Elizabeth Hasselbeck doesn't support the use of the morning after pill because she believes that "life begins at conception." That's a wonderful point of view if you ignore the pesky little fact that the only purpose of emergency contraception pills is to prevent conception from occurring. In fact, they have no effect whatsoever on a woman who is already pregnant. Now, no doctor would let you take them for fun but the point of the pill begins and ends well before Hasselbeck's beliefs are relevant.

The test of her opinion rests at the moment someone informed her that she had misunderstood the medical function of the pill, a fairly common mistake. Did it change? Did she feel relieved or did she respond with "Hmmph, well I still don't like it."

Your opinion is either dependent on the facts or it's not. When they change, you should shift along with them, not wobble and revert like an earthquake proof building. We know that, but try and see. Read something that directly contradicts a long-held opinion on a controversial issue (say gay marriage or tax cuts or some person you idolize), you can see how quickly you try to rationalize and preempt the arguments as though you have a stake in it. The reality is that it shouldn't matter which side you're on, so long as it's the correct side.

I think that "OK, I know but still..." is about the dumbest possible phrase that can come out of your mouth. There's almost never an excuse for it. It's rooted in this delusionally coddled belief that you can somehow dissent from the world around you and it will make a difference. Look at the people who live their lives that way: George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Margaret Mead, Marxists, the annoying feminists who totally missed the problem with Hasslebeck's argument and how that ultimately panned out for the things they all wanted to accomplish. The results do not look good.

The Hustons by Lawrence Grobel (long but very good. about the director John Huston)
The Age of the Moguls by Stewart H. Holbrook
The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst by Kenneth Whyte (tip from Tyler Cowen. it's on the 3 years that Hearst took over the New York newspaper market. one of the better biographies of those breed of capitalists)
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman (these kinds of books could use some fresh examples - worth having still)
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (better than Blink. he could have called more people out but the whole 'straw man' criticism is obnoxious)

Someone made me a Crunchbase profile. It's blank if anyone wants to edit it. Crunchbase is actually a really good idea, there should be an intermediate service for people not notable enough for Wikipedia but still have verifiable biographies that should be aggregated. I'm not saying I'm one of those people but it's helped me out before when trying to research something.

TheBoxOfficeJunkie is updating again and worth reading. Can you believe Home Alone made $300 million at the box office in 1990?

Pictures of Children Crying is yet unannounced but will be incredibly funny if done right.

People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash and eat. When they're really possessed by what they do, they'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. - Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

I just read this book called The Age of the Moguls, which is very good. The author doesn't make this point explicitly but in the course of telling the stories of Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon, Carnegie, Hearst, Standford, Du Pont and Field, he makes it quite clear: That behind every great fortune is not just a crime but a single man who for whatever reason outworked everyone around them.

A man that at 2 in the morning asleep in bed heard a slight irregularity in the manufacturing process and tracked it down with a lantern in pajamas. Or worked his own mines. Or wrote 6,000 letters a year. Or spent every second trying to figure out what made a newspaper perfect.

Outliers, Gladwell's new book - which the reviews completely misunderstood and didn't appreciate in the way it deserves - brings up his 10,000 hours concept again. Since that's such a nice, big round number I think it's really easy to accept without really absorbing. It's almost too sticky. You sort of forget that every one of those hours was an individual choice and propelled into being by some personal force.

Gladwell believed he got his hours as a science writer at the Washington Post meeting late night deadlines and educating himself to write on complex subjects. Vanderbilt got his ferrying people into Manhattan as a teenager. Andrew Carnegie was the personal secretary to a railroad genius that soon put him in charge of his own division.

People don't understand my criticsm of the Brazen Careerist kids but I think it boils down to me inferring that they've somehow come to believe that it's all very easy. That to become a great marketer you just have to talk about marketing a lot. Or that career advice comes from people who look at careers. They've just assumed that it the authority they're after is fundamentally a product of projecting it long enough to feel natural. It's the same entitlement in the little quips and anecdotes that let people reduce it down to some sort of math problem. Like the real secret to Seinfeld was the clever way that he marked his calendar every morning.

I'm trying to think about it this way: if you envision the end result - a mastery of some sort - 10 or 15 years down the road, what are you doing right now to contribute to that? Cutting your teeth, when you examine the expression requires both a time when and an subject to cut them on. At some point, that has to stop being a metaphor.

There is a lazy hubris in just throwing around that number or thinking you know what you want to be. What about - and I think this is what the people we're talking about have actually done - figuring out what you need to subject yourself to become approximately that person? Deciding the conditions under which you can crystallize and making them a reality instead of pompously assuming they'll come about naturally. Lots of people can talk about what they'd like to be, very few can confidentially tell you what they're doing about it now.

When I look back on the period a long time from now, I should be able to see two or three fortunate convergences that shaped what I became. A clear indication that the work I'm doing now was instrumental in cumulating advantage. Because when I got out of bed I had the same conversation that Marcus had, decided that 'faking it until you make it' is bullshit and got to work. And finally, that it was all the same that nobody gave me any credit until I cashed the hours in.

Once as Pericles shoved off 150 ships in the Peloponnesian War, the sun was eclipsed and his men were thrown into fear. To prevent their paralyzation, he walked up to a lead steersman, removed his cloak and held it up around the man's face. He asked if he felt particularly afraid of this and of course the response was no. So what does he matter, he said, when the cause of the darkness differs?

You read this and you smile. The Greeks were so clever. Or, like Von Clausewitz, you dismiss it as self-serving translation - a way to use history to say something obvious. But that very much belies the incredible implications of the idea. Beneath the quaint leadership-in-action anecdote is the fundamental notion that girds not just Stoic philosophy but cognitive psychology. It's the idea that if you can break apart something, it loses its power over you. In cog psych, only when you're aware of a bias or conditioned response can you circumvent it.

Fear is debilitating, distracting, tiring and often irrational. Pericles, understood this completely, and he was able to use the power of analogy to defeat it.

I was talking to a friend who wanted to try making it as a musician after graduating from college. He was afraid, he said. Having been there and wrecked with that same consuming anxiety, we looked at it. Have you ever, ever heard of someone starving to death in California? Or dying of exposure? Or some college graduate remarking 60 years later that their entire life was ruined by the year they took off, intending to get serious after? When he moved out of his college apartment and headed home to drop some of his stuff off, how long was he planning to hang out and relax before he got serious about a job? A month? Two, or three? So what's 10 more? People get sick or distracted or go on benders for that long.

The point is that with blurred vision and a black light, the straw man looks imposing and overwhelming. At a closer glance and a few questions it collapses and falls upon itself. As a man - as someone different - that is your job. You're to break down, piece by piece, the things that have control of you.

Ultimately, the difference between recklessness and controlling your disposition comes down to whether the person has systematically dismantled the cognitive processes or just ignored them. In my opinion, there's not admirable about a fearlessness or calm that comes from being oblivious or negligent. It's simply a more productive mental illness than anxiety and overthinking. The repercussions surface inevitably. It's dangerous and stupid.

The real Freedom from Perturbation comes from collapsing fear upon itself. From examining its causes and looking at them individually rather than collectively. What the Greek understood was that we often choose the ominous explanation over the simple one, to our detriment. The task, as Pericles showed, is not to ignore fear but to explain it away. Take what you're afraid of - when fear strikes you - and break it apart.

Joan of Arc: Her Story by Régine Pernoud
Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work--And Why Your Company Needs Them by Peter Shankman (good premise, the guy comes off as a bit of a tool)
The Beauty of the Beasts: Tales of Hollywood's Wild Animal Stars by Ralph Helfer (continuing my disturbing obsession)
The Voyage Memoirs of Sir Francis Drake by Sir Francis Drake (not as cool as I hoped)
Grand Strategies in War and Peace by Paul Kennedy
The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives by Plutarch (I liked Demosthenes a lot)
What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception by Scott McClellan (this book is a really good memoir of how culture and DNA ultimately dictate the choices of an organization. always have respect for someone who is able to disavow the past and say 'i don't want to be a part of this anymore')

Also, I don't care how much money these kids are making, all but like two of their sites suck. There's nothing admirable about running scammy search arbitrage sites that we'd be skeeved out if an adult was doing and then bragging about how young you are.

When I first got a job as an assistant in Hollywood, someone told me that the best thing I could do as an assistant was to make other people look good. It ended up being pretty decent advice but it was nowhere near the right wording. I certainly wouldn't have moved upwards as quickly as I have if I'd just sat there and worked on the way people thought about my boss.

What he should have said was this:

Find canvases for other people to paint on.

If you're around my age, chances are you don't know what you're talking about. Most of the people the email me end up being creepy or wildly uninformed, or both. There's one fabulous way to work that out of your system: giving an extra push to people who are already good and then learning from them as they get to work.

Or maybe you're not that and you're a bit of a prodigy. Unfortunately there is a small psychological bias known as value attribution and what is basically means is that we let context command our subjective judgments about people's value. So you're still fucked. You're either appreciated as a token 'young person' (see: Brazen Careerist writers) or you're ignored entirely because you don't have 'perspective'. The solution for that is the the same as above - pretend that you're humble while you amass an arsenal.

That brings us back to the strategy: Find and make canvases for other people to paint on.

The Roman's had a loose word for the concept: anteambulo and it meant a person who cleared the path in front of their patron. If you can do that successfully, you secure a quick and educational power position.

It's a different mindset than making other people look good, an approach that tends to imply a lot of ass kissing and ceding credit. Instead it's finding the direction someone already intended to head and help them pack, freeing them up to focus on their strengths. The canvas strategy involves actively finding outlets for other people - in fact, actually making them better rather than simply looking so.

3 Keys:

1) Find new trains of thought to hand over for them to explore. Track down angles and contradictions and analogies that they can use. Ex: I was reading the biography of ______, I think you should look at it because there may be something you can do with the imagery.

2) Find outlets, people, associations, and connections. Cross wires to create new sparks. Ex: I know _________, and I think you two should talk. Have you thought about meeting ____?

3) Find inefficiencies and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas. Ex: You don't need to do ___________ anymore, I have an idea for improving the process, let me try it so you can worry about something else.

In other words, discover opportunities to promote their creativity, find outlets and people for collaboration, and eliminate distractions that hinder their progress and focus. It is a rewarding and infinitely scalable power strategy. From what I can tell, it's one of the few that age does not limit. It's one you can do now - before you have a job, before you're hired and while you're doing something else. Maybe, like I have, you'll find that there's no reason to ever stop doing it, even once you've graduated to heading your own projects.

You don't need email me, or Tucker or Ben or anyone else you want to work for anymore to ask how you can help. The Canvas Strategy is there. If you take it, you'll realize what most people's egos prevent them from appreciating: the person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas dictates the painting.

It goes something like this:

Have you ever been listening to someone justify an idea and while they were doing it, took a look around the room and thought to yourself, how can they not see how poorly this is going? I also imagine that rarely, if ever, you've taken that same look while you were talking and felt the panic and desperation of realizing that it was all falling short.

Now what's more likely, that you've never lost a crowd or that maybe you just can't tell either?

John Boyd had a rule that whenever he was using data as support for an argument, he'd deflate the numbers to understate his case. The idea was use lower number while making a strong case; when he was challenged and fact checked, it'd always be worse when the new calculations came in. A lot of people confuse this with managing expectation, but it's a philosophically different way to think about strategy. Generally, he figured, that when people have a big stick they use it. To not use it, to keep it hidden, the mark of a different breed of person.

Here it is in a common form: You're criticizing the moves of a program that you're trying to restructure to the person responsible for making the change. The program keeps most of their information hidden because they're upside down and don't want to admit it. You're certain they're spending X and end up being wrong - it's over. You say they're spending X (on the high end of your spectrum) and end up being right - the reward is small and the risk was significant. Simply being right, you'll find, is not as rewarding as it should be. So instead, you make the case with the lowest X you can justify and cede the verification to the person you're pushing for change- the results turn the passive observer into an active participant. Since they were involved in the discovery, it's their torch to carry now.

But that's hard. You want to use the stick when you have it. You want to go for the win now because you want the credit, you want to be right, you don't want another participant - you don't like pretense when you have a sure thing. But think of it like being leveraged in a market position, it's great until you blow up. And it only takes one time.

Using conservative inputs gives way to conservative outputs. A good operating plan leaves as many options on the table as possible. Conservative outputs give you space to move. Assumptions about data can be thought about the same way. Restraint is the mark of good strategy, even when you're being aggressive. Round down your numbers, tone your bio, leave the hyperbole to someone else. Keep the stick hidden and think about the next move.

Spin : How to Turn the Power of the Press to Your Advantage by Michael Sitrick (good, surprisingly relevant considering it was written almost 10 years ago)
Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law by Martha C. Nussbaum (sort of just flipping through it at this point)
Spin-Free Economics by Nariman Behravesh (I was kind of hoping this would be an economics primer but really it's mostly just a collection of the commonly held beliefs of modern economists)
Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams (very interesting guy - it's becoming much more common that I'm disappointing in the actual writing of the book. this was a good example)
Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship by Scott Donaldson (flipping through for research purposes. Hemingway destroyed Fitzgerald in one bold move)
Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr (I read a couple others and big chunk of this one. Everybody kept saying he was super ruthless and JFK's enforcer but I didn't find one interesting example, not ONE)

-Klosterman's review of Chinese Democracy is actually really good, I was going the buy it on Amazon after but of course couldn't because GNR did one of those obnoxious exclusive deals and there was no way I was driving to Best Buy
-Denis from Wikinomics responded to me calling him an asshole. He seems like a smart guy and as always, the book is fantastic.
-Somebody stole from Daniel at Cracked, who is a cool guy. He also managed to find and move into the single worst neighborhood in Los Angeles for almost no reason.
-Dickersonian questions are something I'd like to start using

Add San Francisco, New York, D.C, Las Vegas and Shreveport to the cities I've run in over the last few months. Add it to a foot and a half of sidewalk 50 unprotected feet above the intersection of the 110 and 101 freeways, and holes on the back of my heels so big that my socks were healing into my skin and rain, and 2 in the morning and most of the neighborhood between downtown Los Angeles and Beverly Hills - Koreatown, Hancock Park, Los Feliz, the Hollywood Hills, the barrio, below Crenshaw and Venice.

It's what people with energy do. Before you know it you've racked up a history that you never intended to make because every time you came to a choice between more effort and more of the same, you chose the former.

is that they never let reality get in the way of a good post.

-Here's Guy Kawasaki falling prey to a textbook case of the selection bias and using a non-representative sample.

-Here's one of the writers at Wikinomics bragging about Starbucks' successful social media strategy a few days after they reported earnings were down by 97% PERCENT and its shares lost two thirds of their value almost instantly.

-Here's Hugh MacLeod (who this aside is wonderful) self-referencing the "blue monster" for the 400th time, apparently unaware that Microsoft isn't just culturally irrelevant but actively not "changing the world."

-Here's Steve Rubel misunderstanding incentives that some crappy new Mahalo program creates. (Hint: Rewards for searching translate into more worthless searches by people trying to get prizes)

-Here's Michael Arrington (who is the worst) not noticing an incredibly obvious flaw in a textbook rental startup, letting an outlier skew the results by adding TMZ's revenue to an acquisition it wasn't a part of, and finally, projecting a yearly revenue estimate based off 3 weeks of data from an unofficial source in the middle of a financial crisis less than a month after the product launched.

To be fair, it's not really blogs fault so much as it's a product of low-level thinking. Scientists and psychologists do their research in these fields for a reason - to help us think clearer and more accurately. Breathlessly chasing the first lead you find without constantly checking it against the world around you is a dangerous way and unproductive way to think.

If we can deduce anything from the blogs above, it also makes you 1) Sound like an idiot 2) Act like an asshole 3) Always get it wrong

Update: Wikinomics responds - Dealing with backlash in the blogosphere: a personal experience

When I think about my criticism of other people, I'm disappointed to see how much of it could be more honestly laid bare as "be more like me." Or when I sit down to lay out a plan of action for someone, how conveniently the course aligns with my natural disposition. If I notice a flaw somewhere, I'm starting to think, and it happens to correspond with one of my own strengths maybe I ought to relinquish claims to judgment.

It's not pleasant to root out rationalization and subjectivity. You rob yourself of the right to indignation, an intoxicating position. Every time I dig around, I watch as the boxes I've trapped people in just disappear along with my superiority. The reality is that the smear of low level mediocrity never shines brighter than on a person unknowingly reacting to something inside them. In fact, the truly impressive part of Gladwell's New Yorker piece on artists is not his thesis but the fact that it has nothing to do with him. He transcends his own place in the discussion.

So the bold move when you encounter hypocrites may be ignoring the desire to dismiss them. The real question: would you really want to listen to someone whose moral philosophy was just as easily done as it was said?

In the last few weeks I read biographies or memoirs of: Fidel Castro, Toussaint Louverture, PT Barnum, Martin Luther, Langston Hughes, Arnold Rothstein, Wyatt Earp , George Washington, Seneca, Sammy Davis Jr, Jesus, Saul Alinsky, Richard Feynman, the Stoics, Da Vinci, Samuel Bronfman, Cato the Younger, Olaudah Equiano, and Joe Biden.

Those are just the ones I can remember. For most, I used two or three different books. I do know that I have to buy more bookshelves because I've resorted to piling them on the floor and in the trunk of my car. If anyone can think of people like these, iconic figures that might have a side to them that has gone unnoticed, it'd be amazing if you could email me your ideas.

-Here's a list of 30 books you're supposed to read before you're thirty if you plan to be plain, uninspired and be an English teacher at a local junior college.

-Or here's some advice on making money from writing by someone who isn't actually a writer or happen to know anyone who is one.

-This is a chubby weirdo who thinks you have to confront your boss to get vacation.

-Lastly, we have a 'brand manager' who can casually reference the 2 truths, 1 lie icebreaker along with some logical fallacies, unnecessary acronyms and plenty of Arbitrary Capitalization of ordinary Phrases For Emphasis.

If you're a piddly fucking loser who spends their time reading employee handbooks and going to mixers then that's a way to think about life. If at any time during your day or education the concepts of Good Boss, Bad Boss, social media, Gen Y, Gen X, Seven Highly Effective Habits, 'Bulletproofing', Blogging, liveblogging are in anyway significant, you've saddled yourself with the wrong set of priorities. God forbid, if you actually use those words in seriousness, I don't it's possible to truly quantify how far you've removed yourself from the sphere in which people get things done.

The funny thing is that the people who spend time obsessing over these workplace laws are always the absolute worst at following the rules that matter: meeting deadlines, delivering expectations, communicating what they want, being informed, common courtesy. You know, the stuff that makes society work.

So here's what you do when you read things like that: keep your head down and keep thinking. The problems that they pretend to have figured out are far more complex than the 23 year old working at a non-profit in Minnesota will ever be able to articulate via bulletpoints. In almost all cases, the people who put together tip sheets and career advice give it away for one reason - they couldn't manage to make use of it themselves. Let them have the low-hanging fruit they pass off as profound observation and dedicate yourself to chipping away at the actual reality in front of you. You know, turning words into works.

The final irony: the world is indeed a profoundly different place than it was a generation ago, the Brazen Careerist writers though, they are the same small-minded, pontificating idiots that've plagued every recorded age. You don't have to let your ego pull you down that hole. You can pass up attention, the temptation to boil big things down to headlines and giving yourself comically pompous titles and experiences you've yet to earn. It just takes discipline and some goddamn perspective.

Note: I keep reading that Penelope Trunk and Brazen Careerist need venture funding, so if you have a few dollars laying around, maybe they'll make give you an honorary chair in the field of Coachology.