Year: 2017

Make your job your primary focus in life

Our culture has shifted away from viewing work as the main focus of people’s lives.  Part of the cause is economic: most people no longer need to work hard in order not to starve to death on the streets. Furthermore, the differences between income levels are far less important: your friend might have $1 or $1 million in the bank without much noticeable difference in lifestyle, whereas it used to mean the difference between a poor house or a mansion. Another aspect of it is philosophical: we have lost the understanding that markets are responsible for civilization, and so place far less value in productive work.

Career advice for the young: your job should be your primary focus in life. This is not to dismiss the value of family, friends, etc, but as far goal pursuit is concerned, you need to prioritize your career. I see young people who come in the morning tired from video games, partying, reading books, hobbies, etc. You guys need to think hard about your life and your time management. Schedule your social life, put time limits on games, sip your liquor, whatever it takes.
Cut out the non-essential crap in your life so you can come in and perform like a rockstar every morning. Playtime is over — you’re not a kid anymore and need to start adulting ASAP. If you can’t get sufficiently motivated about your job to do that, quit now and find something that drives you to perform your best. Trust me – it will be worth it.

When I give this advice, people inevitably complain that by stressing the importance of work, I dismiss the value of family. Nevermind that young people today don’t place much value in family either – the kind of diversions I mentioned have little to do with forming meaningful relationships. In one aspect, however, I think I value family more than most of my critics. I used to dismiss stay at home moms (or dads) as incomplete human beings who failed to reach their potential. Over time, however, I saw the value of attachment parenting – close physical and emotional contact between parent and child is very important. Furthermore, the financial advantage of two working spouses is less than is often assumed and misses out on major non-material costs. So I’m not so “anti-family” after all.

Finally, making your career your primary purpose in life does not mean working more hours. Not only is overwork counterproductive, but it is often the excuse to avoid taking the few, uncomfortable steps needed to actually make progress in life.  A good work-life balance doesn’t mean arbitrarily delimiting work/non-work hours. It means evaluating what habits and activities in your work and personal life are worthwhile investments and which ones are not, and delegating time accordingly.

Why we need disruption now more than ever

Ever since I discovered the importance of individual rights and the role of markets in human progress, my biggest fear about the fate of world has been not that things will get worse, but that we will muddle along with more of the same.

My study of history led me to the conclusion that the rapid growth in the power of the State following the First World War reached some threshold in the late 1960s, and damned up (however imperfectly) human moral, social, artistic and technological progress in many ways.   I don’t mean some sort of utopia, but the next semi-metaphorical stage of human evolution.  A true cosmopolitanism to replace multi-cultural tribalism, post-post-modernism, post-democratic forms of government (distributed citizenship?), ubiquitous encryption, smart contracts, prediction markets, distributed education, designer babies, single stage to orbit, organ printing, uploaded brains, etc.  Ironically, it was capitalism that created the technological progress and additional capital to make the modern welfare-warfare state possible, before Statism throttled it.

The perpetuation of the mixed economy, a condition somewhere between freedom and slavery threatens the progress of civilization on a fundamental level. The social-democratic welfare-warfare governments of the world strangle innovation, corrupt cultural and moral progress, and hinder the flow of history itself. Ultimately, the fault is not with politicians but with ourselves, down the small-town American voter who uses political violence to zone his competitor out of business, or big-city busybody who votes to decide what how neighbor is allowed to eat, drink, smoke, or play.

I know that no human institution is eternal, and for better or worse, this era of history will someday come to an end, but the possibility that it will last through my lifetime fills some deep part of me with an existential dread.

How will the next phrase of history arrive? Will it be a peaceful and harmonious transition to a glorious future, a descent into totalitarianism followed by tragedy, conflict and collapse, or something I cannot imagine? Whatever it is, I want to live to see it — and I will do my damnedest to bring our long-delayed future forward.

I believe that history has a momentum and a direction of its own. Capital accumulates, knowledge and wisdom is perfected, and though it is weak, imperfect and inconsistent, I believe that there is a *moral* arrow to history – a steady progress towards a better, more rational, just, kind, and *human* future.

For decades now, democratic nations have existed in an increasingly precarious state, as increasing productivity of labor enables ever more looting of the productive class, but just below a level that would lead to social collapse.

I believe that technological progress will become ever more rapid and unpredictable, disputing the rigid schemes of the central planners. Economic cycles will accelerate, central banks will fail, and empires will rise — and fall. Or so I hope.

For better or worse, we need disruption to bring our long-delayed future forward. This is the thread that informs my criticism of our most respected institutions, and my support of the most subversive, disruptive trends.

Here is why most university degrees are worthless, Part 1

I needed a foreign language credit for my undergraduate, so I decided to take Russian, since I had grown up speaking it. So I took a Russian assessment test. It was harder than I expected, but I was still pretty surprised when told that I would have to start from scratch with Russian 101. When I challenged the head of the Russian language department, he asked me a series of grammar questions, which only confirmed the test results. So I took the few semesters of Russian needed for my degree. I got easy A’s – not because I was fluent in Russian, but because I had been trained by 13 years of schooling to memorize grammar rules for tests. My friend Tim took them with me, and I think he would not dispute that he learned absolutely nothing while getting the same grades.

16 years later, and 26 years after I had last spoken Russian on a daily basis, my uncles, who only speak Russian and Hebrew, came to visit. Within a few hours of speaking (and drinking) with them, we were talking and joking together. I had been reading at a college level when I left the USSR, and all I needed to jog my memory was a little language immersion. It turns out I’m not a total beginner. The head of the Russian language department, who had learned the language in a classroom, and probably had never lived in Russia outside of supervised university trips had no interest or ability to spend a few hours with me, and do more good than three semesters of classes. Not everyone can re-learn a language with a few hours of immersion, but everyone has different needs and learns in different ways, and our schooling system is designed for mass instruction without any regard for individual needs.

A month ago, I changed my job from technology to marketing. A graduate degree and 14 years of experience in tech, and I suddenly decided to do something different. Do you think I could have done that if I defined myself by my university degree? I haven’t read a book on marketing (not proud of that btw, just saying), much less taken a class on it, but was I worried? No – because I know how to Google, I know how to ask for help, and I know how to Get Shit Done. And I’m getting it done, my useless economics, political-science and MIS degrees be damned.

Meanwhile, do you know how many unemployed/underemployed marketing/communications graduates there are? I’m hiring one as an intern next week – who wised up to his useless degree and got Praxis (God bless ‘em) to show him to do marketing – starting with marketing himself.

Who knows what I’ll be doing a few years from now. I’ve thought about writing a few books, maybe doing travel photography for a while, or even a starting a hedge fund. If I thought that I needed four years of school for every job, I would still be an unemployed economics graduate.