Three Questions to Ask Yourself Every Day
Do I like what I’m doing? Is it getting me somewhere I want to go? What am I giving up to be here? These seem like simple questions. Obvious even. No need to be reminded of them. Yet so much of what we do is the result of habit, social norms, envy, fear, outside pressure, […]
An Ambitious Young Person’s Guide to Avoiding Office Politics
You’re an ambitious young person at work in your first “real” job. Sure, you probably held a job in high school to pay the bills and let you save up for when you graduate, but this is different. You might have worked as a server or a cashier. Now you’re where you dreamed of going. […]
What I Do When I Feel Too Tired To Create
“I’m too tired.” Too many of my blog post drafts have died an early death because of that sentence. This is an excuse that neatly covers failure for just about any work. It’s so easy to justify. But just because an excuse is justifiable doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile. Because I can always imagine a time when I’ll feel […]
How To Think About Risk
“Risk is the potential for an irreversible negative outcome.” -Tim Ferriss The responses from family, friends, and acquaintances when I announced I was joining a startup were overwhelmingly positive. You would of course expect this from a supportive network. However, there have been many occasions when that positivity has been paired with a side of […]
Life Is A Hackathon
It’s often said that life is a marathon, rather than a sprint. This is sound advice, but I don’t think the marathon is the best analogy for the entrepreneur. If we’re interested in building lives defined by purposeful creativity, we need to look to a different kind of competition. I had the chance to attend my first […]
Sometimes There’s No Lesson to Learn
Back in college, as part of an ice breaker group routine at a retreat, some friends and I were faced with the difficult task of physically carrying each member of a group to a certain location without anyone’s body touching any of the objects that were deemed out of bounds. My friends and I figured […]
Your Resume is Boring. Do These Five Things Instead
The following article is excerpted from our book, How to Get Any Job You Want: Advice for Future Career Seekers. Want a free PDF copy of the full book? You can download it here! The resume is supposed to be a relatively quick way for someone to get to know your personal and professional accomplishments, […]
You’ve Been Postponing Your Goals — Here’s How to Change That
“Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?” — Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead You’re scared. You’re 16-25 years old and you’re scared because you don’t know what you want to do with your life and you’re even more scared of finding out. Or, maybe you do know what you want to […]
Is it Dangerous to Follow Your Desires?
“We abandon the most important journey of our lives when we abandon desire.” -John Eldredge People do all sorts of things without fairly considering any of the arguments that could be made against the decisions they’re making and that can be a very dangerous practice. Over the past year, however, I’ve met dozens of young […]
How I Achieved My Four-Year Goals In Ten Months
I’ve always had fairly large goals. When it came to actually accomplishing them, I wasn’t much different from many people my age. That is to say, I was getting nothing important done. I was keeping my head down and working hard to do well in school and have a “normal” teenage life. I had done well at […]
The College Mindset and the Entrepreneur Mindset: A Comparison
For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves? — Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future I had the opportunity to attend the […]
Advice to Ambitious Young People: Just Build Something!
“I’m an ambitious young person who wants to always be moving forward in my education and career. What should I be doing?” Building something. The best thing that an ambitious young person can do at age 18, 19, or 20 is to be building something. They should be spending as much of their free time as possible […]
How To Be Fascinating: The (Apparent) Contradictions of Interesting People
“He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” – Kris Kristofferson An aristocrat who joins a peasant revolution. An atheist who enjoys liturgical music. A janitor who makes a breakthrough scientific discovery. If these sound like they would be excellent characters for a novel, that’s because they would. We are fascinated by people who defy […]
The Sleep In Your Car Test
We have a simple test for applicants to Praxis. I call it the sleep in your car test. There are people who are willing to sleep in their car to get what they want and those who aren’t. We’re only interested in the former. No, we don’t actually ask people to sleep in their cars […]
The Habit is The Way: Cultivating Success as a Discipline
Consciously developed habits that you commit to whether you’re in the mood or not give you a framework on which to base the rest of your day — if you can commit to the little things and take that small victory every day, you can commit to the larger things as well. When we look […]