Category: Uncategorized

A couple of years ago I decided to rid myself of Facebook friends who I either no longer communicated with on a regular basis (one off friend requests, high school friends I know longer spoke to, other random acquaintances, etc) or who posted obnoxious politically-heavy posts. I decided to do it on a whim, hoping to get myself off social media. I even deleted my account from time-to-time to get myself off, but found there is too much value in being connected with some people.

Since widdling my “friends” from around 380 down to a count of 60 I have slowly been building my connections back. I checked today and have 97.

My new connections have to fit one of three criteria:
1. I am genuinely friends and care about their day-to-day life.
2. They are thinkers/movers and I’d be missing out by not following them and hearing their thoughts/seeing their posts.
3. The person has had, can or will have an impact on my life.

If a “friend” no longer fits one of those three categories, I delete them. Sometimes it’s pre-mature and I do regret it, but I’ve consistently found very few people even notice you’re no longer friends, and if they do notice and say something to me, then I know they care enough that we should be friends.

There is a lot to be said about social media and the value you can get from it, especially through promoting your product or brand, but the current way I have it set up is an awesome blend of the people I truly care about and thought leaders I need to hear. Logging into Facebook no longer brings me anxiety or FOMO (fear of missing out) by comparing myself to others but a refreshing look into the lives of people I have a connection with.

If we’re friends on Facebook you fit into one of those three categories and have an impact on my life in some form or another.

The shift from career man, 50 years as “loyal” employee to one company, is upon us. In the past few months FEE.org has had posts on Your Career is an Enterprise and You Are a Tech Startup. The idea is YOU are in control of your future. The key is being a value creator for your community.

I am currently on that path. Today I wrote an email to an accounting company that uses Xero exclusively looking to create value for them– for free. It only takes an hour of my time but can have a huge impact on them in cost savings.

This is only the beginning. For too long I got sucked into the employee mentality. Spending all my time doing the job, creating value for my employer, and then kicking off my shoes after a long day’s work. Now I’m paying for it and need to play catch-up.

I am a value creator. I think outside the box. My daily reading includes blockchain progress and bitcoin payments. Today I purchased coffee with a bitcoin debit card. It’s time to put my learning, and my abilities to create value, into myself, into You, Inc.

We’ll see where the journey takes me, but I assume it’ll leave me happier than my employee mindset.

I’ve migrated my blog posts from modernheretics.com to philipggross.com.

I am going to try and blog post daily from here on out.

Life has been a bit of a struggle lately. Lots of work, lots of life, things changing quickly all around.

When I started my journey to a more refined, happier me, I had an open mind and a tackle-the-world mentality. Through the thick of things I lost my way, and so too my open mindedness. But, I am emerging from the struggle of daily life and getting back to what makes me happy.

Today I went for a run, did pushups, ate good meals, left the traditional office setting to work from a coffeeshop and wrote this blog post. These are all things that make me come alive. Without these things, I become stuck in daily life. It’s tough, but I have to constantly remind myself to step back and do things that drive my excellence.

Here’s to getting back at it. Back to blogging. Back to personal/professional development. Back to happyness (yes, it’s misspelled). Back to being the person I want to be.

For the most part I believe education, in the general sense of grade school, high school, college and beyond, is overrated and not worth the investment. However, I don’t believe I would have that opinion without myself going through the steps and attending George Mason University for college.

At the time of my decision I had no idea where I was going. No idea how to communicate with the ideas in my head. I was in need of a tool to translate the thoughts in my head into actualities. That tool ended up being Austrian Economics. It took what I had been thinking and created concrete examples of how to apply my thought process.

I was following the sheep. I was told by everyone (friends, family, guidance counselors, society, etc) that the next stop after high school is college, and that’s what I did. My only requirement was to get out of New England because that’s where I was born and raised and felt I needed a change. My parents then gave me a budget and I went to find schools. I ended up applying, and getting accepted, to three: University of Louisville, Temple University, and George Mason University. None of these were decisions based on some vision. They were schools within the budget, that I knew a bit about because of sports, and were in cities outside of New England.

Choosing Economics as a major was also happenstance. I had taken a couple basic courses in Economics in high school, which looking back on it, were nothing close to the Austrian education I received, but to me it seemed interesting and it sounded more fun than a business major like finance, accounting or marketing.

My first class of micro-economics, with Dr. Thomas Rustici, was the on switch. My brain started firing on all cylinders. The dots, nodes, in my brain were connecting at lightning speed. Comparative advantage, principle-agent, supply and demand, water-diamond paradox, broken glass fallacy, opportunity cost and so-on and so-forth took over my mind. These are the lessons that taught me how to think and something I use now on a daily basis in work, life and everything I do. It gave me the lens to see the world.

There are possible paths I could’ve taken to lead me to where I am today but I have no regrets accumulating student loans in the pursuit of shaping my mind.  I could’ve tried to be a self-taught Austrian Economic thinker. I could’ve found books by Menger, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Coase, Kirzner on my own, but probably not in the timely manner that I did stumbling into college. Although I’d encourage others to have an open-mind about next steps in education, I myself am indebted to the education I received. George Mason economics was the light I needed yet didn’t know was there.

Stop living in your bubble. There are smart people out there that you need to cross paths with in order to expand yourself. Reach out. Try cold calling or cold emailing someone you have an interest in. Explain why you’re sending an email. It’s not hard. What is there to lose? They don’t respond to your email?

If you are educated in the subject or know a bit about the person, they probably won’t just blow you off. They will probably reply with an awesome response. Even if it doesn’t expand your knowledge, it still gives you some confidence in doing it again. Once it becomes comfortable it won’t matter who you’re reaching out to. It could be an acquaintance or the CEO of Apple.

Realize the only downside of not reaching out is hurting you. There really isn’t a downside. But the upsides could be tremendous. Go for it!

Adulthood isn’t easy. We all have a dream of where we will be or what we will be doing with our lives. A lot of times it’s fantasy. Something we saw in a movie but not how adulthood actually is. We want to travel. To laugh with friends. To build an empire. To hang out and drink beers. Or whatever other thing you want.

In actuality, adulthood isn’t always that fun. Even if you live a free life. Don’t have to go to the office. Can work on your own time. It’s not always fun. That’s where getting up when you’re down comes into play.

We all have failures. Some of us, probably the over-thinkers, always believe we’re failing. But the point in life, and adulthood, is to deal with the failures as best we can. Moving forward, or failing forward, is the only way to traverse the unknown maze of adulthood.

I have my failures, I have my imperfections, I don’t always accomplish what I want and I hold myself to high expectations. But I have learned a secret to adulthood that so few admit. I will fail (a lot) but I will bounce back better. When I wake up not feeling 100% I will make the most of it. When I miss a deadline and feel stress I will toss it aside and create something out of nothing.

I constantly fall down but I am prepared to get up. That mentality is something missing in the millennial generation. A lot of us have an image of where/who we will be when we’re 25, 30, 35. We set expectations which probably are too much of a dream. And when we don’t reach our lofty goals we fall flat on our face and immobilize ourselves from change.

I will continue to get knocked down, but I’ll get up again.

Value creation is key.

It doesn’t matter what job you are doing. If you are creating value for someone else you will have a job. Whether it be hating your job in a corporate office or walking pets for a living, as long as you remember your worth is in value creation, you will always be employable.

Once you have been employed for long enough you begin to realize the things that create more value. Sometimes stepping outside the box creates the most, but  you may have too many rules/social pressures keeping you in the box. The key is forgetting those cues. They don’t really exist. Whether they’re figments of your imagination or real, by stepping out of the box and creating value you are not going to become unemployed.

Too often I find myself in this trap. I am great at creating value. I take on more and more work and cut it’s processing time in half, in thirds, in some cases make the job obsolete. But I still get trapped. I cop out and think I am not in charge, I’ll let someone else make the decision. What I need to do is step up, take ownership, and see the process through from start to finish. This is easier said than done. But hopefully, by reminding myself that value creating is key, I can continue to break out of the box.

My mind functions way better when it’s free, so do all of ours. Keeping my mind free of the “gray-zone” and stepping up ownership in an outside-of-the-box approach can enable me to continue creating value while building freedoms into my life.

 

Walking down 16th street mall in downtown Denver this Monday morning I saw the face of disdain on many passing by commuters. The doom and gloom of Monday morning starkly on their faces. I couldn’t help but smile.

Days ago I was lamenting the idea of work. Out of energy, emotionally drained, fixated on the idea that I needed a change. A restful Saturday and a 10-mile hike on Sunday cleared my head and reminded me I chose this for myself and I can choose my next steps.

We are all free. Whether we believe it or not, we aren’t tied to any chains, we don’t have to feel intimated at life. Instead turn that fear into liberation. When you see the masses swimming up current put your head down, smile, and swim downstream. Life is much easier. Find what you’re passionate about and fall back into the swing of things. Do things that make you feel good.

Recently I was spending hours at work stressing about getting projects done and slowly felt my brain warp into the trapped feeling I loathed so much about a corporate job. This morning was a reminder of why I’m working at a startup. Of the promises I made myself while unemployed. That I enjoy my life and enjoy being the fish you finds his stream and swims down it instead of fighting the current.

If only we could all see the freedom we have. Even I, who has lived the free lifestyle, need to remind myself. We are free to do what we want. If the current ever gets too rough, change streams and try something new.

My mode of transportation varies by distance needed to travel and time needing to arrive. For most destinations walking and biking suffice (it helps living a mile away from my downtown office). Running is used for exercise purposes while driving is only for getting a mid-distance, like the mountains, where I’d be unable to do it on a bike and flying is for travel to other cities greater than 500 miles away.

Each of these modes of transportation have there place and I wouldn’t trade one for the other. One thing these travel methods have in common is the picture you get when doing them. Walking is slow, it gives you time to reflect, to look at architecture, to think about thoughts that have been bottled up. Running, at least for me, is the exact opposite. It’s an attempt to focus my mind and body on the task at hand with the hope that it’ll clear my mind once I finish. Biking is a way to get from point A to B faster than if I were to walk. Although this makes travel faster, it takes away from the reflective benefits of walking. It’s a means to hurry up my life. While driving, houses, people, bikers, etc. pass you by much faster. But the beauty of seeing far-off landscape is something you can’t get walking, running or biking. Flying is the macro level. There might be a few flights over interesting terrain, but even still you don’t get the detail as if you were driving, biking, or walking in that terrain.

Why does any of this matter? It’s the same breadth of scope used in macro and micro level thought. Walking is micro, running, biking and driving are progressively more macro until you arrive at flying, the most macro of them all.

I challenge everyone to find time to walk. Both figuratively and literally. Walk because it allows you to see the world you live in, not the world the media wants you to live in. You get to see the day-to-day beauty of being a person on this planet. The collaboration that happens around you on any given day. Although there are faster options in life, walking allows for a much more complete perspective of yourself.

Praxeology, the study of human action, guides my day-to-day life. When I don’t take time to walk (either around my neighborhood or mentally slowing things down), I lose my sense of humanity. Look around you and see the people who are similar to you, and those who aren’t. We’re all here because of community, now be a part of yours.