On A Gift for My Daughter

Harry Browne had a huge influence on me because he successfully achieved three of my goals: he became financially independent, he designed a life of maximum personal freedom, and he travelled the world an expatriate. I learned how to invest through listening to the archives of his radio shows and reading his book Fail Safe Investing. Another of his books— How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World— was a big influence on my decision to sell my business and leave my career behind.

Many years ago I read an article of his called A Gift for My Daughter. I revisited the article after becoming a father myself, as I have a daughter too. I found the article very thought provoking because I disagree with Harry’s outlook on parenting.

Harry Browne’s Article

In 1966, Harry Browne was divorced from is first wife and had lost custody of his daughter, who was nine years old at the time. He was writing a column that was published in various newspapers, including one in the town where his ex-wife and daughter lived. When he found out that his column was going to come out on Christmas Day of 1966, he sent a Christmas card to his daughter that said “your Christmas present will be on the editorial page of the Santa Anna Register on Christmas morning”.

In the article, Harry explained that the gift was an idea:

If I could give you just one thing, I’d want it to be a simple truth that took me many years to learn. If you learn it now, it may enrich your life in hundreds of ways. And it may prevent you from facing many problems that have hurt people who have never learned it. The truth is simply this: No one owes you anything.

He goes on to explain the significance of this statement as he sees it:

When people do things for you, it’s because they want to — because you, in some way, give them something meaningful that makes them want to please you, not because anyone owes you anything. No one has to like you. If your friends want to be with you, it’s not out of duty. Find out what makes others happy so they’ll want to be near you.

He describes how he uses this knowledge in his own life:

A great burden was lifted from my shoulders the day I realized that no one owes me anything. For so long as I’d thought there were things I was entitled to, I’d been wearing myself out — physically and emotionally — trying to collect them. No one owes me moral conduct, respect, friendship, love, courtesy, or intelligence. And once I recognized that, all my relationships became far more satisfying. I’ve focused on being with people who want to do the things I want them to do. That understanding has served me well with friends, business associates, lovers, sales prospects, and strangers. It constantly reminds me that I can get what I want only if I can enter the other person’s world. I must try to understand how he thinks, what he believes to be important, what he wants. Only then can I appeal to someone in ways that will bring me what I want.

Unchosen Obligations

I appreciate Harry Browne’s emphasis on finding win-win relationships with other people. He wanted his daughter to know that it's better to find positive ways to incentivise people to give you what you want, rather than rely on their sense of guilt or obligation. As a practical matter, relationships are more fulfilling when based on positive incentives than on obligation. This approach informed Harry Browne's whole outlook on life. In How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, he applies the idea of finding win-win solutions to problems in business and personal relationships.

Underlying the idea that people don't owe you anything is the philosophical principle that unchosen positive obligations are invalid. Nobody owes you anything, and you don't owe anyone else anything, unless you make a deal and agree some kind of debt or obligation.

I agree with the approach of finding win-win solutions and not relying on guilt about owing you something. When it comes to adult relationships, nobody owes you love, or attention, or interest, or respect, or anything else. You have to earn these things in a positive, win-win way with other people.

But A Gift for My Daughter is a strange article because it shows up one of Harry Browne's blind spots regarding obligations. As something that he wrote for his daughter, it is strange that he chose to emphasise that nobody owes anyone anything.

When it comes to consenting adults who have no previous history with each other, it’s true that nobody owes you anything. If you are romantically interested in someone, they don't owe you romantic interest back. If you want to do business with someone, they don't owe it to you to do business with you. If you want people to read your work, they don't owe you their attention. But that isn’t true of all relationships.

Chosen Obligations

Although there are no unchosen positive obligations, there are chosen positive obligations. People can owe each other things. You can have positive obligations to other people, if you choose to take on obligations through your actions. For example, if someone borrows money from you, then rightfully they do owe you something: money. If that person glibly stated that “nobody owes you anything”, that would be annoying. You'd be justified in saying “hey, you borrowed $500 from me and I want it back. You do owe that to me”.

I appreciate the Harry Browne wanted to emphasize that there's no way of forcing other people to feel like they owe you. But it is possible for people to owe each other if they do something to incur a debt or an obligation through their own actions. The most important obligation you can have in life is that which comes from the act of having a child. This is what Harry missed.

Imagine the following scenario: You are on a boat out at sea, standing on deck with a friend. Your friend is leaning over the side of the boat, looking at something in the water. Now imagine you give him a push- enough to knock him into the water. Your friend yells for help. Obviously it would be immoral for you to yell back down, “I just want to let you know that nobody owes you anything in this life”, and then sail off.

If you push your friend into the ocean, then it's on you to save him. You must do whatever you have to do to save this person from their fate, which would be to drown. You must throw him life jacket, or launch a dinghy, or throw down a rope, or jump in yourself. You must get him out of the water. And if you fail to save him and he were to drown, it would be on you because you pushed him in.

We all understand intuitively that if you push someone off your boat, then through your action you have put that person in danger and it's on you to get them out of danger.  If you don't save them and they drown, then that's murder. In these circumstances, the idea that “nobody owes you anything” is not true.

So there are circumstances in which you legitimately owe somebody something, even if you've never made a contract. The story of your friend on the boat is an example where there was no contract about who's going to save who from the ocean. But by pushing your friend in, you have put them in danger. It’s your fault and you have to fix it because you're the cause of the danger. You are responsible for that person's safety now that you've pushed them into the water.

The same logic applies to parenting. When you have a child, you bring someone into a situation of helplessness. By creating a new life you have put a child into a situation of mortal danger who never asked to be put in that position. You put them there as the parents, so it's your responsibility to get them out of that danger. You have to look after your children and give them everything they need to become fully independent, healthy adults with all of the faculties that they need to survive in the world and live their own life. That responsibility comes because you're the one who put them in that situation.

Parents do owe their children a huge amount. That's why it bothers me that Harry wrote this article to his daughter.

The Damage Of Divorce

The backstory to Harry writing this letter is that he went through a very acrimonious divorce with his first wife and had lost custody of his daughter. As far as I understand, Harry initiated the divorce and part of the settlement was that he did not have visitation rights.

Divorce is extremely detrimental to children. Statistically, parents divorcing is a risk factor for a whole range of destructive and self-destructive behaviours in children, such as depression, drug abuse, and self harm. It is also linked to poorer health outcomes in later life. That doesn't mean that it's inevitably going to lead to certain outcomes. You are not fated to a particular life from your childhood, but you do face additional, unnecessary challenges if your parents divorce.

Unless there is violence or physical danger, no child wants their parents to break up the family. My parents split up when I was very young. The break up of my family was one of the worst events of my life. Given this context, Harry’s letter to his daughter seems negligent to the point of cruelty. Parents owe their children a huge amount. Harry was not there for his daughter. He was not providing her with protection or a positive role model as a father.

From the child's perspective, if a parent is willing to give up custody to get a divorce (as Harry did) then this sends a terrible message to the child. Through his actions, Harry effectively told his daughter that his dislike for his wife was so strong that he was willing to give up seeing his daughter in order to get away from his wife. Therefore, his relationship with his daughter was less important to him than getting away. To add insult to injury, by leaving he left his daughter in the care of the same person that he judged so negatively. He wasn’t willing to suffer his wife, but he was willing to let his daughter do so alone. That's a tough message for a child.

Before he presumed to pass on any life lessons to his daughter in a public article, I think Harry could have communicated a lot more humility under the circumstances. He could have apologised for the mess of the acrimonious divorce, taken responsibility for his part in it (especially since he initiated it) and emphasised to his daughter that as an innocent child, she was entirely blameless in the break-up of her family. Without that kind of preface, any advice that he might see fit to offer would have fallen on deaf ears, if I were his daughter.

The Problem with Personal Liberation Movements

Harry was not alone in having a blind spot about his responsibilities as a parent. The problem with his approach goes to the heart of the postwar personal liberation movement, which Harry was a part of. A core weakness of theories of personal liberation since the second world war has been to view children as a barrier to liberation.

When it comes to consenting adults, removing barriers to personal freedom is ethically neutral. I accept the argument that people should be able to live lives of their own choosing and should not necessarily be constrained by traditions handed down to them. The important distinction is between traditions that others impose on you and responsibilities that you incur through your actions.

If you pursue personal liberation without a clear understanding of the obligations that you incur through your actions, then you can end up seeking liberation from the responsibilities of parenting. This is to imagine that the reduction of freedom that comes with parenting is somehow imposed on you (by tradition or someone else) and ignore the fact that it is a result of your own actions.

Now that I have a daughter, I can't just do whatever I want in life. I have to make choices in her interest. For example, I would like to continue our life of perpetual travel, but our daughter benefits from more stability, so we’ve chosen to limit our travel.

I appreciate Harry's message that nobody owes you anything when applied to consenting adults. But it is possible for people to owe you something through their actions, and parents certainly owe their children. In this context, Harry’s gift—coming from a father who was unable to see his daughter because of an acrimonious divorce that he instigated—must have been a bitter pill.

What I Would Write To My Daughter

If I wanted to give my own daughter a message that was a “gift” in the way that Harry did, I would write this:

I just want you to know from me, as your father, that you don't owe me anything. You never asked to be born into our family. When you grow up, I hope you will choose to spend time with me and share things with me about your life, your thoughts, and your dreams. But you don't owe me anything. We gave you life, but you are free. Your life is your own. It's yours to do with as you see fit.

You will encounter many people who try to convince you that you owe them something. People are going to try and convince you that you owe them something just because you were born in this country. They are going to put all sorts of labels on you, like being a citizen. They will expect you to take part in all sorts of rituals to do with the nation and politics. You'll have to navigate all those weird obligations that people try and put on you in your own way, and decide what is the best course of action for you. But I want you to know that you don't owe those people anything either. You're an individual. You are born morally free of any obligations. The only things that you owe are the obligations that you choose to take on through your own actions and choices.

Comparative Advantage Is Mind-Blowing

If you start a business, and if you are lucky, at some point someone will sit you down and tell you the most important lesson you have to learn. You must learn how to specialise. This means learning both how to focus on those tasks where you add most value, and how to delegate everything else. Stop trying to do everything.

Within the business, you must extract yourself from the day to day operations and focus on your responsibilities as the business owner. Within the market, you must stop competing in every way and focus on where you can add most value. This is an important piece of advice.

There is a concept from economics called comparative advantage that almost everyone thinks they understand, but most people misunderstand. When I studied economics, I thought I understood comparative advantage as soon as I learned about it, yet it took me years to realise just how amazing and significant its implications are.

Comparative advantage is the explanation of why trade is beneficial to both sides in any voluntary exchange. In the example of entrepreneurship, this concept explains why you must delegate or outsource tasks to other people effectively. You must trade with other people by purchasing their services for money, instead of you trying to be self-sufficient and doing everything yourself.

This theory proves logically why trade is always beneficial to both sides. But that is not all that it proves. It also shows why we all fundamentally rely on trading with each other for all the benefits of civilisation and economic development.

Most People Misunderstand Comparative Advantage

Most people who think they understand comparative advantage are mistaken. Most people think it means we should all find something that we can be the best at, specialise in that activity, and then trade with others who are the best in their respective fields. I'm the best at doing one thing and you are the best at doing another thing, so I should specialise in what I'm the best at and you should specialise in what you are the best at, and then we trade. That way, we both produce more, and through trade we both benefit more. So that's why trade is good.

In fact, that is not why trade works. That is not comparative advantage, it is absolute advantage, which is far less remarkable.

Comparative advantage is an amazing process whereby even if one person is the best at everything, it still makes sense to trade. Even if a Superman existed— someone who was the most skilled, most intelligent, and most physically adept at every single activity— he would still be better off if he specialised and traded with others. It would also benefit others to trade with him, even though none of them would not be as good as him at any activity.

This is counterintuitive: trade is beneficial even if you're not the best at anything and even if you are the best at everything.

Even Superman Benefits From Trade

Imagine that Superman and I get washed up on a desert island together. Superman is better at everything than me. Whereas it takes me four hours to gather some fruit, it only take Superman one hour. Whereas it takes me three hours to catch a fish, Superman can catch one in two hours.

So he's better at everything than me— he accomplishes any task faster than I can. But he will still be better off if he trades with me. If he specialises in the activity that he is comparatively much better at and I specialise in the activity that I’m least extremely bad at, compared to him.

In this example, Superman would benefit by relying on me to get his fish, in return for giving me some fruit. He could gather two portions of fruit and exchange one of them for a fish. I could gather two fish and swap one of them for some fruit. In this way, Superman would only need two hours for a meal of fruit and fish, instead of the three hours that he would have worked if he was self-sufficient. I would only need to work six hours for a meal, instead of the seven hours that I would have to work if I were self-sufficient.

So we both benefit from trading with each other compared to how we would have fared if we tried to do everything on our own. Superman benefits even though he can do everything better than me. I benefit from trading with Superman, even though I'm not as good as him at doing anything in particular.

Profound Implications

As an entrepreneur, this is why you have to specialise in activities where you add most value, and stop doing all the other things in your business that aren't the most important value-adding tasks.

As the owner of a small business, you can probably do many of the tasks in your business better than anyone else. You know your business better than anyone and you have the most experience of it, so you probably know how to do most things better than your employees or suppliers.

You could probably outperform most individual employees in completing a wide range of their tasks. When you notice that something is taking too long, the temptation is to step in and do it yourself, with the idea that “if you want something done properly you have to do it yourself”.

But it is madness for you to do such work yourself, because the overall outcome is so much better when you specialise on what you add most value doing. That way, you get to benefit of comparative advantage through the division of labour, with other people working together with you, focusing on the things that they are comparatively less bad at.

A profound implication of comparative advantage is that you don’t have to be the best at anything in order to make a positive contribution to a business, to society as a whole, and thereby to benefit yourself. You don't have to be the very best at anything, you just have to find ways that you can contribute by working together with others and focussing on what you are relatively good at.

Trade Is Indisputably Good

The concept of comparative advantage is logically indisputable. Its premises (e.g. we each have different skill levels) are so basic as to be self-evidently true. Once you understand the conclusion following from these premises, you realise that it must necessarily be true.

The insight has beautiful implications, because it shows that trade between individuals is not a war where the strong are just going to overpower and exploit the weak. The fact is that even the strong need the weak. Even those who are more skilled in every imaginable field are poorer when they try to be self-sufficient, compared to the benefits they gain by cooperating in trade with others.

We all need each other. We all benefit from trading and cooperating with each other. Trade is indisputably good, as a matter of basic logic.

Why We Love Each Other

Comparative advantage is the best explanation for why we love our fellow humans. Many philosophers have argued that humans are inherently social. They say that humans like each other, and therefore they co-operate and trade.

Only recently in human history have we come to understand that the truth is the other way around. We are better off together, and that is why we come to have affectionate feelings towards our fellow humans. Unfortunately, not all of us have yet come to understand that trade is positive, benign, and mutually beneficial.

Even grouches can come to appreciate their fellow humans, when they understand that they benefit themselves from voluntary exchange. Even a misanthrope can learn to be nice, interacting positively, and trade with others, because it is in his self interest.

I find the concept of comparative advantage mind-blowing, when I think through the implications. Everyone benefits from peaceful exchange, even those who are not the best that anything. We love each other because we are better off co-operating.

A Critique of Jordan Peterson's Parenting Principles

One of the chapters in Jordan Peterson’s popular book “12 Rules For Life” relates to parenting. The chapter is called, “Don't Let Your Children Do Anything That Would Make You Dislike Them”. His main argument is that you mustn't be afraid to discipline your kids, even though they won't like it. As he puts it:

Parents who refuse to adopt the responsibility for disciplining their children think they can just opt out of the conflict necessary for proper child-rearing. They avoid being the bad guy (in the short term). But they do not at all rescue or protect their children from fear and pain. Quite the contrary: the judgmental and uncaring broader social world will mete out conflict and punishment far greater than that which would have been delivered by an awake parent. You can discipline your children, or you can turn that responsibility over to the harsh, uncaring judgmental world—and the motivation for the latter decision should never be confused with love.

Thus according to Peterson, if you fail to discipline your children, they will have a bad life because other people will punish them. How does his idea of discipline translate into parenting practice? 

Peterson recommends a series of principles for parents which sound reasonable and measured. However, there is a big difference between the title of each principle and how Peterson interprets them in terms of actions as a parent. As I will demonstrate, the way that Peterson interprets his principles does not at all follow from the principles themselves.

Use of Force

Peterson advocates using the least force necessary to enforce parental rules. This sounds reasonable. For example, if you've got a rule which is “don't hit or bites other kids”, then you should use the least force necessary to enforce that rule. That would clearly imply that as an adult, you should never hit your children because, if your child is hitting another child, the least force necessary to stop that from happening is certainly not hitting your child, or smacking, or anything like that. You can simply restrain your child. That is the least force necessary.

But that's not what Peterson thinks the least force necessary means. Peterson is a fan of physical punishment; he thinks it is important and that parents shouldn't shy away from doing it. He says that you should use the least amount of physical punishment which he thinks is necessary. However, he explicitly sanctions using physical violence against children. His arguments for this are frankly pathetic, especially coming from somebody who is a research psychologist who ought to know the literature on this subject, but who seems to have wilfully ignored it. For example, Peterson says, 

For the child who is pushing the limits in a spectacularly inspired way, a swat across the backside can indicate requisite seriousness on the part of a responsible adult. There are some situations in which even that will not suffice, partly because some children are very determined, exploratory, and tough, or because the offending behaviour is truly severe.

Another example:

we should note that some misbegotten actions must be brought to a halt both effectively and immediately, not least so that something worse doesn’t happen. What’s the proper punishment for someone who will not stop poking a fork into an electrical socket? Or who runs away laughing in a crowded supermarket parking lot? The answer is simple: whatever will stop it fastest, within reason

Rather than be explicit in this second statement, Peterson leaves the reader to draw his conclusion for him, which is that parents must use corporal punishment on children. 

Yet his conclusion does not follow from his premises. His idea is to use the least force necessary, which is never spanking. In this example of stopping a child from running away in a parking lot, the least force necessary would be to restrain the child by the arm and stop them from running away. The least force necessary would not be to hit the child. In the example of stopping a child from sticking a fork in an electrical socket, the least force necessary would be to remove the fork from the child. Of course, you could also put childproof coverings on your electrical sockets.

One wonders what the parents are doing in his examples that allow such dangers to develop. What is going on beforehand that leads to a situation in which a child is repeatedly sticking a fork in an electrical socket? Where are the parents? Why does the child still have the fork? Why is it happening repeatedly? In order to bolster his case for parental violence, Peterson chooses dramatic situations of children acting out with no reference to parental responsibility in the lead-up to the problem. He does this because it is impossible to justify parental violence, so he must act as if parents have no role in creating the problem. Poor examples aside, the point is that Peterson is inconsistent with his own principle because at least force necessary is not corporal punishment.

The False Dichotomy

Peterson argues that the choice parents face is between either using physical punishment, or overlooking misbehaviour and leaving your child to their own devices. That's what he thinks the two options are for parents. On this view, either you neglectfully leave your child to run wild and stick forks in electrical sockets, or you discipline your child by physical punishment. This is a false dichotomy. 

Anyone can find non-violent alternative approaches to discipline within a few minutes of searching on the internet. I recommend Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) by Thomas Gordon and RIE, which is best expressed in the podcasts and books by Janet Lansbury. Peterson doesn’t provide a critique of these approaches, he simply ignores them. 

Peterson doesn’t address any of the arguments of academics or parenting specialists who advocate non-violent parenting, just as he doesn’t address any of the evidence on the harm of spanking. His book is written as if none of those arguments exist. Instead, he repeatedly resorts to rhetorical tricks to bolster his argument.  He says “it is wilfully naive to think that you don't need to use physical violence on kids” and he calls it “wrong. Too simple.” These rhetorical techniques are ways of trying to dominate the reader into agreement through fear. When Peterson confidently asserts that his opponents are the naive ones, many will believe him. Who wants to think of themselves as wilfully naive?

The reality is that Peterson himself is the wilfully naive to advocate physical violence in light of the massive amount of evidence on the harm of spanking. As Dr Noam Spencer explained, summarising 9 peer-reviewed meta-studies on the effects of spanking:

The empirical case against spanking is strong, and made stronger by the absence of any empirical case in support of spanking. There is not one well designed study I have seen that links spanking to long term positive outcome.

Spencer summarised the current state of research in the title of his summary article: “The Spanking Debate Is Over”. The empirical studies demonstrate clearly that spanking leads to negative outcomes including lack of impulse control, aggression, depression poor performance in school and worse health outcomes. 

Jordan Peterson is a psychology professor, he must be aware of these studies. He doesn't bother to refute them in this chapter or say anything about them. He just completely ignores them. This is either wilful ignorance or plain deceit by a psychology professor. Both are inexcusable.

Parenting As a Pair

Although there is much to criticise about Peterson’s advocacy of aggression against children, I agree with him about his principle that “parents should come in pairs”. Peterson emphasizes the fact that parenting is very stressful and that if you do it alone then you're more likely to lose your temper on your kids. He advocates empathy towards single parents, especially those who are single parents owing to circumstances out their own control. However, his point is that parenting is better when you do it in pairs. 

Peterson doesn’t go into detail about the evidence that supports this principle, but there is a wealth of empirical studies that show that children simply do much better in families that stay together. Long term statistical studies comparing the wellbeing of children raised in families that stay together versus children whose parents split up, show a clear benefit for children of having two parents.

Therefore, if you want to have kids you should stay together because it is important for your kids' wellbeing. I don't have any argument with that part of this chapter except to say that it's interesting that Peterson didn't focus on this more. It is a well-established finding that parents who break up have a detrimental effect on their child’s development, so if Peterson’s aim is to improve the wellbeing of children, why does he deal with this topic so superficially and yet focus so much on sanctioning the hitting of children? As we’ve already seen, all the empirical studies show that corporal punishment is detrimental to kids, so Peterson’s focus is doubly strange. 

He merely mentions that parents should come in pairs, but I think this should have been his main argument. It is the only argument that he makes about parenting that is clearly backed by the evidence.

Understanding Your Psychology As A Parent

Peterson argues that parents should “understand their capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful”.

When I first read this principle, I thought it was an injunction to self knowledge. I thought that Peterson was going to argue that if you want to have kids, you've got to be aware of your own dark side and you have to be conscious of it. As a parent, you will be in a position of enormous responsibility. You must be aware of your capacity for aggression and you must control it.  You must be aware of your potential to act out, and you must not do so. You can control it. We all have the capability of acting with extreme violence. We all have the capability of assaulting others every day and yet we don’t. We can control it. That's what I thought he was going to say. But his argument is very different.

Peterson’s argument is that as a parent, you have to be aware of the fact that your kids might annoy you. Therefore, don't let your kids do anything that might annoy you because you're such an angry, vengeful person deep down that they will trigger you. In other words, Peterson thinks it is not the responsibility of the parents to stop themselves from acting out. His argument is the children must behave themselves because otherwise they're going to trigger the parents to act out. In Peterson’s mind, it is the children’s responsibility to be extremely well behaved in order not to annoy the parents because otherwise the parents will take it out on them. 

This is a bizarre inversion of responsibility by Peterson. Why is the onus on the children to be the more responsible ones? Given that the adults are supposed to have more capability of managing their emotions, Peterson has responsibility backwards. He thinks kids should be more adult than the adults! Peterson talks a lot about personal responsibility in his book, but he believes children should take responsibility for managing their parents feelings, not the other way around.

I agree with Peterson that we all have the capability of being vengeful and deceitful. Peterson’s conclusion from this that children should take responsibility for their parents feelings makes no sense. Rather, the obvious conclusion is that parents have a responsibility to control their aggression and be  vigilantly aware of their capability to act out. 

Peterson often advocates taking personal responsibility, and I agree with that aspect of his work. But taking responsibility also means taking responsibility for your feelings. Peterson is right when he states that we are all capable of being vengeful and that we all have a dark side. But that is not an excuse for putting the responsibility on your children to be more adult than you. His idea that children must behave because parents can't control their own dark side gets responsibility the wrong way around.

Behaviourism

Throughout his comments on parenting, Peterson advocates a psychological approach called behaviourism. He praises B.F. Skinner  (the most important psychologist in the behaviourist movement) for having worked out how to get the behaviour you want using techniques based around punishment and reward. Peterson’s essential argument is that parents should use punishment and rewards on children in order to train them into positive behaviours. 

Within psychology as a whole, behaviourism has a controversial reputation. There are many criticisms of the approach, ranging from ethical issues to critiques of Skinner’s original overblown claims for how effective behaviourism can be. Particularly with regard to children, there are well known negative effects of behaviourism because the approach pushes children to be extrinsically motivated. Behaviourism trains kids to merely try to please reward givers, rather than internalizing values for themselves. Alfie Kohn’s book “Punished By Rewards” provides a summary of these criticisms. It is therefore questionable that Peterson uncritically advocates Skinner as an authority for parenting ideas, as if this were uncontroversial. He doesn’t bother to offer any defence of behaviourism or acknowledgement of the criticisms. 

Behaviourism’s main application has been in training pets. Nobody has to have kids. If you're going to have them, then it's immoral to treat them as if they are pets. That is what Jordan Peterson is advocating. 

Peterson has a problem: his core message to parents is to advocate the use of physical punishments and yet none of the main theories of child development lend any support to the use of violence on children. I think this explains why he has chosen to rely on behaviourism, despite the fact that Skinner didn’t really focus on child development and behaviourism has a distinctly controversial reputation, especially with regard to children. But behaviourism can be used to justify punishments and rewards.

Peterson’s Psychology

Peterson’s descriptions of his interactions with children are quite revealing about his attitude towards them. Peterson is a psychologist who often speculates on the motivations of others, so it's reasonable to point the camera back to him and explore his attitudes and beliefs about children. Here is a telling anecdote from his book:

I remember taking my daughter to the playground once when she was about two. She was playing on the monkey bars, hanging in mid-air. A particularly provocative little monster of about the same age was standing above her on the same bar she was gripping. I watched him move towards her. Our eyes locked. He slowly and deliberately stepped on her hands, with increasing force, over and over, as he stared me down. He knew exactly what he was doing. Up yours, Daddy-O—that was his philosophy. He had already concluded that adults were contemptible, and that he could safely defy them. (Too bad, then, that he was destined to become one.) That was the hopeless future his parents had saddled him with. To his great and salutary shock, I picked him bodily off the playground structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field. No, I didn’t. I just took my daughter somewhere else. But it would have been better for him if I had.

I presume Peterson was trying to be funny in making that comment about throwing a toddler thirty feet, but there is a definite seriousness underneath his dark joke about assaulting a child. He fantasises about doing an extraordinarily vengeful act to a small boy. I don’t find that amusing.

I'm aware that Peterson didn't assault the toddler and that this was merely a fantasy. I'm also aware that it was probably supposed to be a joke, but Peterson argues that it would have been better for the boy if he had been thrown. What are we to make of that? Peterson supposedly advocates the principle of “mimimim use of force on kids”. Is his fantasy of throwing a toddler 30 feet down a field supposed to demonstrate his minimum-use-of-force thinking?

Why did Peterson let this child repeatedly step on his daughter's hands in the first place? Surely the minimum use of force would have been to remove the child’s foot as soon as Peterson saw the boy moving towards his daughter's hands on the climbing frame. If necessary, Peterson could have lifted the boy off the climbing frame altogether (the boy was only 2 years old). Perhaps there would have been as a discussion to be had with the boy’s parents, which Peterson could have had. 

Peterson was the responsible adult in the situation and he failed to act in a timely way to diffuse the conflict. He cites the situation to show how aggressive the boy was (which he was), but this situation was also an example of failure on Peterson’s part to protect his daughter and stop the boy “repeatedly” stepping on her hands.

Peterson often writes about the importance of establishing dominance. He writes openly about how he sees parenting as a battle of dominance and how important it is to immediately respond to any challenge. For example, he writes that “anger crying is often an act of dominance and should be dealt with as such”. 

He argues that since we evolved over millennia in dominance hierarchies, it is necessary to recognise the reality of such hierarchies within families. This means that when children challenge parents for dominance, parents must win the challenge. He uses phrases like “I prepared for war” when describing his approach to winning dominance over children. When describing how he made his son eat some food, he writes:

I poked him in the chest, with my free hand, in a manner calculated to annoy. He didn’t budge. I did it again. And again. And again. Not hard—but not in a manner to be ignored, either. Ten or so pokes letter, he opened his mouth, planning to emit a sound of outrage. Hah! His mistake. I deftly inserted the spoon.

It sounds to me as if Peterson enjoys asserting dominance over little kids.

Evolutionary Psychology

Peterson’s justification for his emphasis on establishing dominance is that he thinks it is important to recognise the findings of evolutionary psychology. We are products of evolution and ignoring our nature is unrealistic. The fact that we evolved in dominance hierarchies means that we can’t avoid them and should therefore assert them as parents.

Even if we accept the idea that humans necessarily live in dominance hierarchies, this only implies that parents have a leadership role to play. Children require leadership and look to their parents to provide it. But being a leader does not necessitate the use of violence or aggression to assert that role. The fact that we evolved in a dominance hierarchy isn't excuse for abusing your leadership role. It’s not an excuse for hitting your kids, and using euphemisms like spanking doesn’t excuse it either. Good leaders do not rely on violence. You do not need to hit children; to do so is an unjustifiable act of aggression. 

Peterson’s emphasis on evolutionary psychology is also highly selective. He cites it in support of his ideas about dominating children but ignores the findings of evolutionary psychology that would inform other parenting decisions. For example, there are very good  arguments for co-sleeping from evolutionary psychology. In our pre-history, babies never slept alone. It would have been incredibly dangerous to leave babies to sleep alone when we were in the hunter gatherer stage of our evolution (which was for the majority of our evolutionary development as humans). All children would have slept in the same place as their parents. But Jordan Peterson is certainly not an advocate of co-sleeping. He thinks children should be left to cry it out, and trained not to disturb their parents at night.

Peterson’s advocacy of aggressive parenting is not a result of following evolutionary psychology, rather he uses evolutionary psychology to support only those arguments he wants to make, and ignores implications that don’t support his arguments. 

Rationalising Violence Against Children

Of all the parenting issues that Peterson could have chosen to highlight as his main concern, he chose to advocate more physical discipline. His main argument on how to be a better parent is don’t hold back on corporal punishment. 

There are many problems facing children that Peterson could have chosen to focus on to improve the quality of parenting. Parents who break up their family have a lasting detrimental effect on their kids. Peterson mentions this, but only as minor topic. He totally ignores many other pressing concerns for the quality of parenting today. What about neglect? What about the huge number of kids who grow up without dads? What about the fact that school is often little more than a prison for children where they must stay for over a decade? What about the still widespread problem of child sexual abuse? What about barbaric practices such as circumcision? What about the epidemic of giving children drugs like Ritalin because they are so bored out of their minds in school that the only way to get them to conform is by giving them drugs? What about the huge amount of time that kids are stuck in daycare and the lack of time that parents spend with their kids?

Peterson didn’t tackle tackle any of these issues. He chooses to focus on making an argument for why you should immediately counter any testing of your or authority by your children with old fashioned discipline, including corporal punishment. He's chosen to focus on that because he argues a false dichotomy that as a parent you either spank your child and as a disciplinarian parent, or you leave your child to their own devices and they become dangerously antisocial.

Peterson doesn't say so explicitly, but we can infer from his arguments that he spanked his own children. He defends spanking extensively and doesn’t state anywhere that he has changed his mind or learned anything new since he was a parent himself. He is a psychology professor who discusses the topic of spanking without a single mention of the many studies that have demonstrated the harm that it does. The most charitable interpretation of this omission is that he is wilfully ignoring all of the evidence on the detrimental effects of spanking.  

Peterson’s advocacy of disciplinarian parenting are probably a post-rationalisation of his own parenting practices, and perhaps an excuse for what his own parents did to him. He probably thinks that he turned out fine, and that he has great kids, therefore everything he did was great, and therefore spanking is probably good too. In writing a long excuse for his own behaviour as a parent instead of focussing on the real problems that children face, he has done children and parents a disservice.

Conclusion

Peterson is the most intelligent and well-argued advocate of aggressive parenting that I’m aware of. Yet he makes no valid arguments for the use of aggression in parenting. He can’t, because there are no good arguments for using aggression on children.

To make his defence of corporal punishment he had to ignore all the research literature on the bad effects of spanking. He had to rely on a controversial and outdated school of thought in psychology (behaviourism) as the only authority he could appeal to in trying to justify his aggressive style of dominance assertion against children. He had to ignore the entire field of child psychology, none of which supports spanking or aggressive parenting. He had to cherry-pick ideas from evolutionary psychology that seem to support aggression, whilst ignoring evolutionary psychology when it leads to promotion of practices such as co-sleeping. His arguments are so weak that he resorts to rhetorical techniques like asserting that anyone who disagrees with him is wrong and holds views that are “too simple”.

Peterson’s chapter on parenting is called “Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them”. But that that is a mealy-mouthed way of stating his views. He should heed his own advice and take responsibility for his views, which means not using the passive tense. His chapter should be titled “Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That You Dislike Them Doing”, because that's what he is really saying. When you put it like that, it amounts to merely saying “Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That You Don't Want Them To”, which is neither deep nor enlightened. It is merely a sophisticated excuse for indefensible aggression against children.

Let Go Of Your Baggage

Without all this stuff to distract you, you are forced to search a little deeper to find out what the fuck it is you want to do with your life. Sometimes that leaves you staring into an abyss. Your shit isn’t going to fill the abyss, it will merely obscure it.

Chris Thomas

Physical Baggage Is Emotional Baggage

In 2015 I sold almost all my possessions to pursue a travel lifestyle. Getting rid of all my stuff got harder, the closer I got to my goal. It started to become less about practical matters and more about the emotional side of my possessions. I left the most difficult things until last.

Extreme decluttering forced me to clarify for myself what my possessions mean to me. I kept things because of psychological needs, not just practical ones. If you want to declutter, pretty soon you get to the point where you're pushing up against emotional baggage.

I hope that my experience with letting go will inspire you to reflect on your relationship to your stuff, so that you can get rid of any emotional baggage that is holding you back from achieving more freedom.

Don't Let Your Stuff Own You

A long time ago I bought some skiwear. I used it a couple of times and enjoyed skiing. But skiing is very expensive, relative to other kinds of holiday that I enjoy, so other trips almost always took priority over skiing. Then I got together with Hannah, who doesn’t enjoy skiing, so there was even less incentive for me to ski.

That skiwear took up space in my wardrobe for years, unused. Whenever I saw it, I found myself thinking, “I should go skiing again.” I wanted to “get value” out of my past purchase of ski stuff. I had spent a lot of money on it, and I had a nagging feeling of guilt about not using it enough. Owning the skiwear made me feel bad.

You can get the skiwear effect from any purchase. Every time you buy something, a part of your brain starts to post-rationalise your purchase. You think that you ought to do something with your possessions, in order to justify the fact that you spent money on them. Instead of deciding that you want to do something and then spending the money to do so, you can end up determining your activities on the basis of your past purchases. Over time, your stuff can come to own you.

The Victorian poet William Morris said that you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. The problem with that idea is that all your stuff is potentially useful. My skiwear was useful (for skiing). But it was more useful converted into cash than it was cluttering up my wardrobe.

I suggest—unpoetically—that you should not have anything in your life that isn't much more useful or beautiful than its storage and maintenance requires. These days I only keep possessions if the benefits are much more significant than the mental and financial maintenance costs.

Owning lots of stuff limits your psychological freedom. Don’t let the fact that you bought something in the past determine how you spend your time now. If your stuff does not bring you fulfilment now, get rid of it.

Close The Open Loops

I used to have cardboard boxes in my cupboards, filled with all sorts of unused junk that I intended to sort through “one day”. These boxes contained old home videos on VHS, even though I hadn’t owned a video player for over a decade.

I kept an ancient collection of audio cassettes—music that I had bought years ago and mix tapes that I had made. I kept these tapes even though I hadn’t owned a cassette player for nearly two decades.

I had old floppy disks, left over from the 1990s, with god knows what on them. I have not seen a computer that can read floppy disks for two decades, but I kept these, “just in case”.

When I packed away stuff in boxes, it was out of sight, but there was an open loop left in my mind. I had not made the decisions about what to do with all this old clutter.

Extreme decluttering involved making all these decisions. I made the choice about which videos and disks I wanted to digitise, and got it done. I said goodbye to the old cassettes that were never going to be played.

Storage gives you a great excuse for avoiding decisions. If you have cupboard space to fill with crap, you don’t have to know why you own it, what you are going to do with it, or whether it can ever serve any purpose in your life.

Having unsorted stuff is a drain on your mental energy, even if you never look at it. Make the decisions, clear the decks, and free yourself of the mental baggage.

Give Back What Is Not Yours

One of the boxes that I procrastinated about decluttering was filled with other people’s stuff. Some of this stuff belonged to people that I had broken contact with. Giving back their stuff would involve initiating contact of some kind. I didn’t want to open a dialogue. I thought that giving things back might be misinterpreted. At the same time, I did not consider it right to sell or throw away things that didn’t belong to me. So the box languished in my cupboard, and I avoided thinking about it.

In the end, I decided to simply give back everything that was not mine, without fanfare. It is not within my control how anyone else interprets my actions. It is within my control to do what I consider the right thing for my own peace of mind. So I just stopped worrying about how my actions might be interpreted. I gave back things that belonged to others, and I felt better for doing so. That box was emotional baggage. I feel much freer having taken care of it.

Let the past be done. Give back what is not yours, or throw it away— do whatever you think is right. Let others have whatever interpretations of you they want. Other people’s opinions of you are not your business.

Acknowledge Mistakes

I used to buy a lot of books, resulting in many unread books on my shelves. As long as I held on to those books, I could keep telling myself that I would read them “someday”. I avoided admitting to myself that I had wasted money buying them too hastily.

This was an example of me avoiding getting rid of some stuff because I would have to acknowledge mistakes that I had made in purchasing it. Acknowledging rash purchases would give me minor discomfort in the moment, so I avoided it.

I chose to stop procrastinating and sell those books. The payoff in the long run has been clearing all that clutter from my life. The great thing about acknowledging your mistakes is that you put them behind you and move on. I feel lighter and more free, whenever I let go of the baggage of past mistakes by acknowledging them and moving on.

Accept Loss

When we first moved into our flat in Brighton, I bought various pieces of ergonomic furniture which I assumed we would use for many years to come. When our plans changed, and we decided to pursue a life of travel, I discovered that the resale value of the furniture would be far less than I had imagined. I felt reluctant to sell these items at such a loss, so I procrastinated.

This way of thinking is called the fallacy of sunk costs. If you buy an asset that subsequently goes down in value, and you avoid selling at a lower value because that would acknowledge the loss, then you are only kidding yourself.

Treat the past as done, behind us, finished. The only relevant question is whether it makes more sense to keep an asset now, or sell it. If it is not worth keeping now, the rational course of action is to let it go.

Clearing out all your stuff forces you to recognise losses, which hurts. On the bright side, it also forces you to put all that stuff behind you and move on.

Challenge Your Customs And Assumptions

Before I started decluttering, it never occurred to me that I could get rid of some possessions. For example, I never considered it an option to get rid of my books because… that’s just not what I thought one does with books. Books were almost sacred objects to me.

Both my parents collected hundreds of books. I learned from an early age to treat books as treasured possessions. I grew up respecting books as the main repository of knowledge within society. They were the tool by which knowledge got handed down from one generation to the next.

I still value books very highly, but I have learned to challenge my custom of treating them as sacred. The ideas in the book are what matter, not the paper that they are printed on.

A digital file can be a far more enduring way to store and transmit knowledge than paper, because it can be backed up, shared, or copied. If I want to share a rare book with my children in future, it will be much easier to give them my scan of it.

It was uncomfortable challenging my assumptions. When I first thought about destructive book scanning, I felt like I was contemplating a crime. It was a strange sensation cutting the covers off previously sacred objects.

Extreme decluttering is an unconventional lifestyle. If you do it, you will end up breaking some of the customs regarding possessions that are held by your family, friends and social circle. You can do things differently. Some people might be surprised, or disapprove, but so what.

You may not have the same assumptions about your book collection as I did. But I bet you have some unchallenged customs or assumptions preventing you from decluttering. If you are finding it hard to contemplate getting rid of some of your stuff, challenge your assumptions. Let go of any outdated customs.

Let Go Of Your Status Symbols

Another obstacle to getting rid of all my books was my concern about what others think of me.

I took pride in having read a lot of books. Reading books takes some discipline. Finishing a book is an accomplishment. But keeping books was not just a matter of personal pride, it was also an exercise of vanity on my part. The books on my shelf were trophies.

I regarded books as a kind of status symbol. My collection of books was not just for my own reference, they were also to show off to people who came to my apartment. My collection proclaimed “look at all the books that this guy has read!”.

I’m telling you a lot about my relationship with books, as these formed such a big part of my personal possessions and I had a lot of emotional baggage attached to my book collection. That’s were I wanted to “make an impression” through my possessions.

Your status symbols could be different. There are many things that you might own in order to impress other people, or communicate a message about the kind of person you are. I’ve never been interested in cars, but I know that a lot of people use cars as status signifiers, in the same way that I did with books.

What I have found is that the pursuit of my own dreams—a life of travel with Hannah—has enabled me to let go of my preoccupation with “making an impression” through the stuff I own. I still confront my ego sometimes, but it no longer shows up through stuff. I don’t care what people think about the fact that I don’t own any books. I have more important things to do.

Find a purpose for your life and pursue it relentlessly. Doing so will help you to forget about insecurities and preoccupations that are getting in the way, like what others think of you.

Decide What Your Life Is About

The hardest object for me to get rid of was a beautiful, vintage Fender Stratocaster guitar. I had owned that guitar since I was a teenager, when I played in a band. The Strat travelled with me to university, and then afterwards to all the various flats that I lived in. I took it with me wherever I moved to, even though I stopped playing regularly during my University years, and very rarely picked up my guitar afterwards.

I got a PhD, became an entrepreneur and built a business. During many years of hard work, the Stratocaster was a reminder of times that I had been more playful. I did not have the energy for creative improvisation. I missed that aspect of life. I didn’t want to sell the guitar because I didn’t want to admit to myself that I didn't play any more.

When I sold my business and retired early, one of the first things I did was get back into playing my guitar. I attended a Jazz school, where I learned to play a style of music that I'd never tried before. I learned new tunes and did a lot of improvisation. I joined jamming sessions and played live gigs in a pub every Friday night for a summer.

I also found other creative outlets for play. I attended comedy improvisation courses and performed in some comedy improv shows. Making a podcast and writing books are also my creative pursuits.

When we decided to sell everything and adopt a life of travel, I knew that it would be impractical for me to take the Stratocaster with me. It is notoriously stressful taking musical instruments on planes. I would have had to carry an additional flight suitcase, and that old guitar was made of heavy maple wood. I would also need an amp. All these obstacles were surmountable, but I knew that it was only worth taking the guitar if I was going to play it every day, as an integral part of my life.

I loved the idea of playing. But, uncomfortable though it was to admit it, I knew that I loved the idea, not the the reality. I did not have the same hunger for playing my guitar that I have for writing, podcasting, travel, my life with Hannah, starting a family, and all the other things that I am wildly enthusiastic about.

Extreme decluttering has forced me to ask myself: what do I hunger for? What am I enthusiastic about? It is a vulnerable feeling to admit these things to yourself, and go for them, dumping everything else.

It is much more comforting to be mildly interested in a thousand pursuits, and keep all the crap associated with them. If you have a guitar, and play it once a year, you can think of yourself as a guitarist.

I know what it feels like to be afraid to commit to being wildly enthusiastic about something. It is easy to forget that you have the freedom to change your mind. I sold my guitar and said goodbye to that pursuit, to focus fully on the things that are most meaningful to me. But I can always change my mind. If, in two years, I decide that playing guitar every day is a really important goal for me, I’ll just buy a guitar.

Don’t keep all your clutter to avoid deciding what you are enthusiastic about. And don’t keep it just in case you change your mind. If you are not passionate about skiing every year, sell your skiwear. If you are not passionate about playing that guitar every day, sell it.

You can experience and achieve a huge amount in life, but not all at once. A rich life is lived as a series of focussed pursuits. Extreme decluttering forces you to commit to wanting only a few things in your life at any moment, but wanting them with wild enthusiasm. Give up on all those other things that you are semi-committed to, but not wildly enthusiastic about.

Stop pretending that you can do a thousand things at once in life. Then you can allow yourself the courage to do something truly remarkable with it.

An Alternative to “Waiting For” in GTD

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) is a brilliant and life-changing methodology for productivity, but one idea in the original book doesn’t make sense to me: the context “waiting for”.

At the heart of GTD is the method of always defining the next action on a project, in order to keep things moving. One context of actions suggested by Allen is called “waiting for”. This context is used to categorise those times when you are waiting for somebody else to do something. For example, an action called “hear back from John about project proposal” might be categorised as a “waiting for” kind of action.

The problem is: “waiting for” is not an action. You can’t do waiting. It’s a kind of inaction. This means that it doesn’t really fit with the whole GTD method of defining action contexts by what you do.

I suggest the alternative is to create a “follow up with” action that you schedule for some time in the future. If you are waiting for John to get back to you about a project proposal, create a deferred task called “follow up with John about proposal” (context could be email or phone). When the task shows up, if you’ve already heard back from John then you can just delete the task. Otherwise, you have the correct next action for yourself.

This alternative seems more in line with the underlying philosophy of GTD to view all your projects in terms of your own responsibilities and next actions.

How To Check If Your OmniFocus Projects Have An Evernote Page Automatically Using Keyboard Maestro

Large projects usually have both a series of tasks associated with them and some kind of documentation. I use different applications to work with these two different kinds of project information because each application is designed specifically for one thing and is the best tool for that job. OmniFocus is great for task management but not designed for documentation. Evernote is great for documentation but not as good at handling tasks as a dedicated task management app like OmniFocus. 

Using two applications to handle project information creates a problem though. How do I tell if I have documentation for all my projects in OmniFocus? Or, how can I tell if I have an OmniFocus project for all my Evernote project pages. I have to compare the list of projects in OmniFocus and the list in Evernote to see what is missing.

MIT has a very nice webpage for comparing lists here. Using this webpage, the workflow is as follows:

1. Select all live projects in OmniFocus and export the list to the MIT webpage

2. Select all live projects in Evernote and export the list to the MIT webpage

3. Compare the lists and see what is missing from either list.

That sounds simple, but is quite time consuming and requires a lot of individual steps. For this reason, I wrote a macro in Keyboard Maestro to do it all automatically. In case you are interested, each step is outlined below:

The First Extreme Saver

Extreme Saving is one of the four approaches to achieving financial independence that I wrote about in my book Job Free. The idea is to save the majority of your income (ideally more than 75%) so that you can retire early within 10 years. Some blogs advocating this approach are Early Retirement Extreme, Mr Money Mustache, Go Curry Cracker, and Root of Good.

The modern extreme saving movement started with Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s influential 1990s book, “Your Money Or Your Life”. However, the concept of extreme saving much older. In fact, there were extreme savers in Victorian times. 

Samuel Smiles was a bestselling Victorian author whose books encouraged ordinary people to live frugally and save, in order to secure a better future. In the nineteenth century, saving was the main way that ordinary people could free themselves from poverty and live a better life. Smiles did not come from a wealthy family, he was a self-made man. This is how he wrote about saving in 1875:

There is a dignity in the very effort to save with a worthy purpose… It produces a well-regulated mind; it gives prudence a triumph over extravagance; it gives virtue the mastery over vice; it puts the passions under control; it drives away care; it secures comfort. Saved money, however little, will serve to dry up many a tear—will ward off many sorrows and heartburnings, which otherwise might prey upon us. Possessed of a little store of capital, a man walks with a lighter step—his heart beats more cheerily. When interruption of work or adversity happens, he can meet them; he can recline on his capital, which will either break his fall, or prevent it altogether.

Samuel Smiles not only considered saving the best way for individuals to better themselves, he also saw it as a social good. A saver not only helps themselves but, through their actions, leads to the betterment of society as a whole. Smiles outlined the positive social role that savers play:

It is clear that man would have continued uncivilized but for the accumulations of savings made by his forefathers,—the savings of skill, of art, of invention, and of intellectual culture. It is the savings of the world that have made the civilization of the world. Savings are the result of labour; and it is only when labourers begin to save, that the results of civilization accumulate. We have said that thrift began with civilization: we might almost have said that thrift produced civilization. Thrift produces capital; and capital is the conserved result of labour. The capitalist is merely a man who does not spend all that is earned by work.

Modern day extreme savers emphasise that achieving financial independence is not easy. It requires significant lifestyle changes and the right mindset. Samuel Smiles told his readers the same thing back in Victorian times. As he put it:

Thrift is not a natural instinct. It is an acquired principle of conduct. It involves self-denial—the denial of present enjoyment for future good—the subordination of animal appetite to reason, forethought, and prudence. It works for today, but also provides for tomorrow. It invests the capital it has saved, and makes provision for the future.

Smiles was writing for the growing literate working class, not for rich people. He was a bestselling author, so his ideas were adopted by many and considered mainstream. Yet his recommendations about saving were far more ambitious than you might expect. He cites a recommendation that coal workers should be saving 40% of their income. He discusses whether the general advice save half your income is “perhaps” too ambitious. Half your income!

This was in the nineteenth century, when real incomes were a tiny fraction of what they are today. Yet how many people today achieve anywhere near the levels of extreme saving that Smiles advocated? People took saving a lot more seriously back then.

Samuel Smiles’ book, Thrift, outlines his whole approach and is easily available online in kindle format. If you want an explanation of the modern extreme saver movement, check out my own book Job Free.

Digitize Everything

We live in a period when many physical objects are being replaced by software and digital data. Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur and founder of the X-Prize, summarised the process in his book, Abundance:

Just think of all the consumer goods and services that are now available with the average smart phone: cameras, radios, televisions, web browsers, recording studios, editing suites, movie theaters, GPS navigators, word processors, spreadsheets, stereos, flashlights, board games, card games, video games, a whole range of medical devices, maps, atlases, encyclopedias, dictionaries, translators, textbooks, world class educations, and the ever-growing smorgasbord known as the app store.

Cumbersome objects like these used to clutter up our homes. Now you don’t need to own any of those things. You can replace them with apps on your smartphone, and data in the cloud.

My approach to decluttering has been to jump on this dematerialization trend and push it as far as I can with my own possessions. Technology has made it possible to get rid of the majority of my physical possessions, whilst losing none of the benefits of owning them.

One of the major reasons I kept possessions was because they had meaning for me. Meaning is ultimately information. And information can be stored digitally, requiring no space in my luggage. My old paper journals were important to me because of the ideas I had written down in them, not because of the paper that those words were written on. By scanning my journals, I captured the information in them, moved that digital data into the cloud, and shredded the original notebooks.

This is a key strategy I used for extreme decluttering: I identified the meaning I attached to each possession, worked out how to digitize it, and then moved that information into the cloud. I scanned all my old photo albums. I digitised all my music and movies. I replaced all my paper books with a digital library. I got rid of the physical possessions but kept all my valuable data.

You can declutter to a far more radical extent if you replace your physical possessions with software and data. By digitizing as much as I could, I made many of my physical possessions redundant. It’s no sacrifice to get rid of redundant objects. In fact, it is a relief.

Replacing physical things with software has increased my quality of life. Dematerialization is a process that everyone is gradually adopting anyway, whether they are aware of it or not. I am just doing it more consistently. I recommend that you embrace the trend.

Three Ways To Delegate

Delegation is a vital skill for entrepreneurs to master. If you want to grow your business, you can’t just hire people and tell them to get on with it. You need a framework for delegation.

Derek Sivers tells an instructive story about the perils of delegation gone awry in Anything You Want, his autobiographical account of the founding of CDBaby. He delegated total responsibility for the creation of an employee bonus scheme at CDBaby to his own employees. He realised later that the resulting scheme was wiping out all profit in the business. When he amended the scheme, he faced a huge conflict with employees.

Although entrepreneurs agree about the importance of delegation, there are widely differing views on the best way to delegate. This article explains the three main approaches and outlines the pros and cons of each.

The "Operations Manual" Approach to Delegation

The Operations Manual approach to delegation is described in Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth Revisited. This approach is geared towards the kinds of small businesses that Gerber spent many years advising. This method of delegation involves creating explicit and detailed instructions for work procedures that you expect your employees to follow. You tell them not just what you want done, but also how you want them to do it. Your instructions are codified in an operations manual or similar document.

In his book, Gerber describes an experience he had visiting a hotel where he noticed the great customer service. He asked the hotel manager how he had achieved this level of quality in service. The hotel manager showed him a detailed operations manual, which included well-defined procedures for all tasks, down to order in which the cleaning staff should clean each item in a room.

The idea behind this approach is to treat your business as if it were a franchise prototype. As the business owner, you try to get yourself out of the operational role as quickly as possible, in order to give yourself maximum freedom to grow the business and step away from it in future.

The operations manual approach works best with inexperienced employees who are willing to learn how things are done and to follow detailed instructions given to them. Since you want everyone to be working in line with your operations manual, you hire people willing to learn and follow your way of doing things. Experience in other ways of doing things could even be seen as a liability. Gerber recommends hiring inexperienced people in The E-Myth Revisited.

The advantage of the operations manual approach is that your business is highly scalable. The strategy of designing your business as if it were a franchise prototype makes it easy to increase production, doing more of the same.

The down side of this approach is that it can easily become outdated, because it is dependent on detailed prescriptions for all actions. Flexibility and adaptability are not built into a centralised system. You can codify all your procedures in an operations manual, but the business will grow and change. Innovation by staff members is deliberately stifled in this approach, which prevents you from benefiting from employee knowledge about what can be improved. Anyone adopting this approach has to implement feedback mechanisms to try to get some of that knowledge back into the centralised plan, such as asking staff for their suggestions as to how to improve procedures. But such feedback mechanisms tend to be cumbersome and bureaucratic.

You can try to mitigate the downside of this approach by involving employees as much as possible in the creation and updating of your procedures. I did this in my business by using a wiki-based operations manual, as I describe in my book Becoming An Entrepreneur. Everyone could edit any page in the manual and contribute to standardising the procedures. I found that with this adjustment, the operations manual approach to delegation worked very well with inexperienced employees. 

The ROWE Approach to Delegation

The Results Only Work Environment (or ROWE) is a totally different approach to delegation. This kind of delegation involves giving your employees clearly defined outcomes to reach, and leaving it to their discretion as to how they reach them. What really matters to the entrepreneur is the results of an employee’s work. The way that the employee achieves those results should be irrelevant to the entrepreneur (as long as they don’t do anything that is in conflict with the interests of the business or that creates any problems). Consequently, according to the ROWE approach, the best way to get things done is to provide very clear targets or business goals, and then leave your employees completely free to achieve those results in their own way.

If you accept the logic of this approach, you shouldn’t care what time your employees come to work, or whether they work from home. The only thing that the entrepreneur should concern themselves with is the employee’s productivity. What matters is the quality and quantity of completed work by each employee. If the employee does better work at home in their pyjamas, so be it.

Advocates of the ROWE approach also see a benefits to entrepreneur’s work from adopting this approach. This method of delegation forces the entrepreneur to provide very clear goals for the business. In the operations manual approach, it’s possible for an employer to get bogged down in telling staff what to do and lose sight of their own job—to provide vision for the business. ROWE forces the employer to think about what needs to be done rather than the minutiae of how to do it.

One of the aims of the ROWE approach to delegation is to incentivise employees to find more efficient ways of working. By giving employees the opportunity to benefit from efficiency gains, they are encouraged to seek out faster, easier ways of reaching their own targets. This reflects an underlying insight that employees are likely to be more aware than managers of potential efficiency gains in their own workflows, because they are the ones doing the work. The aim of ROWE is to encourage improvements to efficiency at the most distributed level possible.

Ricardo Semler is a famous proponent of this kind of approach.  He implemented ROWE principles throughout Semco, his corporation in Brazil. He has described his approach in two books Maverick and The Seven Day Weekend. The term ROWE was coined by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson— two human resources executives who implemented these principles within the Best Buy corporation during the 2000s. They describe their journey in their book Why Work Sucks And How To Fix It. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson describe how they adopted a similar approach in their company Basecamp (formerly 37 Signals) in their book Rework.

The downside of the ROWE approach for the entrepreneur is that there is no clear mechanism to translate efficiency gains by individual employees into productivity gains for the business as a whole. Employees will always benefit from the greater flexibility. Increasing employee satisfaction certainly can benefit the business. However, more satisfied employees do not necessarily become more productive employees.

Efficiency gains can simply lead to employees finishing their work in less time and having more leisure time. This is exactly what Tim Ferriss suggests that employees do in his book, The Four Hour Work Week. He encourages employees to strive for the freedom to work at home so that they can take advantage of their own productivity gains to free up some of their employee time for personal projects. This means that all efficiency improvements are translated into higher effective wages for the employee. This higher wage might benefit to the business (by attracting better employees and improving retention) but it doesn’t necessarily lead to more productivity.

ROWE can only lead to greater productivity if employers are able to increase employee targets in line with increases in efficiency. This is going to be a difficult judgement call, since the employer gives up all detailed knowledge of working practices in a ROWE. It is interesting to note that Best Buy—which was the model example of a ROWE implementation—has since scrapped ROWE and gone back to previous working practices. 

The Outsourcing Approach to Delegation

The third approach to delegation is to avoid employer-employee relationships as far as possible and outsource work to external contractors instead. This model of delegation works by outlining your desired outcome and then negotiating with an external contractor for an agreed price, timescale, and other conditions, to achieve the outcome. 

In his book How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, Harry Browne described his own implementation of this approach. He hated the bureaucracy involved with employing people, so he decided to arrange his business entirely using independent subcontractors.

Like the ROWE approach, the outsourcing model of delegation is focussed on outcomes and leaves it up to the person undertaking the work to identify the most efficient way of achieving the goal. This kind of delegation also incentivises the entrepreneur to create clear and explicit business goals.

Outsourcing has one significant advantage over the ROWE: with outsourcing there is a mechanism to translate efficiency gains by individual workers into productivity gains for the business as a whole. That mechanism is market competition. If the independent contractor does not pass on some of the efficiency gains to their customer in a lower price, then they run the risk of being uncompetitive relative to other subcontractors. In fact, this mechanism works for both sides, since it also means that the subcontractors will have to capture some gains in the form of profit in order for it to be worthwhile for them to innovate in the first place.

The cost basis of outsourcing is different from employing people. The entrepreneur gets to keep fixed costs as low as possible because he only employs people on a contract basis. He may have additional search and transaction costs when finding people to do the tasks (although the internet has reduced these costs significantly). The independent contractors may also be more expensive than employees because they need to charge more (since they don’t have the security of a fixed paycheque). However, the entrepreneur is also likely to get more skilled specialists by outsourcing, since he is not trying to fit a limited set of existing employees to a diverse range of tasks that need to get done.

If you accepted the logic of ROWE, then outsourcing is just a more consistent version of that approach. If you believe that people work better when they have autonomy, then why not work with people who have full autonomy (external contractors) and avoid hiring employees altogether? Hiring external contractors to achieve specific tasks is the ultimate version of ROWE.

I have had very positive experiences with independent contractors. I prefer the Harry Browne approach of relying on outsourcing instead of fixed employment contracts wherever possible.

Automation: An Alternative To Delegation?

Automation is one alternative to delegation that is becoming more feasible for many tasks. The act of delegation requires you, as delegator, to clearly identify your desired outcome. The Operations Manual approach also requires you to identify a detailed workflow for the work. Once you have clearly specified the task, you may be able to delegate it to a computer and avoid having to deal with human delegation altogether.

Automation is much easier now because there are so many applications available now to help with basic tasks. To take a simple historical example, typing on a typewriter used to be a slow and cumbersome process. Errors were not easy to correct and often involved restarting an entire page. Consequently, it made sense for any skilled professional to delegate typing tasks to an assistant. The professional would dictate a letter and give it to a secretary to type up. Very few people do this now, since word processors make the process of typing faster and easier than before. Even if you prefer to dictate a letter, personal computers can do a fairly good job of voice recognition and automate the transcription process for you. The job of typist has been effectively automated.

Over time, this kind of automation removes the need to delegate more and more simple tasks. This is the ultimate goal of the Operations Manual approach to delegation: specify the task so well that you can get a computer to do it automatically.

Choosing Your Approach to Delegation

If you need to delegate simple tasks to be done in exactly the way that you specify, it makes a lot of sense to adopt the Operations Manual approach to delegation. This approach will also likely inform your hiring strategy and you will tend to employ inexperienced, enthusiastic people at the start of their careers who are willing to learn your way of doing things. Consider automation as the final goal of this kind of delegation.

Alternatively, if you want to benefit from expertise that you don't have, it makes sense to delegate work to people in a way that gives them maximum autonomy. The ROWE concept is one way of implementing this approach. But if you accept the logic of the ROWE approach, then a more consistent implementation of the concept is simply to outsource work to external contractors, and avoid hiring employees altogether.

Are Empiricists Anti-Rational?

Stephen Hicks is a philosopher and author of “Explaining Postmodernism”. In a recent article, he answers the question “Is Austrian economics anti-empirical?” in the affirmative, stating “its roots and the tradition have been mostly anti-empirical.”

I commented on his FaceBook post that a better question would be “are empiricists anti-rational?” Professor Hicks responded:

“That's an interesting question, too, Jake. What makes it better?”

Here's my reply:

Thanks for your response. Empiricism is far more influential in economics than the Austrian School, so more deserving of scrutiny in my opinion. Popperian empiricism has been consciously adopted as the core philosophy of mainstream economics since Milton Friedman and others. The Austrian School’s emphasis on rational principles is a tiny holdout to this trend, and their rationalist approach is generally considered wacky and eccentric by the mainstream.

Empiricism’s victory has been so overwhelming that even the idea that some things can be known to be true or false based on reasoning from first principles is seen as “anti-empirical” (synonymous with bad). Yet one can hold that the answers to some questions about the world are knowable by reason alone, whilst other questions indeed can only be answered by checking empirical evidence. That’s the Austrian approach— not anti-empirical, just aware that reason shows us that some things can never be true. For example, when Mises demonstrated that central planning can never work in the socialist calculation debate, he did so by deductive argument from first principles, not by evidence.

Empiricism in economics is always vulnerable to radical skepticism, because empiricists hold that one can’t be sure of anything by reason alone (except, inconsistently, they are sure of that statement itself by reason alone). Will central planning work? Empiricism says the only way to know is to test it, and see if you can “falsify” it (and even then you are only provisionally accepting a hypothesis until the next test). 

Of course, Popper argued that you can be sure if a hypothesis is proven wrong, but any competent empiricist can always use “immunising stratagems” to protect a failed hypothesis (for example, that old chestnut “Russia wasn’t true Communism, it was Stalinism… so we need to try central planning again”). 

By the way, I hugely admire your book “Explaining Postmodernism” and I consider the continuation of the Enlightenment project a vital task for our times. My concern is that we’ve all assumed empiricism is the natural heir of the enlightenment (don’t we all want to be considered good empiricists?) but empiricism’s contradictions have undermined our ability to reason from first principles.

Professor Hicks responded:

Thanks for your explanation, Jake. Do you think the duality of empiricism versus principles can be overcome? That is, does empiricism have contradictions, or is is that we've not yet connected the basic empirical commitment to a good understanding of conceptualization, proposition-formation, and logic?

I appreciate the great questions. I’d love to hear your answer to them too. Here’s my take:
Empirical work is great, but empiricism as a philosophy is self-contradictory. Even committed empiricists rely on principles that aren’t dependent on sense data all the time. As Hume pointed out, you can’t derive a single causal relationship from the senses because all sense data ever shows is one thing happening, then another thing happening. Without rational principles, the evidence of the senses is meaningless. Empiricism always piggybacks on the deeper principles of reason.

Of course, it is vain to assume one could solve all questions with pure reason. But it does not follow that all questions about the real world can be answered with evidence from the senses. There are a-priori synthetic truths about the world, like the principle of causality and the laws of logic. I presume there is some kind of evolutionary explanation for how we acquired such rational principles, but ultimately how we got them doesn’t make a difference to the fact that they are true and useful. These principles are the ultimate foundation of rationality and failing to accept a-priori synthetic truths is a good definition for irrationality.

The Enlightenment philosophers lost their way when they assumed that empiricism could be the source of all truth. It led them away from developing rational ethics and towards utilitarianism, positive law, and relativism. When logic, causality, and other rational principles were assumed to be mere conventions, the Enlightenment lost it’s objective footing. That was a mistake we need to correct.

I think the task for continuing the Enlightenment project is to clean up rationalism. Rationalism doesn’t have to deny the existence of empirical questions, but empiricism as a philosophy must deny the existence of a-priori synthetic truths (which always leads to self-contradiction).

How to Manage Your Commitments as Projects

This diagram shows how to manage all your personal, work, and other commitments as projects within a productivity system based around the idea of Getting Things Done (GTD). When something arises that might involve some kind of commitment, the first step is to capture the idea immediately as a project within your system. Decide whether this new project is something that you are committed to working on right now, or if you are just considering it’s potential.

Someday Maybe Projects

If you are not yet sure whether to commit to a new idea, make it a Someday Maybe Project. Someday Maybe Projects can change into Live Projects, if you decide to commit to them. Otherwise, if you decide later that it is not worth doing after all, drop it instead.

Live Projects

If you are committed to a new idea as soon as it arises, start working on it as a Live Project, skipping the Someday Maybe stage. If all goes well, work on the project until it becomes a Completed Project. If at any point the project becomes no longer relevant, drop it.

Managing Projects With Tags in Evernote

I find it helpful to document my projects within Evernote. I create a separate Note for each project and use a tag to denote the current status. As a project goes through its lifecycle, I keep editing the same note with accumulated information on it. I change the tag on a project as it’s status changes.  I have tags for Someday Maybe, Live Project, Complete Project, and Dropped Project.

As part of my weekly review, I use Evernote to check through my list of Live projects and Someday Maybe projects. I use a saved searches (“Shortcuts” in the Evernote menu) based on the project tag to generate  these lists automatically.

Complete and Dropped Projects

Sometimes it is helpful to be able to see notes from past projects, so I have tags for Complete Project and Dropped Project. These notes don’t get in the way of my current work, because they have a different tag.

Further Information On Working With Someday Maybe Projects

You can find more information about working with Someday Maybe projects in episode 257 of my podcast:

The Missing Link Between Evernote and OmniFocus: A Workaround

OmniFocus and Evernote are two vital components of my project planning system on MacOS and iOS. I organise all my active commitments into projects in OmniFocus, where I manage my tasks. I make a project note for each of these projects in Evernote, where I store all the text, diagrams, and other reference material related to the project.

The Missing Link

There is a catch with this system though. These apps don’t integrate with each other as well as you might hope. As I work, I want to switch back-and-forth between my tasks in OmniFocus and my documentation in Evernote. This is where the problem arises.

Linking in one direction—from OmniFocus to Evernote—is easy. You right-click on a note in Evernote, press the alt key, and select "Copy Classic Note Link" (there are many webpages out there explaining how to do this). That gives you a nice hyperlink to the note in Evernote, which you can then paste into the notes field of an OmniFocus project or task.

The missing link is back the other way, from Evernote to OmniFocus. In the past, you could select a project in OmniFocus and  “copy as link”. You could then simply paste this link into Evernote. This is still the method currently recommended on the Inside OmniFocus page. But at some point, Evernote made it impossible to paste a link for anything that wasn’t a HTTP address. Now when you paste an OmniFocus link, you just get plain text saying something like “omnifocus:///task/icDN-FlhkDLK”. Not very helpful.

A Workaround

Here is a workaround for making a link from Evernote to OmniFocus:

1. Right click (or control click) on your project in OmniFocus and select “copy as link”:

2. Paste the text into the relevant note in Evernote. It will come out as plain text, and should start with “omnifocus:///task/”

3. When you want to go from Evernote back to Omnifocus, right click on the “omnifocus:///task/” text in Evernote and select Service- “Open URL”:

That will bring OmniFocus to the front and will land you on the correct project inside OmniFocus.

That’s it. It is not quite as fast as a simple click, but better than having to search inside OmniFocus each time. I recommend you always put your OmniFocus link in the same place on your Evernote project notes, so that you know where to find the link quickly. I put my links in the first line of the note.

Project Planning on macOS and iOS

This is my project planning system on macOS and iOS. I use these apps to plan projects within the context of a personal productivity system based around the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach. When planning a project, I use these tools in the following sequence:

1. Task Management System

Project planning starts with a task management system. On macOS and iOS, the best app I’ve found for this purpose is OmniFocus. This is where I create a project and manage tasks for the project, including the project startup tasks.

I’ve spoken more about task management in Episode 191 of The Voluntary Life:

2. Project Documentation

As I start working on a project, I generate notes and graphics which need a home. The second tool in my planning system is my project documentation. I use Evernote on macOS and iOS for project documentation.

I explain my use of Evernote for reference material in Episode 120 of The Voluntary Life Podcast:

3. Mindmap

Once I have a project page in place, I begin to get into the detail of planning the project. The app that I find most helpful in organising my thoughts is a mind map. I do a brain dump and get everything out of my head into a mind map in a fairly unstructured way. As the mind map grows, I order and rearrange ideas on it, categorising different aspects of the project that I need to work on and issues that I need to resolve.

Episode 186 of my podcast has more detail on how I use mind maps in project planning:

4. Process Map

A process map is like a more rigorous and evolved version of the mind map. Whereas a mind map just has everything branching off from a single topic with no further structure, a process chart adds in the sequencing and logic of a project. I use InShort to create my process maps. For more detail about process maps see TVL Episode 205:

5. Gantt Chart

Once I have created a process chart, I can add in task durations and start times and create a Gantt chart within InShort. I find this process a bit tricky in InShort, but I haven’t yet found a good alternative app for it.

A Note On Project Planning Versus Project Management

This workflow is great for a single user doing project planning, but I use different tools for collaborative project management work. That will be a subject for a future post.

 

Job Free Audiobook Now Available

The audiobook version of Job Free is now available on Audible.

The Limit Breaker Interview: How To Retire At 38 By Starting And Selling A Startup, With Jake Desyllas

“Fumnanya Bernard took quite a bit of an effort to get in touch with Jake due to the lifestyle he’s living right now. Today on “The Limit Breaker Show”, Fumnanya got Jake to share his work experiences and the reasons why he started and sold his business.

Listening to this episode of The Limit Breaker show is sure going to help crush those frustrating limits of working a job to starting your own business.”

— The Limit Breaker Podcast

Listen to the interview here.

Review of Becoming An Entrepreneur on Freedom Lovin' Blog

“This book is a must for anyone looking for more freedom and fulfillment in their life.”

— Kevin Koskella, freedomlovin.com

More here

Sidepreneurs Interview

Here's an interview about entrepreneurship that I did with Sidepreneurs Podcast in 2015.