Maybe that boat you bought isn’t creating value for you because you don’t make the proper time to go out to the lake. Maybe your camera isn’t creating value for you because you never learned photography properly. Maybe your mountain cabin isn’t creating value for you because you’re allergic to mountains or something.
Tag: logic
Do You Even Logic?
The concept of figuring something out seems to be genuinely foreign to a lot of people. You can call it a failure of education, failure of parents, failure of society, whatever. But it’s really damn creepy how many people don’t grasp the concept of deductive reasoning. It’s not just that they’re bad at logic; it’s that they don’t even know what it is.
How to Be Confident (Tell The Truth)
A friend asked what gave me the confidence to pitch the first Praxis investors on our projected growth when there was no real way to prove or back the numbers, since we were building something brand new. If I approached it from a place of needing to make investors happy, or make them believe in the credibility of my numbers, I wouldn’t have been confident at all.
Band-Aid Solutions Are Lame and Nature is the Answer
The violations that plague us don’t come out of thin air one day. It is the result of the culmination of traumas inflicted onto us from day one (and actually before, while we are still in the womb) of entering into a world that profits and runs off of others people’s trauma. We literally live and operate in a place that is rooted in trauma and carries out traumatizing rituals on its most vulnerable people. So long as we passively accept these cultural narratives and practices, we cannot and should not expect better from our society.
Idealism Is Different From Ideology
Some people and organizations feel they have to make a choice between idealism and dry pragmatism. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is the false equivalency of idealistic behavior and ideological behavior. To be idealistic is to strive for the good, the just, the beautiful. Idealists aim for a better…
An Extremist Position on Metaphors and Understanding
Every conceptual breakthrough and big business idea I’ve had hasn’t crystallized until the right metaphor could be formed around it. I get inklings of ideas and solutions, and beat my head against the wall trying to clarify to myself and others. Success only comes fully when I stumble upon the right metaphor.
Social Security is the Titanic; 2022 is the Iceberg; Anybody See a Lifeboat?
Everything eventually comes to an end, and Social Security won’t be the single historical exception to that cold hard fact of reality. The big question is whether it winds down in the least damaging way or catastrophically implodes (cue images of the elderly living on cat food and so forth).
Three Obstacles
We will always have much the same emotions that Adam and Eve had. Institutions will always militate against change, and even when they do change they will only update to new institutions. Institutions are static steps in the dynamic process of change. And technological matters will always seem god-like because they change while the former two don’t — technological change is outside the box.
When to Be Decisively Indecisive
I’m a big fan of agnosticism. I don’t mean the orientation to theological questions, but something much broader. For me, the greater the number of things about which I am agnostic, the happier I am and the more powerful and productive on the very few things about which I have passionate belief.
Rationally Speaking
The most important question in a debate is not “What’s the evidence for your point of view?” It’s “Why should anyone care to discuss the evidence for your point of view?” In any debate, the first type of evidence to demand is the kind that proves the debate is actually worth your time.