dollar bills in the ground would cause them to grow into money trees you’d immediately look to see if this person was rich.  If not, you’d be ready to mock and dismiss the idea.

The unconventional idea of burying dollars in the ground is stupid for a lot of good reasons that are easy to discover.  But to argue against it because the person espousing it is not himself rich is not a very good reason or a sound approach.  Why not?  Let’s look at what would happen if we used the same standard to analyze conventional ideas.

It is widely accepted that eating healthy foods leads to a better life.  It’s common wisdom.  Again, whatever other good and bad arguments can be made to demonstrate the truth of this knowledge, one poor approach would be to demand that everyone making the claim themselves be fit and healthy.  If an overweight person claims that a healthy diet low in sugar is a key to health, most of us (wisely) do not dismiss it simply because the person does not exemplify the outcome they claim is likely.

There are several good reasons to not demand that the bearers of truth themselves exemplify it in order for us to believe.  Knowing and doing are two different things.  I may know full well that shooting 100 free throws a day will make me a good free throw shooter.  But I may not value free-throw percentages enough to make the necessary sacrifices to implement this bit of wisdom, even if I espouse it.  In addition to not having an intense enough desire to implement the idea given the costs involved, I may also have an upward limit on my own improvement.  No matter how many free-throws I shoot, I’m probably not going to be as good a shooter as Stephan Curry.  If I had lost both my arms in an accident, my free-throw shooting ability might be zero, yet that makes the piece of knowledge I hold about practice making one better no less true.

We overlook potentially powerful and valuable ideas when we dismiss (or accept) them based entirely on the lives lived by those who espouse them.  This is a poor standard of proof that would destroy all conventional wisdom if we applied it equally.  The life of the preacher doesn’t necessarily prove or disprove the validity of the sermon.  We’ve got to do more work and examine ideas for their logical validity, experimental validity in a wide variety of situations, and most of all their applicability and usefulness to our own lives.

How Change Happens – Higher Ed. Edition

The current higher education model is flawed.  If we’re serious about changing it, first we need to get serious about understanding how social change happens.  Intentions and action are not enough to bring about desired ends.  We need an understanding of the causal relationships involved in order to effectively bring about change.

The great truth that flies in the face of civics textbooks and popular myth is that politics is not the source of social change.  It’s more like the last in a line of indicators of cultural shifts that have already occurred.  Politicians and the policies they create only change after the new approach is sufficiently beneficial to the right interests, and sufficiently tolerable to the public at large to help, or at least not harm, political careers.  Of course some politicians guess wrong and suffer accordingly, but by and large the political marketplace tends toward preservation of the status quo until a new direction is imperative for survival.

An entire, and entirely fascinating, branch of political economy called Public Choice Theory examines the incentives at work in the political marketplace in depth, and I highly encourage anyone attracted to political action to gain a working knowledge of this field.  It reveals, in short, that incentives baked into the democratic system create and perpetuate policies that are bad for the public at large, and good for particular concentrated interests.  What Public Choice has a difficult time accounting for is the role of changing beliefs.  There are countless policies that, based purely on the incentives of various interests, ought to be in place but are not, or vice versa.  Some things are simply out of bounds, no matter how much a particular group might benefit and be willing to lobby, because the general public finds them unacceptable.

Contrary to the seemingly ironclad rule of interest driven politics, public beliefs can and do change, and dramatically sometimes, putting parameters around the area within which political actors can ply their trade.  Slavery is a striking example.  At one point, it would’ve been hard to get elected, at least in some areas, if you publicly supported abolition.  Not too many decades later, it’s unthinkable to get elected anywhere if you’ve ever even joked about supporting slavery.  There is certainly a complex relationship between changing economic incentives and public beliefs, but it is undeniable that the about-face on the ethics of slavery was more than a mere shift in power among competing interests.  What most of the public found tolerable they now find reprehensible.

Our institutions are formed by incentives, and incentives are constrained by beliefs.  That makes the beliefs of the public the ultimate key to change.  Smaller changes might occur within the window of things already publicly acceptable, but major change requires a shift in that window.  How to change those beliefs?  There are two primary drivers, both of which feed each other; ideas and experiences.

Ideas are the raw data that form beliefs.  If you accept the idea that minimum wage laws make lower skilled individuals less employable, and you accept the idea that a society with fewer unemployed persons is desirable, then you will have the belief that minimum wage laws are bad.  If, on the other hand, you’ve never really thought about the economics behind minimum wage at all, but your low skilled neighbor lost his job when minimum wage increased, that experience might also cause you to believe minimum wage laws are bad.

I spent a good part of my life focusing entirely on disseminating ideas as a way of changing belief.  It was fulfilling and, I think, valuable work.  But it wasn’t until relatively recently that I began to understand the immense value of experience as a vital second prong when it comes to changing beliefs and the world.

Consider the difficulty of convincing your mother that the New York City taxi cartel is inefficient or immoral.  It requires a great deal of economic theory or philosophizing about rights and coercion.  Your mom might have other things she enjoys more than reading books on these subjects.  Even if you convince her, her newfound belief will probably barely register among things she cares about.  Sure, taxis aren’t the greatest.  So what?  She’s never had that bad an experience.  Even if a policy change to end the cartel were possible, your mom mighn’t pay any attention, or she may be concerned about what the new world without cartels would look like in practice.

Now consider recommending your mom use Uber on her next trip in to Manhattan.  She uses it, likes it, and becomes a regular customer.  She may be completely ignorant of the current cab cartel and the problems with it, but she’s now a believer in an alternative system.  If Uber comes under attack from vested interests, she’ll defend it.  If the chance to end the cartel comes up, she won’t fear because she already knows what the world looks like without it.  She can’t easily be convinced out of her experience.

It is for this reason that dictatorial countries not only ban literature that propagates new ideas, but also goods and services that compete with government monopolies and let people experience something better.  The Soviet Union feared blue jeans, jazz, and Marlboro cigarettes as much as free market textbooks.

If we want to break out of the educational rut it requires new ideas and new experiences.  We mustn’t only talk about new approaches, we must build alternatives.  The best part is, you don’t have to wait on anyone.  You can take your own path right now, and by so doing not only improve your life, but serve as an example to others of what’s possible outside the status quo.  Educational entrepreneurs, not just intellectuals, will change the hidebound approach to education.  It’s already happening.

While policymakers, pundits, professors, and provosts squabble about the future of higher education and jockey to secure their position, entrepreneurs are busy creating and delivering alternatives across the globe.  The educational consumer is enjoying new experiences and getting new ideas about education in the process.  The old guard can argue any which way they like, but at the end of the day they’ll have to prove more valuable to the learner than the myriad new options.  All the protections and advantages in the world can’t stop competition now.  Technology has helped break it wide open.

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Excerpted from The Future of School.

When Ideas Aren’t Enough, Start a Company

From Medium.

For me it was education. I had ideas. That wasn’t enough.

I worked in and around higher education for the better part of a decade and it confirmed and strengthened the belief I developed during my own college experience: the whole system is a wasteful mess.

Hardly anyone involved enjoys it. Students and professors complain about each other. Both are happy when class is cancelled. Employers don’t think grads know what they need to know, grads don’t feel ready to embark on careers, and everyone is spending everyone else’s money with unknown results and little accountability.

“I see opportunity”

I openly talked about the problems of credential inflation, student frustration, artificially stimulated supply via tax dollars in myriad forms, artificially stimulated demand via licensure requirements and restrictions on employers using other means to test competence. I wrote and discussed the dangers of the cultural narrative that guilts, shames, and scares everyone into buying a multi-thousand dollar product that they don’t much enjoy and don’t know what to do with.

I saw the emergence of MOOC’s and the decline of informational gatekeepers. I heard business owners say they don’t care about degrees anymore. I imagined far more efficient, customer-centric, accountable, exciting, and effective ways of providing education, experience, confidence, skills, and a network to young people. In short, I had ideas.

The problem with ideas is that they’re almost costless. I could broadcast my ideas and others could broadcast theirs, and ideas people can lock in an endless tussle over whose are better. Who cares? Nobody wins when it’s all talk. It hit me one exciting, frightening day. If I’m really correct about the problems with higher ed, and if my ideal alternative is as valuable as I think it is, I need to put my money where my mind is. I need to build it. So I did.

Make it real

I created a company that puts smart, hard-working young people in great businesses while they are engaging in a rigorous educational experience complete with tech skills, professional development basics, liberal arts, coaching, and self-guided projects that demonstrate tangible value.

It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done.

Suddenly, I went from the guy with opinions and ideas about education, entrepreneurship, and career to the guy who’s going to succeed or fail based on those ideas. I learned that the only thing critics love more than ideas to disagree with are physical manifestations of those ideas. But once I launched Praxis, everything became clearer. I was playing a new game. I was no longer worried about the critics, I was interested in my customers.

Have something to lose

This change in focus is the healthiest thing in the world. Economist Nassim Taleb talks about the concept of “skin in the game”, and every entrepreneur knows exactly what he means. Nothing sharpens your focus and clarifies your thought like having something on the line besides just the pride of being right. Nothing helps you gain valuable information from those who disagree like the need to succeed in the development and deployment of an idea.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an ideas person. Philosophizing is my favorite pastime. But the best philosophers are those who don’t limit themselves to thought experiments, but also put their ideas through field experiments. It’s not enough to have ideas that seem superior in mental models. The real impact comes from the thinkers who take the next step and incorporate their vision.

Entrepreneurship is philosophy in action.

Use the value-creation test

A good exercise is to attempt to turn every idea into a business model. Think people eat too many carbs and they’d be happier and healthier on your preferred diet? If you’re right, that’s value sitting on the table. Can you create that value for others and measure it in revenue? Think people watch too much TV? What need are they trying to meet and what other services might meet it better? Can you build it? Can you sell it?

I am not claiming that speculation without action is worthless. All action starts in the imagination. I am saying that every idea can be sharpened by forcing yourself to put it into some kind of model that creates value. Not every idea is monetizable, and that’s OK. But neither is monetization some kind of lower life form or dirty word. It’s nothing more than a representation of the value your idea creates for people. The practice of putting theories into business models will reveal weaknesses in the idea, or demonstrate that it’s so good you can’t wait to act on it.

Don’t get stuck talking

There are limitless entrepreneurial opportunities, and today it’s easier and cheaper than ever to turn an idea into a business. But there is also infinite information and no shortage of platforms with which to discuss ideas. This presents a challenge to big thinkers and entices many of us to stay forever in the world of speculation, avoiding implementation.

If you want to change the world and your own life, you can’t stop at ideas. The transformation of those ideas into something that receives feedback from the market is the hardest, yet most worthwhile journey I can think of. Embrace it.

The Shortest Summary of How to Change the World

Help people imagine new things by introducing new ideas.

Help people experience new things by creating new alternatives.

These two things – ideas and experiences – change people’s beliefs about what’s possible, and their beliefs about what’s possible are the binding constraint on the institutions we live under.

If you want to change the world, spread new ideas and create new experiences.

Twitter and/or Voxer Could Do Something that Would Change the World

I’m going to give away an idea that I think could revolutionize communication and entertainment.  This idea came from conversations with my brother Levi, and he deserves most of the credit.

I am a huge fan of Voxer and Twitter.  Both have changed communication for me in significant ways, and Twitter has for the whole world.  This is why I’m so excited about what I see as a potentially breakthrough combination of the two.

First, let me briefly outline a few of the things that are so powerful about each.

What’s great about Voxer

Voxer is by far the best form of one-to-one or small group communication I’ve found.  It allows asynchronous voice messages of any length that can be listened to in a real-time back-and-forth, or left for the other party to listen whenever they get a chance.  The beauty is that it maintains a single, ongoing conversation that fits the contours of the schedule of each party.  In this way it’s like email or text, except you don’t get all the messy clutter of a huge email thread, and you don’t have the fat thumbs problem of texting.  Not to mention the inability of texting to convey full emotion, or to be done while driving (or walking if you’re like me).

The best part is the ability to create group threads.  In my company we have four or five separate Voxer threads for conversations relevant to marketing, education, events, and more.  We have an urgent action thread and a get-to-it-anytime big picture thread to leave ideas as they come.  These group conversations are amazing, and far superior to email or trying to get everyone on a Google Hangout at the same time.  I can’t even tell you how much fun my NBA and NFL threads are with friends.  We have ongoing conversations about the sports, as well as live in-game commentary and jokes.  Voxer also has an individual voice memo function which saves in the cloud instead of taking up space on your device.

Voxer occasionally glitches, but they’ve got the functionality down for the most part.  You can email, download, or forward individual recordings.  You can also post text and images.

What’s great about Twitter

By now most people are aware of the amazing ways in which Twitter has changed the world.  Without getting in to all the benefits in ways many others have already done better, I’ll just boil down what seem to me the most powerful aspects of the platform.

Twitter destroys gatekeepers.  No longer do you need to enroll in an MBA program and read about a great entrepreneur in case study.  Now you can follow Marc Andreessen‘s Tweetstorm firsthand.  He’ll probably even like your Tweet if you mention him.  No longer do you have to trust the gossip column to convey what a celebrity or athlete is thinking or doing.  They can tell you themselves.  No longer do you have to wait for official news coverage, often warped by political preferences, to see protests and major events worldwide.  Twitter lets each individual – whether famous or not – control their own brand and communicate without mediators to their audiences.

The other major breakthrough is the size.  Twitter brought on the idea of micro blogging and tiny packets of information that are valued more for their timeliness and rawness than for their depth or polish.  Getting a quick gut-level reaction in 140 characters real-time is something totally different than a long-form, heavily edited thought piece.  Twitter is the first place you go when something you’re interested in is happening live.  You can read a recap about a football game or a major event, but nothing is quite like watching the stream of Tweets go by as it happens.

With the acquisition of Periscope, Twitter is adding even more value to the shared live experiences part of the product.  That’s where Voxer comes in…

The killer combo

Imagine watching a game, but instead of being forced to listen to whatever commentators the network selected, you could mute the game and instead listen to one or two or five of your favorite journalists, comedians, athletes, or friends give their own live take.  Imagine Pardon the Interruption but live, during the game.  Imagine hearing Stewart or Colbert lampoon a political speech…while it’s happening.  Imagine being able to listen in to an ongoing conversation between a few of your favorite thinkers.  Imagine a podcaster doing micro episodes live on the spot as ideas come to them.  Better yet, imagine you sharing your own voice.

With one small change all this and more would be easy.  Voxer could create a unique link for every thread – whether between me and my wife, or between my team at work, or even my individual memos – that I could share with the world.  Anyone could click the link to listen to the thread.  Just like any Voxer user, they could scroll back to listen to older messages, or start right in with the most recent.  They could listen in real time or after the fact.  They could not participate, only listen.

The ability to share asynchronous conversations between anyone with anyone would open up everything.  Periscope is great, but for now it only lets you see one person’s live video at a time.  Voxer lets you hear not just one person’s voice, but much larger conversations between many people.  Think about your favorite podcast interviews.  It takes so much time and scheduling and production to get Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins sitting down in the same room with a mic.  What if they had a public Voxer thread, where Tim could pose questions anytime, and Tony could respond anytime, from anywhere?

The possibilities are endless.

Twitter is the company in the best position to build or acquire something like this.  Voxer already has everything but that last little bit – the publicly shareable thread link.

I’m not a tech guy.  Neither is my brother.  We both love this idea.  We investigated the time and cost of building something like this from scratch and it’s more than either of us can realistically commit to, as we are both building our own businesses.  If I had a pool of developers at my disposal, I’d put them on this in a heartbeat.  The next best thing to building something awesome is sharing the idea so someone else can build it.

Voxer, Twitter, or anyone else if you’re listening, take this idea and run with it!

On Dismissing Ideas Out of Hand

I fully believe some ideas, arguments, and propositions are not worth spending time on.  I don’t think it makes a person more noble or a better intellect to entertain all ideas with equal weight and never dismiss any.  Primarily because it’s not possible.  We all have limited time and mental resources, and we must choose where to apply it.  Equal seriousness on every idea is not an option.  If we pretend it is we are lying to ourselves and everyone else.

The way in which the decision gets made to not give further consideration to an argument is more important than whether or not it gets made.  There is no shame in simply acknowledging the limited resources at our disposal and being honest about which ideas simply do not intrigue us enough to investigate, or areas on which we are content to let our assumptions remain largely untested, or trust in someone else we respect.  There is shame in lying about what we’re doing.  Refusing to investigate an idea for any reason other than an honest acknowledgement that we do not believe it ranks high enough to bump other things down is a bad habit, and does not breed intellectual integrity.

I suspect we’ve all done it.  For some reason we feel embarrassed to simply say, “I’m not going to take the time to look into your argument because I just don’t care that much”.  So we invent other reasons.  We appeal to authority, or lack authority on the part of the person proposing the idea.  We say vague condescending things like, “They need to engage the literature”, without ever risking anything to explain exactly where we think they’re wrong or what “literature” they need to engage.  We want to ignore the idea without admitting that’s what we’re doing.  We need to pretend we never write off anything.  That would be closed minded!  Instead we do worse than ignore it.  We pretend we’ve refuted it while ignoring it.

There are a great many topics we are ignorant on.  Many of those we’ll never take the time to investigate.  That’s a reality we can’t escape, and we don’t need to.  It’s refreshing when someone forcefully presents an argument to be able to say, “I don’t find that credible, but to be honest I’ve never really investigated it and I probably never will.”  We’re better off acknowledging our areas of ignorance and apathy then pretending we have some other reason besides lack of interest to dismiss an idea.

The Power of the Subconscious

I’ve written before about one of my favorite books, Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation, and what it says about the subconscious mind being the key to scientific discovery, artistic expression, and other eureka moments.  Koestler describes a common process where those trying to solve a problem or create something new consciously wrestle with the ideas so much that they seep into the subconscious.  After some time away (sleeping, a vacation, a walk, other pursuits) the solution emerges from the subconscious into the conscious mind when least expected.

A friend was telling me recently about a similar observation Napoleon Hill made about those who write down and read or recite their goals regularly.  The goals, after being absorbed and repeated over and again, seep into the subconscious.  That’s when the real stuff happens.  The subconscious takes over, works on the goals, heightens your awareness to ideas and opportunities that move you towards them, and sends out a kind of invisible signal to the world that attracts people and things that assist you in the achievement of the goals.

This need not be interpreted as a mystical phenomenon.  How many times, after learning a new word, do you begin to notice that word everywhere?  How many times, after naming a child something unique, do you begin to hear that name regularly?  Once your subconscious has material to work with, it alters your perception and enables you to tune in to the things that best resonate with whatever is bouncing around in there.

This means that, whether or not you’re deliberately putting it to work, your subconscious mind is working.  What is it doing?  What problems is it solving?  What opportunities is it making you attuned to?  In what ways could you put it to work for you more effectively?

When to Take Action

I’m highly action biased.  I get the frustration of identifying a problem or having a new idea and wanting to do something about it, good and hard.  I believe jumping in with both feet as soon as possible is always preferable to lots of analysis.  Still, there are times when the best thing to do is nothing.

This is particularly true when the problem is a grand one that affects all of society.  Just because you realize that there is something wrong with X system or process doesn’t mean there is an obvious and immediate action to take.  The realization is the first, often most powerful but also most fleeting step.  It’s easy for action biased people to get antsy and want to do something quick.  Start a campaign, write an article, launch an organization, etc.  Often though there is no clear vision, understanding of causal factors involved, or strategy.

Our culture is one that provides social rewards for any kind of action.  If you say you’re doing something to alleviate poverty, people congratulate you no matter how stupid or useless or even counter-productive your efforts might be.  Volunteering is deemed noble and effective, whether or not it’s either of these things.  The obsession with nonprofits and vilification of win-win for profit activities further incentivizes blind action.  Start a club.  Host a fundraiser.  Do something!

The most profound improvements in the world are typically born out of many years of following the initial identification of a problem deep down the rabbit hole.  Those who see something they don’t like and jump to do something come and go, as do the effects of their efforts.  Those who internalize the problem – let it steep, let it alter the way they think, pursue an in-depth understanding of the problem and knowledge of tried and untried solutions, and only act when the idea they hold is one that doesn’t just suggest but demands action – are typically the ones who best solve it.

There are a lot of dysfunctional beliefs and institutions around us.  Discover them.  But when it comes to action if you feel the itch ask yourself exactly what kind of action you want to take and why.  Do your ideas demand action?  That specific action?  Will you be unable to sleep without taking that specific action?  More importantly (and much harder) ask if the solution you have in mind can be obtained within the context of a for-profit business model.  If not, the odds that it will work are incredibly low.  If a solution is real, it will create value.  Non-profits can create value, but it’s much, much harder to know if they are and far too easy for them to do the opposite.  If the solution is political it’s almost assuredly going to do more harm than good.  If the goal is good feels, launch a nonprofit effort or lobby politicians.  If the goal is effectiveness, try as hard as you can to discover a way in which your ideas can generate a profit.

Until action is clear, and clearly value-creating, let your ideas direct you to further understanding.  Channel your hunger to act towards the act of learning more.  When the time is right and the idea is ripe you’ll know.

What Liberal Arts Education Misses

I’m a big fan of liberal arts education.  Not in the classical sense of churning out dutiful citizen soldiers, but in the modern sense of a broad exploration into the humanities rather than a narrow vocational specialization.

The dichotomy between learning for “work” and learning “for its own sake” is ridiculous.  All meaningful learning has an end desired by the learner, whether to have fun or gain knowledge that helps earn money or both.  Liberal arts education is incredibly valuable as a tool to sharpen thinking and broaden the mind.  Despite all the names given to the disciplines therein, it all really boils down to the master discipline of philosophy.  Philosophy is valuable if for no other reason than that we all have a philosophy whether we want to or not.  It’s either examined or unexamined, and we are better at achieving our goals and ends if we examine our philosophy.

Still liberal arts education has a huge, gaping hole.  It’s not that it doesn’t teach enough hard skills or vocational specialization.  One could argue those are something that could be learned on top of a liberal arts foundation for those who want to master a particular skill.  Yet it is true that liberal arts education often makes it hard for individuals to bridge this gap between general critical thinking and particular ways they might apply it to create a meaningful life and career.  The missing piece is something a little more concrete than liberal arts but a little more abstract than vocational skill.  It’s an understanding of value creation.

Value creation is the only thing that matters when it comes to involvement in commercial life.  This is where philosophy meets action.  This is where theory meets practice.  An entirely pragmatic practitioner who only performs tasks may find herself flustered with limited career options just as easily as an abstract theorist who doesn’t know how to concretely practice his ideas.  The pragmatist misses the fact that it’s not just getting your hands dirty that brings career success, but creating value for others, which may or may not correlate to how many hours you work or how much you master a particular skill.  The theorist misses the fact that all the clear thinking in the world about the nature of people and the universe won’t put bread on the table unless they can translate it into something of value to others and exchange with them.

A truly powerful liberal arts education would include learning value creation.  What it is, and more importantly, how to do it.  The thing about value creation that differs from other things learned studying liberal arts is that it cannot be learned by intellectual examination alone.  You have to do it.  You have to enter the messy marketplace and bump into other humans with unique goals and desires and find a way to bring something of value to exchange.  If philosophy begins with ‘know thyself’ then working for pay is one of the most philosophical activities possible.  Getting others to voluntarily part with their resources because you can create something they value more will reveal more than you can imagine about yourself, your desires, habits, and unknown abilities you never would have guessed are valued by others.

It shouldn’t stop with merely performing the action.  Reflection and dissection of what’s happening will take you to the next level.  All the best entrepreneurs are deeply philosophical people.  They don’t merely work and try stuff and suddenly get lucky when people value something they created.  The analyze why, how it might be made better, what fundamental causes brought about success, etc.  They get to know whether their key value was the big idea, the management and execution, the network of talent, the sales job, or some combination.  This allows them to replicate success by focusing on the areas with highest return.

Philosophy is known for thought experiments, but the market is where its field experiments take place.  The most powerful liberal arts education is one that includes the study and practice of value creation.  This could mean digging into ideas in the humanities while simultaneously working at a company and trying to make it and yourself more money, not just as a practical but a philosophical exercise.  I’ve never understood people who’ve studied for decades but never entered the marketplace to exchange.  Perhaps it’s a carry-over from the Greek’s high-minded condescension towards merchants, but an attitude that treats value creation as beneath contemplation is impractical and illogical.

This passion for theory and big ideas and liberal arts combined with the thrill of value creation in the marketplace is what animates Praxis and what gets me up and working every day.  I’ve gotten to the point where I do not have any way to distinguish work from study.  In the office I’m as likely to be reading Seneca as going over an expense report.  I see both as equally important for my long term success and happiness.

We don’t need Plato’s philosopher kings.  The worst thing is to confer the use of force upon smart people who leave the production to others.  We could use more philosopher merchants who constantly examine themselves and seek to understand the world while testing their ideas in the voluntary marketplace of goods and services; who imagine a better world and then go out and create it themselves.