I don’t have a morning routine. Sometimes I experiment with one, other times I alter my mornings based on other larger goals. In some phases of life, I’ve slept in ’till eight or nine. In others I’ve gotten up at five or six. Sometimes I do both from day to day. I’ve done email first…
Category: Education Through Entrepreneurship
Me and Goals Have a Love Hate Thing
I like really short term goals (“publish a blog post today”), and I like really long term goals (make the world freer when I leave it than it was when I entered). I don’t like mid-term goals. They feel constraining, and unnatural. Why aim for a made-up halfway target instead of just aiming for the true, big giant end target?
Career Leverage and the Structure of Production
I’m a big fan of the Austrian School of Economics, which focuses a lot on the structure of production, which is a fancy way of saying the long process of how stuff gets made. It’s the process of going from products (Here’s an apple), to tools (Here’s a ladder to reach more apples), to tools for making tools (Here’s a saw to cut wood for ladders), and on and on. The deepening of the structure of production requires insight and foresight, since it adds ’roundaboutness’ to a straightforward task like apple picking. But it also adds massive leverage.
We Need a Substitute for the Word ‘Support’
When people say they support something, it usually means they want governments to make laws that will advance that thing. Legislation is not like business, or family, or society. Those institutions require persuasion and value creation to get the thing you support to win. Legislation is a different beast. The single feature that distinguishes governments from every other institution is that they initiate violence to back everything they do.
The Time Element in Alchemy
On the way to the office this morning, a thought popped into my head. Everything I touch turns to gold. It was a weird thought, because it doesn’t seem true. I’ve had tons of failures, and many more long, slow slogs through the shit-trenches to get success.
No, It’s Not the Degree
I often see people say things like, “Sure, they say you don’t need a fancy degree to get the job, but then they hire people with fancy degrees.” It’s not because companies are lying about not needing a degree. It’s because candidates are totally lame and uninteresting. In a pool of generic, flat, 2D resumes…
How to Confront Big Changes in the World
Whether the world is being disrupted and displaced at a frantic pace or not isn’t the relevant question. What about your life? What’s happening there? What do you want to happen there? How can you work with changes in the world to help rather than hinder those goals?
The Current Career Landscape in 8 Short Points
1. Young people mistakenly assume the way to start their career is to go into debt, spend four years taking tests, following rules, chasing grades and getting a degree. 2. Paper credentials won’t launch your career. Employers don’t care about degrees, they care about the right skills.
Most Success Formulas are Guesses
The human experience mostly consists of trying stuff until you get something right, guessing/deconstructing why you got it right, repeating those elements as many times as possible in as many scenarios as possible until it can no longer be replicated, rinse, repeat. If what you get right is a big enough win, it will take…
Why I Prefer Freedom
Anything deemed too important/necessary to question or face competition is a giant web of protected dark corners. This is why the myth of authority and the myth of the rule of law are so dangerous. They create shelters and havens for scoundrels.