In relentless pursuit of freedom.
Don’t follow your passion. Not because it’s a bad idea, but because most of the time it’s not possible early in your life.
Instead, arrive at your passion(s) by taking the sculptor approach. Chisel away everything that you don’t love. In a sentence:
Don’t do stuff you hate.
Everything else is fair game.
I’ve met a lot of bright young people planning on law school or in law school.
I’ve also met a lot of unhappy lawyers.
I suspect lots of these young people will end up unhappy lawyers too, and I’ve got a theory as to why.
Lawyers are often “successful” in terms of external indicators and cultural prestige. They tend to make good money and are held in esteem (lawyer jokes notwithstanding). And, of course, lawyering is a perfect fit for some people. I know some very happy lawyers.
But it seems a large percentage of the profession consists of unhappy people. People who don’t particularly enjoy doing divorce or merger and acquisition paperwork. Many who wish they could escape.
How did they end up there in the first place?
Because the educational conveyor belt doesn’t know what else to do with truth-seekers.
Everyone is motivated by a lot of things. But most of us have one core value that, when push comes to shove, trumps the rest. For some it may be freedom, for others security, adventure, or in the case of many an unhappy lawyer, truth.
Those whose dominant core value is truth are rather relentless. They’re smart. They like to argue, and they tend to argue well. They want to get to the bottom of things. They want to find the right answers. They want correct facts and knowledge of right and wrong. They are willing to examine and explore multiple sides of issues and ideas in the process.
Similar to those whose highest value is independence, they’re comfortable questioning authority. But the freedom-seekers tend to be more willing to disobey or ignore the rewards and punishments of the education system. They might rebel against assignments or good grades. Truth-seekers on the other hand, though happy to question the status quo, are typically comfortable following basic rules and getting good grades as well. They see winning at the grade system as a way of finding whatever truth is to be found there.
Herein lies the problem, and the beginning of their disproportionate and often unfortunate pursuit of careers in law. The school system doesn’t know what else to do with them.
There are few ways to channel their truth-seeking desires in school. There’s little in the way of philosophy, history doesn’t do as much debating as fact-spitting, and even the sciences pre-graduate level don’t really spend time questioning anything fundamental.
What’s left? Debate and forensics. Truth-seekers do well here. They love it. Most high school debaters will tell you it was the absolute highlight of their educational experience. They finally got to question everything, look at all sides of issues, argue without being offensive or reprimanded. And they got to “win”.
Parents and teachers of young truth-seekers are so conditioned with the conveyor belt mindset that they struggle to see beyond an easily identifiable handful of job titles. The work/identity trap is also strong, so whatever junior likes must immediately be mapped onto a business card. A focus on external indicators of success furthers the tendency. The common refrain for young debaters is, “You’re always arguing. You should be a lawyer!” What other possible avenues for all this truth-seeking could there be?
“I get to search for the truth? I get to debate it? I get to make everyone proud of a prestigious career? I get to make good money? Yeah, I guess I do need to go to law school!”
So lots of them do.
And lots of them end up wishing they hadn’t. They find out too late that most lawyer jobs have little to do with truth-seeking. The law itself isn’t primarily about truth, and most law jobs are even less so. They’re about navigating bureaucracy and nearly impenetrable wordplay to help people do very simple tasks like buy and sell things, move money, end or begin professional or personal relationships, or draft up “just in case” language. It’s a fundamentally conservative endeavor, concerned with protection from liability more than the caution-to-the-wind pursuit of truth that landed them there.
Law requires attention to detail, a high degree of literacy, and plenty of patience and problem solving. Those things are perfect for some people. But those whose core value is truth aren’t often among them.
Because their desire for truth was so quickly tracked and careerified, they never had the chance to explore. Law school is particularly problematic then, because of its astronomical price tag. Upon completion, more doors have been closed than opened. There are only so many jobs that pay enough to service the debt. And by now they’re closer to marriage, kids, and other financial obligations that make lower starting pay gigs tougher. After law school, they kind of feel like they have to be a lawyer, even if it doesn’t scratch the itch for truth.
A decade later and the debt burden might be gone, but the golden handcuffs replace it. Quality of life seems locked in. Mortgages, cars, schools, and prestige can’t easily be downgraded, even if they are unhappy most of the day most days. It’s lifestyle slavery, and it kind of sucks.
Where else might these truth-seekers have gone with their passion? Perhaps philosophy. Not just in the academic sense, which often comes with its own bureaucracy and BS, but more generally. It’s true, you can be a philosopher and a lawyer or a philosopher and a great many other things. Your source of income and who you are need not be the same. Seeking, writing, researching, fact-finding, and questioning are such general and generally valuable traits that a true philosopher can apply them in myriad careers. But law is a career that makes being defined by anything else particularly hard.
How many authors, podcasters, coaches, mentors, counselors, investigative reporters, or entrepreneurs are at bottom truth-seekers? Truth as a core value is applicable in a great many areas. Most of all, someone with the freedom to follow their passion for truth is likely to discover or create a career we can’t even yet imagine. Sadly, the school conveyor belt tends to corral more than its fair share into law.
So here’s the takeaway: Stop telling good arguers to become lawyers.
Let them explore the world fully and freely. Let them try a lot of stuff. Let them follow their questions. If after real exposure to the day to day reality a career in law appeals to them, great. They’ll choose law school. But don’t obsess about placing them on a list of predefined career categories and channeling their core values into it before they know what’s what.
I’m a parent. I get it. We worry how our kids will feed themselves and build a life. If they love something, our mind immediately tries to formalize and monetize it. My son loves video games and comics and superheroes, and more than once I’ve begun formulating ways to turn this interest into a career as a video game designer or illustrator and set him on that path now.
Fight that urge. Open the world up to them, not just the few aspects of it that come with a title and salary today. But everything that it is and could be tomorrow.
This leads to another good question…what are some other career tracks that young people with other core values get placed on too early?…
I had an awesome email conversation with a young lady named Hannah who’s busy building the life she wants and realized there is no prefabricated, standardized educational path that will cut it. Here’s an excerpt:
“I originally thought I was on a college path, because I loved academics so much and because everybody told me college was the obvious choice for me, but when I started actively exploring schools I was really unimpressed. I knew from my homeschooling experience that, academically, I could learn pretty much anything I wanted to on my own. I also feel pretty sure that I can learn it better, because I can follow my own instinct and interest and learn it in the way that perfectly suits me, not the one-size-fits-all system. I was horrified by the price tag, felt like four years was a long time to waste in school, and I didn’t have a formulaic career path picked out for which a degree would be a logical first step. I didn’t want the life of any young college graduate I knew, definitely wanted to avoid the college culture, and felt underwhelmed by the curriculum and unimpressed by every professor I’d ever met. At this point in my life, I can’t think of anything I really want to do for which I actually need a college education. The icing on the cake was the moment when I realized: right now I’m free. The moment I commit to a semester of college I become shackled in debt — something I’ll have to shape my life around paying off, rather than exploring interesting projects and developing and growing, which is what I’d rather be doing.”
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.
Maybe not “easy”, but entirely possible.
I recently listened to an episode of The World Wanderers Podcast where the host discussed working at a Cafe in a great city that a lot of people would love to live in. She mentioned how, had she not moved to this cool, exciting city, the job she had would have made her feel like a loser. In your hometown working retail after getting an expensive degree seems pretty lame. Up and moving to a destination city and working retail to support the lifestyle seems kind of adventurous.
Back home, she would have dreaded seeing an old friend come in. “Oh, so you’re working here?” In the new city when someone she knew came in the question was more like, “Wow, so you’re living here?”
Just a few days ago I talked to a guy who’s biking across the country and loving it. He spent several months in beautiful Missoula, Montana waiting for the weather to improve so he could continue his journey. He worked at a grocery store while there and it provided everything he needed to live the lifestyle he wanted and get back on the road in time. What would his resume look like when, several years out of college, he had “Grocery bagger” listed? Not great, except when put in the context of, “Spent two years biking across the U.S., paying my way through with odd jobs and blogging about the adventure.”
I thought about this phenomenon more in Mompiche, Ecuador a few weeks ago. We found a little place with a sign for American-style pancakes. A welcome breakfast after days of fruit and cereal. The breakfast nook was run by a twentysomething woman from the Ukraine. She fried up pancakes on a small griddle and served them with coffee for breakfast and lunch in the tiny Bohemian surfing village. She lived in a neat little house right above the pancake joint and spent the rest of the day as she pleased.
Imagine this ambitious young woman back home responding to the common, “So, what do you do?” with, “I make pancakes for a living.” Likely her friends and family would be a little worried and ashamed and think something wrong with her.
Contrast that with the same answer to the same question but with a change in geography. “I moved across the world to a tropical surfing village in Ecuador where I opened my own business.” Wow. What an enviable life, right?
There’s something weird about staying in your hometown. It severely limits the definitions you accept for what makes you successful. Oddly, most of the hometown definitions of success have nothing to do with happiness. They have to do with becoming what everyone in your past expects or desires given who you used to be. It’s a sort of tether to a past self that no longer exists.
When the expectations of back home no longer apply you can ask better questions and make clearer connections. What kind of person do you want to be (vs. what job title do you want)? What kind of people and surroundings do you want to be immersed in (vs. where do you want to work or live)?
Many people would probably love to be the master of their own schedule, be in a beautiful outdoor setting with interesting people from around the world, seriously pursue a hobby with lots of their time, and be challenged in new ways daily. Yet most of those same people would be horrified at the idea of playing guitar on the street for money, flipping pancakes, or doing freelance odd-jobs online, any of which might be the very means to achieve the life described.
Most people have this idea that you have to work a boring job in a boring house in a boring city for a few decades, and then if you play your cards right and all kinds of things totally out of your control (like the stock market or real estate prices) do the right thing, you can have some kind of two week vacation cruise or retire in a place where you enjoy good weather and leisure. The weird thing is, all those “someday” goals are available right now with relatively little difficulty. You can afford to live in a cool bamboo house in a beach town just by making pancakes for lunch and breakfast. You can (as was one guy I met) travel the length of South America living entirely off the cash you make playing guitar outside of restaurants.
I’m not claiming this kind of life is for everyone. Not at all. There is nothing wrong with a 9-5 job and life in the suburbs if that’s what really resonates with you. There’s nothing inherently noble about traveling or working some low wage odd job. The point is that it’s too easy to choose things based on an artificially limited option set. It’s too easy to define your life by stupid things like college majors or giant industry labels or titles that will make Aunt Bessie proud at the family reunion or salary levels.
The last one is especially dangerous.
It’s a weird habit to measure your success in life only by the revenue side of the equation. Who cares if you bring in $100k a year if it only buys you a crappy apartment that you hate in a city that stresses you out with friends that don’t inspire you and a daily existence you mostly daydream about escaping from? Your costs exceed your revenues and you’re actually going backward. You very well could get twice the lifestyle you desire at half the annual income. Like any business, the health of your personal life should be measured using both revenues and costs. On the personal level, neither are not just monetary.
Only you can know what kind of life you want. But getting off the conveyor belt of the education system, getting out of the home town expectations trap, and opening your mind to measures of progress beyond salary will give you a much better chance of crafting a life you love.
Here are a few articles to chew on:
Why You Should Move Away from Your Home Town
Why You Should Get Off the Conveyor Belt
Why “Escapism” Isn’t a Bad Thing
Why It’s So Hard to Exit a Bad Situation
Do You Need to Do Work You Love to Be Happy?
Do What You Love, or Have it Easy?
If you look into the origin of head coaches in the NFL you’ll find something pretty amazing. There are only a handful of head coaches past from whom all current head coaches come. If you want to get really crazy complex, check out this WSJ article and visualization.
The NFL isn’t unique among sports in this respect. You’ll find a similar phenomenon in college and pro basketball and other sports as well.
This is not the result of rigid rules or imposed design. It’s the spontaneous order that emerges from the demand for certain very hard to identify and cultivate skills. Coaching is incredibly nuanced and you can’t tell who will be good at it from a resume or a few interviews. Those who come up under great coaches and absorb the lessons, gain the trust of players and other coaches, and build a reputation through continued tests of greater and great responsibility end up with head coaching jobs themselves. Then those that coach under them end up with HC jobs, and on and on.
Not all of them succeed of course, but that’s not surprising. What’s suprising is how powerful the network and legacy of a single great coach can be. Today’s NFL is made up of 32 head coaches who are the understudies of just three or four retired HC’s. It’s pretty crazy when you ponder it.
I think there’s something to be learned from this on a personal level. I’ve never seen a great coach in sports who does not spawn many apprentices. I don’t think it’s possible to lead at that level in such a complex organization if you don’t have a cadre of trusted up and comers, many of whom will go on to leadership roles themselves. If you are trying to build something or be truly great at something you’ll need other people.
Look around you. Probe your close personal network. Are the people in it likely to go on to greatness? Will a family tree of leadership spring from your associates?
If not, you might need to do a gut check and ask why. Are you too obsessed with controlling or micromanaging everything? Do you surround yourself with low caliber people? Do you only follow and never lead? Do you demand to take credit for everything, swallowing up all the opportunities for those you work with to grow and possibly surpass you?
I can’t think of a more fulfilling legacy in sports that to not only be a champion at the highest level, but to be the progenitor of generations of champions. I think the same is true outside of sports. It’s a kind of immortality.
You don’t need to live vicariously or obsess over the success or failure of those in your network. It’s got to be a loose, spontaneous thing. But if you’re doing leadership right, you should see other leaders emerge from your circle of influence, and then other leaders emerge from under them.
These two great secrets are known to almost nobody. A few people know secret number one, but falsely conclude that the signal is still the best option.
A small but growing number of people partially understand what’s behind secret number two, but because they do not grasp that the product universities sell is a signal, they compare only alternative social and learning experiences to universities, not alternative ways of creating a signal.
The combined understanding of both of these secrets will completely revolutionize the way people think about and engage in education, career preparation, work, and life.
The Signal Secret
A small number of economists and thinkers have identified that higher education is valued because of its signalling power. That is, the college experience does not form people into more valuable or learned individuals capable of doing good work, but it sorts people into groups and attaches degrees to those who were already capable.
Signals are not bad things. They are very valuable. Employers need a way to narrow the pool of applicants and weed out the least likely to succeed. There is a correlation between completing college and being a better worker on average. But there is no causation.
Harvard doesn’t make you more likely to succeed. The type of person who gets accepted into Harvard is already more likely to succeed.
Almost everyone objects to calling the product universities sell a signal. They claim it’s a big bundle of goods. It’s a social experience. It’s a network. It’s knowledge.
It is indeed a bundle of these things and many more, but these are all fringe benefits. None of them are the core product being purchased. When you pay to get your oil changed and the waiting room has coffee and magazines it’s a nice perk, but it’s clearly not the service you are purchasing. If the auto garage didn’t have these comforts you might still go, but if they only sold coffee and magazines without oil changes, you wouldn’t.
College is the same. Whatever other activities and benefits students may derive from their experience, none of them are the reason they are paying to be there. They are paying for the signal, period.
It’s easy to prove this point. List every other element of the higher education bundle. Sports, parties, talks with professors, lectures, books, living with other young people, etc. Now ask which of these would be possible if you never paid tuition? All of them. Move to a college town, sit in on classes, join clubs, go to events, read books, and live the college life to your heart’s content.
When you take away the credential at the end, it becomes clear how easy it is to get all the other aspects of college for free or very low cost, and often better.
This is also evidenced by the fact that everyone is happy when class is cancelled. What other good do people pay for upfront and then cheer when it’s not delivered? It’s because the classroom lectures and tests are not the good being purchased. They are an additional cost that must be borne in order to get the real product, which is the piece of official paper. The signal.
Young people may or may not enjoy some or all elements of the college experience. But the reason they go and pay is because, in their minds, they have to. They have to to get the signal, because without the signal you can’t get a decent job or be seen as a decent human being, so the prevailing narrative goes.
The signal is the product. Until that is understood, no amount of tweaking or reforming or innovating any of the other parts of the higher education bundle will matter.
And it turns out, you don’t need the signal college sells after all.
The Alternatives Secret
Everyone is thrilled to show you charts and graphs and statistics about the correlation between degrees and earnings. None of that matters.
It doesn’t matter because aggregates are not individuals and because data can never show causation.
What happens to the average of some aggregate does not determine what course of action is most beneficial for an individual. The average Ferrari owner earns a lot more than the average Honda owner. No one assumes this means buying a Ferrari is a great way to improve your earning potential.
To the individual, the question is not whether college is a good investment for all young people on average. The question is whether you can build a better signal with less than four plus years and five plus figures. Turns out, that’s a pretty low bar.
The degree signals that you are probably a little above average for someone your age. Maybe not even that as degrees proliferate. This means if you are average or below average in ability, creativity, or work ethic, the degree signal may help you get a better job than you could without it. (Though it won’t help you keep it.)
If you are above average in ability, creativity, or work ethic the degree signal sells you short. It makes you blend in with all the lower quality people coming out of the same institution. (Not only that, the college experience itself tends to foster habits that make you less able, creative, and hardworking.)
Young people today have at their fingertips tools to create signals far more powerful than generic institutional credentials. Consider the impact of a tailored website that demonstrates the value you have created? Better yet, a website or product that demonstrates to a company the value you will create for them?
Consider the value of working alongside a successful entrepreneur or industry leader for free or low pay for a year or two and parlaying that into a full-time gig? Companies hate the searching and hiring process. They’d always rather promote someone within who has a proven track record of value creation. Compare the cost of low wages for a year or two to the cost of no wages and huge debt for four.
Businesses need value-creating employees. They use degrees as an early proxy to eliminate some chunk of applicants (though even this practice is declining for big and small companies alike), but they only use them in absence of a better, clearer, more powerful signal. When one exists, it trumps the academic credential. When you realize all they want is proof of ability to create value, the world begins to open up. How many ways are there to prove that you can?
It’s not only about getting hired. Professors are quick to tell you that wages are not the only thing that matters when it comes to happiness and success in life. They are correct. Yet chasing the degree as the only signal often leaves people with debt that requires a relatively high wage to service, thus cutting off options and opportunities to explore and experiment.
Not least of these explorations is the wonderful and growing world of entrepreneurship. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to create your own product or launch your own venture. It’s also more and more valuable. Machines and software can do rote tasks. Humans’ greatest value add is creative problem solving and innovation.
The ability to freelance for a living, launch a micro business, or create a major enterprise is expanding every day. There is no benefit to the degree signal in the world of entrepreneurship. There are no HR departments wading through resumes looking for checklists. Here, in fact, the college experience can be more of a detriment than a benefit. It tends to restrict the imagination to known methods, restrict your network to same-aged people, restrict your financial flexibility and risk-taking, and cut into many of the easiest years for trying something bold when the cost of failure is lowest.
A 20-year-old who launched a KickStarter campaign, built an app, created a website, apprenticed for a small business owner, read 50 books, or even just has an amazing online presence signals more value creation potential than a 22-year-old with a BA and a 3.7 GPA. Yes, you can supplement the college experience with these other things, but classes and obligations (not only time but financial and parental) get in the way of fully unleashing your independent signal-creating potential.
The Real Revolution
The real revolution in higher education will not come from better delivery mechanisms for lectures, or new platforms to sell the same signal. It won’t be disrupted by online versions of the brick and mortar establishment.
The real revolution will look as varied as the people participating in it. It will begin when people understand the two secrets of higher education. When it is realized that college is selling a signal and that signalling your ability to create value can be done far better in myriad other ways, the world will bloom with alternative methods of getting young people from where they are to where they want to be.
Instead of 16, 17, and 18-year-olds stressing about how to get into colleges, they should focus their energy on how to begin building a better signal. Instead of 19, 20, and 21-year-olds stressing about majors and minors and GPA’s, they should focus their energy on creating value and building a way to prove it.
What are you signalling?
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Want more? Check out Praxis, a one-year apprenticeship + professional development + coaching educational experience for young people who want more than college.
If Malcolm Gladwell is right then it takes 10,000 hours to master something at the highest level. I guess that means after the 15,000 hours a typical kid spends in public school they become a master and a half. But at what?
Certainly not geography, or history, or math, or English, or any of the other arbitrary slivers of factual knowledge called “subjects”. The learning is too fragmented, inconsistent, and lifeless. If it’s not the subjects themselves what is the predominant trait or skill that happens consistently throughout that entire, nearly life-consuming 15,000 hours of schooled childhood? What do kids master?
Seeking permission.
Children master the art of being permission seekers. They lose the ability, to borrow from James Altucher, to choose themselves. Each of those 15,000 hours share in common the absence of choice. Students aren’t free to explore or follow their curiosity outside of incredibly narrow bounds, both metaphorical and cinder block and barbed wire. Permission must be sought to speak, go to the bathroom, or do anything differently than the officially sanctioned authority figure has prescribed.
Is it any wonder people stick around in unhappy jobs and relationships? Is it any wonder people numbly obey sometimes absurd and immoral laws? Is it any wonder people don’t deviate from the education, career, and life path that was explicitly pushed on them? Is it any wonder people don’t believe in or take pride in themselves or others in the absence of external rewards and badges and credentials?
Sometimes people say that anything other than 15,000 hours in school is radical. I’m all for radical, but I can’t help but find it an odd way to view not sending your kids to school. As John Taylor Gatto said,
“Is there a more radical idea in the history of the human race than turning your children over to total strangers who you know nothing about? Having those strangers work on your child’s mind, out of your sight, for a period of twelve years?”
15,000 hours. Let’s hope Gladwell is wrong.
A few years ago I started blogging every day. Then I stopped to focus my energy on launching Praxis (so I told myself). My productivity and happiness began to lag so I started daily blogging again. Then I stopped again because I wanted to take the time to write more long-form pieces (so I told myself). My productivity and happiness began to lag again so I started again.
The first stint was six months of unbroken daily blogging. The second stint, after a six-month hiatus, was a year of unbroken daily blogging. I just started up again after less than a month off because I couldn’t stand it any longer.
A few of the more valuable things I’ve learned from the practice of daily blogging…
Selfishness
Seems like it would be impossible to have something to write every day. In fact, it almost feels arrogant to try. The voices inside began to mock, “Oh sure, everyone really wants to hear what you have to say every single day!” If I get stuck asking what everyone (or anyone) else wants I’ll never produce anything. Not happiness either.
I shut out the voices by reminding myself that I write because it changes me. I don’t write as a mission to the world or a gift to humanity or a calling card for business or to impress my wife (lord knows that doesn’t work) or to prove my point to anyone. I write for me. I write because doing so every day makes me more of the person I want to be.
Self-Knowledge
Writing for me might overcome the internal objection to posting my ideas daily, but it doesn’t solve the need for content. Every day blogging means I’ve got to have something you want to say every day. It’s not as hard as you might imagine.
I think everyone has plenty to say. Most of us just don’t know what’s in our own heads until we’re forced to get it out. How many thoughts go through your head every day? Brain researchers claim upwards of 50,000, plus all the things you dream. You make observations, form theories, develop insights, and share many of them in conversation. You just don’t know it.
Writing every day has taught me more about myself and what ideas are bouncing around in the attic of my skull than any practice I can imagine by forcing me to give them voice.
Killing the Critic
Something weird happened when I started writing every day. My capacity for lazy criticism damn-near dried up. When I read articles or watched movies I rarely found myself tossing out unbacked claims like, “That was lame”, or, “What a weak argument”.
The casual signaling of disapproval that passes for commentary is a brain-rotting, happiness-and-creativity-killing habit. I was good at it. Daily writing put wrench in my call-outs.
This happened for two reasons. First, I need content! Watching a movie I don’t like and sharing my reaction in a simple Facebook post declaring, “Meh” is like washing your hands with the last liter of water in the canteen while crossing the desert. I need fuel to feed the daily writing and my brain just processed an entire two-hour spectacle full of ideas and implications. Surely there is something in there that can be turned into a post!
The second reason the critic in me got neutered was simply perspective, or if you wish, empathy. I know what it means to create something and ship it out to the world, how many or few they may be. It’s hard. It’s brutal some days. And everything I create is not my best stuff. But the pride I feel when I churn out a post on a bad day, even if I know it’s a weak post, is amazing. When I see other people create I can’t help but internally cast a knowing nod their way. Who cares about the flaws? They’re doing something. Plus, if they’re like me, they’re probably already…
On to the Next One
I don’t have comments enabled on this blog. I never read the comments on Medium or other outlets where my stuff is published. I rarely read or engage Facebook comments on my articles.
Before you think I’m a total condescending jerk let me just say it’s not you, it’s me.
I have nothing against comments or commenters. I love that people want to engage some of the ideas I produce. But I’m a pretty weak-willed person in many ways. It’s hard enough to blog every day as it is, without the backward-looking draw of yesterday’s work. If I get caught up reading comments I will not be able to do it dispassionately. It’s my writing, so it’s close to me. I’ll become vested in the outcome of the conversation, which is like being vested in Sisyphus getting that boulder to stay up there.
It also runs the risk of getting me hooked on the quick dopamine hit of a “like” or positive comment, which is the beginning of the end if I want to maintain my goal of writing for me.
I’ve learned to immediately distance myself mentally from my writing the minute I click “publish”. Blog for the day is done. Great. Let’s move on. What’s on the agenda?
This practice has been so necessary for my mental health it’s hard to overemphasize it.
Not only that, when you don’t treat your writing as so precious it deserves a week of fawning after completion it frees you up to produce lots of other things and allows you to improve as a creator much faster. If I’m totally wrapped up in the fate of yesterday’s piece it will be harder for me to see its flaws and improve. Or, worse yet, I might become overwhelmed and embarrassed by its flaws and never want to write again.
Instead, I tell myself to shut up and ship it. Don’t look back, look ahead.
OK I’m done. See you tomorrow.
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.
The stoic approach has a lot going for it.
Contrary to “name it and claim it”, Law of Attraction kind of practices, stoicism admonishes not to fill your head with visions of utopia. It takes the opposite tack.
Mentally explore the worst case scenario and familiarize yourself with it. This prepares you emotionally to handle whatever comes. By preparing for the worst you’ll be unshakeable when anything less occurs.
It’s a valuable life philosophy for dealing with fear of failure. When you’ve already experienced failure mentally and realized it’s not all the bad, you gain a kind of invincibility not devoid of reason and realism. You become what my friend TK Coleman might call a “Tough-minded optimist.”
But failure is not the only fear that holds us back. Fear of success is a thing too.
What if you launch your blog or produce your movie or sell your new product and it actually takes off? What if you go viral? What if you have more demand than you can keep up with? What if people start writing news stories about you? What if your success presents you with the decision of whether to quit your day job and redefine yourself? What if you threaten the status quo? What if people start suing you? What if people write articles about how much you suck? What if all your acquaintances start asking you for jobs and money and favors? What if big investors want to fund you but only if you move to a new city? What if your quiet evenings at home with your loved ones and Netflix become impossible to maintain along with your new endeavor?
If you really succeed some of these things will happen. They are at least as scary as failure and the stoic approach might cause you to avoid imagining them ahead of time. It’s arrogant to close your eyes and feel the experience of wild success, right? It’s delusional and might keep you from being able to handle failure, right?
Maybe if that’s all you ever imagine. On the flipside, if you’re only every braced for failure you might be blindsided by success and crumble, or worse yet never go hard after it due to latent fear of its unknown rewards and challenges.
One of those cheesy evangelical phrases I grew up around is pretty accurate here. “Another level another devil”. Maybe now your problems and fears loom large. If you don’t get the job you won’t know how to pay rent. Yet if you succeed in a big way your problems and fears become more, not less serious. If you don’t land the deal you’ll have to fire thirteen good employees and they won’t know how to pay rent. Success can be scary stuff.
If the stoic experience of mentally living through the worst-case is the antidote to fear of failure then I suggest the opposite is the antidote to fear of success.
Envision your best-case. Envision having millions of fans or dollars. Envision wild success and its attendant obligations and challenges. Really, seriously explore what you would do right now if you had it. It presents more challenges than most are willing to acknowledge.
I don’t know about the effectiveness of envisioning your goals as a way to achieve them, but I still think it’s important to envision success as a way to overcome your fear of it.
Illustration by Matthew Drake
This article is adapted from a presentation given at FEE and SFL seminars. Co-authored with James Walpole for The Freeman.
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We all want to live free, but we have a problem: governments don’t always want us to.
From seemingly mundane rules (like banning raw milk sales) to the truly horrific (like taking your house from you or throwing you in jail), the state is probably going to mess with you at some point in your life. It will throw taxes and fees and fines and rules at you and erect roadblocks and regulations inhibiting your progress — especially if you’re trying to do something new and innovative.
What can you do?
You do have options. Grave as the stakes may sometimes be, you must first accept this outlook: it’s all a game. If you treat it that way, you’re more likely to find a way forward rather than simply cowering in fear or trembling with anger.
Here, then, are four options when you’re faced with the game of government interference.
1. Play the Game
This is the strategy you’re probably most familiar with. It’s what we’re all encouraged to do. Whether through voting, lobbying, or holding office, you can try to take on the state while playing by its rules. You can try to change it from the inside. This is a strategy we cannot recommend.
In business, this strategy leads to the phenomenon economists call “regulatory capture.” Many companies become involved in lobbying and political action to prevent hostile regulations. It’s understandable. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign donations and dinners trying to sway politicians and regulators to delay a vote, join coalitions, or carve out exceptions.
It’s a tough, slow process, one that involves endless compromise of principle and decency, and the few who succeed end up with political power and the ability to gain more. They end up using that power not just to expand their own freedom but to crush the freedom of competitors.
But any changes you make will be temporary. Laws passed in one decade are easily repealed in the next, especially if they limit state power. The bigger loss is a personal one. If you play the game long enough, the game ends up playing you. You become a part of the power structure you were trying to fight.
2. Defy the Game
When the state crushes your dreams, you can fight back. History is full of people who stopped taking oppression for granted and started resisting. Look at the civil rights movement in the United States, the Hungarian revolt against Communist rule, or even Uber’s commercial rebellion.
Today, the ridesharing company is operating illegally in dozens of cities, and it’s already paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for its drivers who are caught violating local laws. The company is growing fast enough to absorb the damage, and while governments don’t like Uber, customers love it. In Uber-hostile cities like New York, riders are standing up for their favorite way to get around. The “rebellion” has been a huge success.
But rebellion plays out in more desperate ways in the rest of the political world. For people and companies without the money and reputation of Uber, successfully defying the game is hard. While you can get tremendous satisfaction from sticking it to the man, you might end up in jail. You might be killed. In other words, playing this way means you might run into the real power of the state in its rawest form.
3. Change the Game
Changing the game is about recognizing the incentive structures and putting external pressure on the government to bend. Often, all you need to do to win is to hold the state to its own rules.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds, and the people who try to change the game in this way have to be heroic, if not martyrs. They’re taking the longest route. Game-changers lower the cost of information to the public while raising the cost for government to break its own rules or be thuggish. This group includes lawyers, journalists, public intellectuals, and everyday citizens.
Look at the case of occupational licensing. Municipal and state governments throughout the United States require entrepreneurs to give up money and time to comply with regulations. Many would-be entrepreneurs are stopped dead in their tracks by competition-killing regulations.
Before the Institute for Justice (IJ) challenged the regulation, eyebrow threaders in Texas were required to train for 750 hours before they could set up shop. Before another IJ case in 2011, Texas required bakers wanting to sell cookies to the public to rent commercial kitchen space and obtain food-handling permits.
Changing the game isn’t limited to the courtroom. Governments will break their own rules if they can get away with it. Both IJ cases included concerted efforts to raise public awareness about the unfair consequences of the regulations while simultaneously challenging them in court. These efforts raised the stakes for any judge who wanted to rule for the status quo. It also resulted in politicians jockeying to change the law before the court case was even settled so that they could take credit and benefit from the positive PR. Think about the state lawmakers who jumped at the chance to restrict eminent domain after theKelo outrage.
This is one of the biggest pros of changing the game: if you’re successful, you’ve kept your own integrity, and you’ve helped to protect others from the dream crushers in government.
The problem is that you may not win. You can spend years of your life fighting the battle to change the game and lose — plenty of people have, from the Dred Scott case to the Kelo decision. Even if you do win, the victory is too often short-lived: as soon as public awareness and scrutiny abate, courts will “reinterpret” hard-fought constitutional changes put in place to restrict government.
4. Ignore the Game
Entrepreneurs in the last decade have made international-trade and immigration restrictions less and less important. Today, anyone can telecommute to work in the United States from a call center in India, an Internet cafe in Bangladesh, or a personal laptop in Mexico. These innovations allow labor to move freely, and the inventors never needed to lobby politicians.
You can quit, exit, and opt out of the games government uses to stop you. You can move. You can pull your kids out of school. You can alter your business plan. You can quietly sidestep the obstacles placed before you.
There are major benefits to ignoring the game. For one thing, you don’t have to think about politics. Psychologists and philosophers have long told us to not worry about things not under our control. By ignoring the game, you can be politically ignorant and much happier. You don’t have to fight court battles or Internet comment threads. You can focus on creating, not protesting.
Ignoring the game isn’t always as satisfying as defying it, but ignoring the game offers an immediate sense of personal freedom. It allows you to create a freer life for yourself while providing an example that others can learn from. Over time, if enough people ignore the game, it begins to wane in importance and power.
How Will You Respond?
If your goal is to live free, first understand the game and know the rules. The way you respond to the game is then up to you. The strategy you choose will have more influence over your quality of life than any near-term victory or defeat will.
You may respond to the government in many different ways throughout your life, but if you treat it like a game, it will be less likely to ruin you.
I’m on a ceaseless quest. This quest it based on a belief about myself and the world:
For everything that I do there is someone somewhere who can do it better.
When I start doing something new my quest is always to find the person who can do it better and hand over the reins as soon as possible.
Where and when I’ve succeeded at that, I’ve succeeded.
I fully believe the maxim that you’ll be most successful when you find and do the things that no one else can do as well – the things that are uniquely you. But if I always believe there is someone who can do everything I do better, and I’m always trying to find them and hand it off, what does that make me uniquely good at?
I don’t really know. Here are two possible answers. One is that at any given time I might be the best person for something. So that’s what I’ll be doing. But that time is limited. In the long run, even though I might be uniquely perfect for something at first, someone else might be better.
The other possible answer is that my most unique and valuable skill is replacing myself.
Maybe I’m best at breaking new ground, getting the basics figured out, identifying nascent talent in someone else, and transitioning things to them so they can blossom in a way no one else – including me – ever could.
Whatever the answer I am totally confident that, given enough time, I can find someone who can do everything I do better. This doesn’t threaten or bother me. It fills me with excitement! Where are they? How can I find them? How soon can I get them catapulted to heights I could never reach? When can I replace myself with someone better?
If you share a similar disposition know you’re not alone. If you know you’re a jack of many trades but master of none don’t fear. That’s its own kind of mastery. At least I hope so. It’s worked pretty well for me so far and I’m having fun.
I’ve written before about the power of daily challenges, about how simply eliminating unwanted elements from your life is often better than trying to achieve some lofty goal, and about how identifying and overcoming obstacles one at a time can be better than plotting a perfect long-term path.
All of this, as well as concepts like deschooling yourself and creating your own structure are wrapped into a very tangible tool we at Praxis call a Personal (or Professional) Development Project (PDP).
My colleague Cameron Sorsby writes about PDP’s:
“A Praxis Personal Development Project (PDP) is a short-term set of challenges with the goal of gaining self-knowledge, overcoming obstacles to success, and gaining mastery in areas of value to the individual and the marketplace.
For the majority of a young person’s life they are told where to be, what knowledge they need to gain, and what skills they need to develop in order to be successful. Their day-to-day structure is designed for them, which makes it an incredible challenge to transition to professional life successfully.
Creating and completing a PDP helps you instill creativity as an everyday habit, develop marketable skills, and provide tangible evidence that you can create value for others. It helps you overcome those unproductive habits you developed in over-structured institutions like school and start deciding for yourself what knowledge and skills you value. Ultimately, the purpose of a PDP is to become a superior version of yourself within a short-time frame.
Praxis participants complete a series of 12 PDP’s throughout their program experience. With the help of their program advisor and access to resources like the Praxis Curriculum Library, each month they create a PDP and follow through with completing it.”
Check out a few recent Praxis participant PDP’s here.
Check out the Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course, which includes a 30-day PDP built into the program. If you can successfully complete it (harder than it sounds), you get a free coaching session with Education Director T.K. Coleman.