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No BS Friday: Ever Wanted To Jump Off A Skyscraper? (Me Too!)

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Sometimes our mind splits into cross purposes. The results get pretty wacky…

Have you ever felt the drive to do something totally reckless?

Like, have you ever found yourself standing on a cliff edge or at the top of a tall building, hearing a voice inside you say, “Go on, jump.” Do you find yourself fantasising about what it would feel like to step out into air, feel the wind on your skin, the split seconds just before the impact splits your skull?

And I’m not talking about suicidal ideation here. That’s a completely different thing.

I’m talking about something that’s completely location-dependent. The thought has possibly never crossed your mind before, but then once you’re at the cliff’s edge, it’s right there – a seductive, reckless and almost joyful urge.

You’re not alone. It’s apparently very common.

And the context isn’t always so dramatic. It could be about saying something stupid, keeping a secret, throwing tea on someone… anything you know you really shouldn’t do.

There was an episode of the old ‘Spin City’ where the mayor is going to meet the Governor. He says to Michael J Fox’s character,

“But what if I punch her in the face?”

“What? Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know! I say to myself, ‘don’t punch her in the face’, but then I just start obsessing on it. ‘Don’t punch her in the face. Don’t punch her in the face. I go crazy with it.”

(He ends up punching her in the face.)

Or I had a friend, a keen footballer, who had a new-born baby. He noticed one day that wrapped up in its swaddle, the baby felt just like a football. So he imagined drop-kicking it through the uprights. Wouldn’t that be silly?

It was a joke at first, but he surprised himself with how vivid the image was – how clearly he felt it in his own body.

He says to himself, “Oh my god, don’t do that.” But then every time he picks the baby up, the thought comes, the feeling comes. He feels horrified.

He stops trusting himself.

And this is another common feature of this phenomenon. You feel split in two – in your conscious mind you know it would be terrible thing to do to jump over the cliff or punch the mayor in the face. But, the feeling seems to come from another part of you – a part of you that doesn’t share your outlook on right and wrong, cause and effect.

(Who’s got their hands on the steering wheel here?)

It can be a strange and terrifying experience. But as I was saying, it’s actually very common.

In psychology the phenomenon is called ‘The imp of the perverse.’

The reason it has such a flamboyant title and isn’t called something like ‘regulatory impairment syndrome’ is that it was first articulated in the west by the poet Edgar Allan Poe in one of his short stories: The Imp of the Perverse.

In this piece, someone concocts a perfect murder, and inherits the victim’s estate. At first the murderer is incredibly pleased with himself, and proud to have come up with such a fool-proof scheme.

But in time, the thought of the murder starts to haunt him. His first response is to come up with an affirmation: “I am safe”, and he repeats this anytime the memory of the murder occurs to him.

For a long while this works, until one day, for some reason, he adds to it: “I am safe, if I be not fool enough to make an open confession.”

At that point, the thought worm enters his mind, “Don’t make a full confession, don’t make a full confession.”

It eventually drives him mad, until finally he does indeed make a full confession, and is hanged.

Poe says that this is an impulse that every human has and calls it the imp of the perverse – a demon egging you to do exactly the wrong thing.

(Poe was such a ray of sunshine wasn’t he?)

But we now know that this is not a case of demonic possession – it’s just one of the quirks of having a complex and multi-layered mind.

The key to understanding it is remembering that our mind has conscious and automatic processes.

So you walk into a restaurant you’ve never been in and have to choose something to eat off the menu. You weigh up the different options and make a choice. That’s a conscious process.

Everything else in life – like the remaining 95% – is done automatically, based on instinct, learnt behaviours, habit and training. It’s done without ‘thinking’.

Like, say, the habit of having a cigarette after sex. You know how it goes. You finish a beautiful round of lovemaking, then you ask if anyone there has a cigarette, decide if you want menthol or regular, ask the quartet to tone it down a bit so you can ask if anyone has a lighter.

You know how it goes. It’s all just automatic. There’s no thinking involved.

And this is how we work – our automatic systems on autopilot, and our conscious minds getting involved sometimes, but only when they have to.

Most of the time, the two work hand in glove and it all seems to work as one happy, cohesive whole.

Sometimes though, and actually reasonably often, the automatic and conscious processes come into cross-purposes – in to a sort of conflict. The imp of the perverse is one of those situations.

The way I’ve heard it described is that the automatic processes are responsible for ‘calibration’.

So take driving a car. Unless you’re 16, driving the car has probably become automatic. You’re not consciously thinking about gears, you’re not consciously steering. You’re thinking about dinner and singing along to the radio.

It feels like it’s easy because there’s no effort involved, but driving a car is still an incredibly complex task.

And what the automatic mind is doing in the background is constantly checking itself against its objectives.

So maybe the objective is ‘stay between the white lines’. The automatic mind is constantly measuring your performance against this goal: “Am I between the white lines? Am I between the white lines?” and then adjusting your driving accordingly.

It is constantly calibrating.

Most of the time this is a very efficient division of labour. It seems to get a bit weird though when you set it a ‘negative’ goal. Do NOT jump over the cliff. Do NOT punch the mayor. Do NOT kick the baby.

When the automatic mind gets a goal like this, the calibration questions change. Am I not jumping over the cliff? Am I not falling through the air? Is the wind not rushing on my skin?”

By framing the goal in the negative, you become fixated on the exact thing you are trying to avoid.

And what the conscious mind then gets to witness is the automatic mind testing itself against the felt experience of the goal.

And so you watch it imagine (in a felt and very vivid way) stepping over the edge, falling, hitting the ground.

To know whether it is NOT doing these things, it needs to conjure them up in a very vivid and visceral way.

And you then find yourself surprised that the thoughts don’t make you feel more frightened. But that’s because the automatic mind is doing it in a value neutral way. It’s not saying that falling is good or bad. It’s just imagining the outcome so it can calibrate its performance against it.

And because you are almost watching someone else’s dream, it’s surprisingly exhilarating.

But you don’t know all that, so you think that the automatic mind is an imp who wants you to kick babies.

The horror.

But as I said, perfectly natural and very common.

Now that we’re all on the same page with that, I think this has a few interesting implications for the journey of success and self-mastery.

The first is what it says about ‘will’.

In many we ways we can understand will as the conscious mind’s attempts to control the impulses of the automatic mind.

Your habits are urging you to have a cigarette, but consciously you know you shouldn’t. You give the lighter back to the triplets and go out and get some water. You exercise your will power.

However, ‘will’ is the mastery of the 5% over the 95%. (I’m making those numbers up, but you get the point.)

Since your automatic mind is responsible for so much more than your conscious mind (breathing, driving, chewing, most of shopping etc.) it is naturally allocated much more power.

So the conscious mind gets tired quickly. You are dragging a T-Rex around on a chain. Willpower is a limited resource.

The other implication here is that it helps us understand the power of positive versus negative affirmations and goals.

So if you say to yourself, “I will be rich”, then 100% of you becomes focused on the task.

If, however, you say, “I will not be poor”, then 5% of you is focused on making money, while the other 95% of you starts fantasising about what it would be like to be poor.

“Am I wearing rags? Am I eating dog-food? Am I performing show-tunes in a cast with other 19th Century English orphans?”

Your focus becomes split, but not in an even way. In a massively unbalanced way. Like 95% of you has their eye completely off the ball!

If you set yourself negative goals, if you work with negative affirmations, how can you possibly hope to succeed?

There is great power in the body and in the automatic mind. Self-mastery involves making sure that the conscious and the automatic minds are in alignment.

Then the magic happens.

Becoming fully conscious – aware of our conscious mind – that’s only the first step. We have to become aware of our automatic mind as well.

Then we are on the road to self-mastery.

NO B.S.FRIDAY: How to be a master of complexity

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If you don’t realise this about yourself, the growth journey could just be very frustrating.

How complex are you?

You know, in the scheme of things…

Like, a clock is complex. There’s probably a couple of hundred moving parts, some electronic circuitry, a battery that stores power and that slowly releases it at just the right rate.

Clocks are fairly complex.

But they ain’t got nothing on you babe.

What else? Computers are fairly complex, but still, humans can build computers. They can’t build other humans yet (except in the old-fashioned way).

And then even consider other organisms. Plants, insects, beavers, pelicans, bonobo monkeys… even bee hives and ant colonies.

All doing some pretty complex crazy stuff, but then hey, you’re doing all that stuff too AND you’re reading a bunch of scribbles on your phone, translating it into a voice in your head, and using the sound that voice makes to discern meaning.

Titty-sprinkles.

You are really about as complex as it gets.

Now if that’s the case, how hard is it to ‘fix’ you?

Now I don’t like the word ‘fix’ because it implies ‘broken’. And if you’re not hitting your life goals, if you haven’t build a powerful abundance mindset that’s making your life a ticker-tape parade of dreams and yummy things, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing ‘broken’ about that.

It’s the journey we all have to take. In some ways, I wonder if life is set up just so we can take that journey, as a way of learning how weird and complex we are, and how wonderful and strange the universe is.

So there’s no ‘broken’.

But I’ll use broken as a metaphor because we don’t tend to care about the performance of our stuff unless it is actually broken.

“My watch is great, but I still wonder if it is really actualising its full potential. It seems happy, but is it ‘really’ happy?”

No, we only engage with our watch’s performance if it just not doing what it is supposed to do – if it’s broken.

Ok, so let’s imagine our watch – a relatively complex thing – is broken. How do we fix it? Well, we try and pull it apart, isolate the problem, and sort it out.

What you would find though, when you did that, is that many pieces of the watch are interconnected. You can’t get to the gears unless you remove the battery. You can’t remove the gears until you de-tension the springs. You can’t de-tension the springs until you get the little lady-bird off the bike.

(Yes, that is totally how watches work.)

The defining feature of complexity is inter-connection.

If its parts aren’t inter-connected, then it’s just not a complex thing.

Ok, now let’s talk about you again. As I said, you are one of the most complex creations that has ever existed. (No I mean it. You’re special).

If that’s the case, how many of your parts are inter-connected?

Like, all of them?

Your hormones respond to stimuli, travel around your blood stream, give signals to your organs who then turn stuff into other stuff. And there are literally like thousands of lady-birds working the pulleys of your muscles.

And now how complex is your psyche?

Like, totally?

You drive is connected to your self-belief. Your self-belief is connected to your self-worth. Your self-worth is connected to the imprinting you received from your parents as a baby. Your imprinting is connected to your knee bone, and praise the name of the lord.

Now if that’s true, if your psyche is massively inter-connected, how tricky is it to ‘fix’ yourself. (Again, not the right word, but you see where I’m going.)

You can’t work on any one thing in isolation. You can’t just go, I think I need to work on my drive. You drive is connected to a hundred other things, embedded in the complex web of your psyche, and will manifest in different ways depending on what’s going on in your life.

It’s not a gear you can just pull out and polish.

The reason I’m saying this is people can often get frustrated with themselves.

“I’ve been working on my abundance mentality for 18 months now, and I’m just not getting anywhere.”

But sometimes it is hard to know. To get to you abundance mentality, you probably had to cut through a dozen different beliefs about yourself and how the world works.

Each of these will need to be brought into alignment, until finally the target of your work itself can be brought into alignment.

It’s just the nature of working on complex things.

So my advice is this: keep pushing, keep going. Once you know what you what you want to do – the areas of your life where you would like to grow and mature – just hold it in your mind and keep going.

And remember it’s probably not going to be a linear journey. You’ll have to fiddle with a dozen different gears before you get the one you want.

But stay focused. Just hold it in your mind, and do the work that presents itself to you – even if you don’t get what the connection is. Just keep working.

There is a deeper intelligence at play – the intelligence of complexity.

You’ll create the change you want eventually. It will happen. Just keep going.

Because no one said being complex was easy.

The art of making meaningful change

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Holiday down here in Melbourne today. Something to do with some type of sporting event. Footy grand final they call it, and of course the Victorians get a day off.

Not to worry, it’s only costing the local economy about a Billion dollars.

…But I am still hard at it and there’s no rest for the No B.S.

Let’s get into it

Ok, I want to tell you a tragic story. There’s no happy ending here, but I promise there’s some interesting lessons.

It’s about an American woman I met one time – a personal trainer. This is about her journey from riches to rags… and then more rags I guess. I lost track of her, but it seemed like her fate was sealed.

In her twenties and thirties she had it all. She was young and hot. She had a successful personal training business, a hot boyfriend, and a stylish inner-city apartment. This was the late 90s, but if there had been Instagram she would have had quite a following.

She also had an entrepreneurial streak, and she came up with a weight loss system that she was getting some good results with.

She wanted to take it global. Be the next Jenny Craig or whatever.

But she realised that if she was going to get that kind of reach, her brand needed to be more relatable. Women weren’t going to take weight-loss advice from a woman who had never been bigger than a size 8.

So she decided to be her own proof of concept. The idea was simple. She’d put on a tonne of weight, and then use her own method to shed it all.

In one swoop it would have been both the proof of the pudding and the inspirational back-story she needed – it would have sent her relate-ability factor through the roof.

And so she engaged a film crew to document the whole process for her. She raised investment funding from some rich friends, and gave her self eighteen months – 15 months to do the journey up and down the scales, 3 months in post-production, and then bam. Launch time.

It was all a great idea. Genius in fact. In theory…

Only it didn’t work out that way.

Putting on weight was easy. This was New York in the 90s. There was no shortage of unhealthy eating options available to her. She also had a body-type that was amenable to weight gain.

She piled on the pounds.

But there is healthy weight gain and there is unhealthy weight gain. There’s being a Viking and eating whole sheep for dinner every day of your life. And then there’s suddenly stuffing yourself with deep fried chicken and ice-cream sundae’s every day of every week.

Her body really wasn’t ready for it. In the end it triggered a hereditary liver condition, and she even ended in in hospital for observation for a week.

No worries, she thought. This is perfect. This is where I hit rock bottom. We’ll get some awesome footage of me in a hospital bed with a drip in my arm.

Now it’s time to bounce back.

Only bouncing back wasn’t so easy. Her system had been designed for women looking to lose a few kilos – not obese people with ongoing liver conditions. She found she just wasn’t up for the regime she had prescribed her self.

Partly it was just beyond where she was at, but partly it was about motivation. She wasn’t a perky fitness instructor with energy to burn anymore. She was now someone who broke a sweat getting up off the couch. Sometimes she just couldn’t do it – couldn’t get off the couch at all.

A big part of her work as a fitness instructor was giving people the motivation they needed. But who was going to do that for her now? She was too proud to let anyone help – that would have undermined the hero narrative she was building – but she wasn’t winning every battle with her will either.

And so the tight schedule she had set for herself and her production team – it started to look iffy. She tried to project confidence, but her team was starting to doubt her.

And her personal confidence was taking a hit too. She didn’t love the way she looked – not at all. And the world responds in a particular way when you’re a perky fitness model, and in another way when you have fried chicken stains on your singlet.

Her boyfriend was a case in point. Seems he realised that a large part of his attraction to her was physical, and she somehow found out that he had started banging another one of the gym bunnies down at the club.

It was a pretty crushing blow. When he moved out, she took it pretty hard, though she tried to put on a brave face for the cameras.

Ok, new rock bottom.

But then nothing comforts depression like food, and in her sorry state, she found herself making excuses. Maybe fried foods could be part of her diet. Maybe her regime could allow space for special treats – at 3 a.m, staring into the freezer.

Maybe if you have the right affirmations and beliefs, chocolate wouldn’t actually translate into weight gain.

Long-story short, she was no longer the same person. She was no longer a fitness model trying to lose a few kilos.

She was someone with depression, self-doubt, eating disorders and an ongoing liver condition, trying to lose what was now quite a few kilos.

It had become a monumentally bigger challenge.

And this now triggered a crisis of purpose. Do I really want to be the next Jenny Craig? What’s so great about being thin anyway? Why can’t we just love each other for who we are? Why is everybody so superficial? Why is the world just so horrible and nasty?

Maybe I don’t want to be a fitness guru. Maybe I want to be a love guru.

At this point, the camera crew just stopped showing up. It was clear that there was no way they were going to come close to meeting their schedule, and the funding had dried up anyway.

She also had to move out of her apartment. She had no income coming in and she had burnt all her financial backers – though they were very understanding and sent their well-wishes.

She also needed to find an entirely new line of work. She didn’t look the part of fitness instructor any more. Her old clients had all moved on. New clients weren’t interested.

And so she left New York. Moved back home to the small country town she came from. Got on to disability benefits with her liver condition, and started working some part time gigs cleaning houses or down at the convenience store.

And that, as far as I know, is where her story ends.

She rolled the dice. She lost.

Poor love. It’s a sorry tale. The least we can do is try and learn something from it.

What I find interesting about this story is what it says about our ability to make decisions and create meaningful changes in our life.

In theory and in isolation, it’s easy. Lose weight. Give up cigarettes. Quit your job and do a Cert IV in Interior Design.

But these things are never in isolation. There are always multiple currents pulling your life in one direction or another. A liver condition. A bad break up.

But it’s not only that. Our capacity to make decisions and execute them is also in flux. They swing with our mood and energy levels.

And this is the crucial mistake I think this woman made. It was easy to envision herself doing the hard yards involved in losing weight when she was in peak form – when she was energised, motivated and full of self-confidence.

But these things aren’t incidental. They are key ingredients in success. If depression hits and your motivation goes, you’re not in a position to tackle anything, no matter what task you’ve set yourself.

But having always enjoyed good health, having always enjoyed strong drive and self-confidence, this woman just failed to realise how important these things actually were…

… until they were gone.

I saw a really interesting TED talk the other day. In it, a guy name Rutger Bregman argues against the idea that poor people are poor because they make bad life choices.

Rather he argues that causality runs the other way. Poor people make bad life choices because they have no money.

When you don’t have a job or job prospects, when you have no stable social network, when you have no self-esteem or respect, hey, why not do meth?

… or any of the lesser evils like smoking or fast food?

It is much easier to make good financial decisions, and good life decisions, when you’re standing on stable financial ground already.

Anyway, I think this has two important implications for us.

The first, is remember to be compassionate. Someone might be making some life choices that you strongly disagree with – that you would never do yourself.

But maybe they’re making those choices because they’ve never enjoyed the privileges that you’ve enjoyed in life.

Decisions don’t exist in isolation. Our entire personal histories come to bear on each and every one.

The second is be careful not to think of the success journey in purely technical terms. Yes, strategies and techniques are important. But mindset, energy levels, motivation and commitment – all these things are crucially important.

I mean hey, that’s the whole reason I do these No BS blogs. It’s not for my benefit.

(Ok, it’s partially for my benefit, but this is about you, ok?)

If you are trying to turn your life around, be prepared to think holistically. Be prepared to look at our relationships, your fitness, even your diet! – as well as your finances.

I can’t promise you a happy ending. Fate has a role to play as well.

But this is will maximise the chances of success.

And that’s as much as any of us can hope for.

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Shock! House prices to fall 80%!

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I show you how the media industry actually works, so you can stop yourself from being sucked into their shenanigans.

80%?!?! That got your attention, right? All eyes on me.

(Look at me, look at me, look at me, Kimmy.)

This is exactly how the media industry works. Attention is the most valuable commodity there is. And there are all sorts of tricks out there to suck you in.

But I’m going to break it down, so you know exactly how it works, and how you can protect yourself from it.

But hang on… So that just a joke then – about house prices falling 80%?

Nah. That could totally happen. All it would take is for the Earth’s magnetic poles to reverse (it’s happened before, it will happen again!), unleashing a cataclysm of earthquakes, tidal waves and volcanoes.

Then, just as what’s left of humanity is picking up the pieces, bam, deadly Ebola virus outbreak.

In that scenario, I predict Australian house prices would fall 80%, perhaps even 85%.

Someone put me on the telly.

Ok, how are you feeling right now? Probably a little annoyed right? You read the title, wanted to find out more, and then realised that Jon was on another of his benders.

(Why wife calls it “Margarita Madness”).

I’ve taken time out of your busy day, and wasted it with some inane ramblings.

Just like 60 minutes did.

Last Sunday, Chanel 9's 60 Minutes program, did a terrifying piece on Australia’s looming house price crash. In it, they suggested house prices were about to fall a massive 40%, and they made it sound like that is what a lot of smart and important people were expecting.

Only they weren’t. The 40% figure came from Dr Martin North – a bonafide data nerd. He’s actually pretty good – I’ve used some of his statistics in this blog before.

The thing was, that wasn’t what North was actually saying was going to happen. What he actually said is that there was an outside chance that house prices could fall that much, If (and it’s a big IF) there was some kind of re-run of the global financial crisis.

Thing is though, 60 Minutes chose to edit all that out. You had to actually go to his blog (and how many people did that?) to get the complete picture:

… It is not my central scenario. My best call would be in the region of 15-20% from top, over 2-3 years, but with some risk of a worse outcome. Nine chose not to cover these alternatives, though I went through each in the recording…

So yeah, if there was another GFC, it’s conceivable house prices could fall 40% (for a time). And if the magnetic poles reverse, it’s conceivable house prices could fall 80%.

So what’s going on here?

Partly this is about that old saying that “good news never made a paper sell,” but it’s more than that.

As some one who works at the coal face of marketing, there’s some tried and tested marketing strategies at work here, and 60 Minutes gave us a text-book case in execution.

The term you need to know is ‘disturbance marketing’.

This is the idea that before you can sell someone anything, you need to get their attention.

Trouble is, getting someone’s attention is hard. People just tend to put their heads down and go about their lives, generally trying to ignore the gazillion sales pitches they get on any given day.

And so, as a marketer, one of your key challenges is to jolt them out of this slumber. You need to find a way to break up their routine so they actually start paying attention. You need to disturb them.

And so the prospect of a 40% fall in house prices, or that fact that “Australia’s debt bomb is about to explode”, would be very ‘disturbing’.

Job done. You have our attention.

The key thing that follows then is an emotional hook. You’ve stopped us in our tracks. You now need to grab us by the heart strings and hold our attention.

And to that end, 60 Minutes trotted out three ‘victims’ of the coming housing crash.

All three were struggling to make their mortgage repayments (OMG, imagine if that was us!). One was sick, one was unemployed, and one had just seen their interest only loans rolled over to principal and interest.

Now at this point, it all just struck me as pretty strange. I mean take the sick bloke and the unemployed bloke. Should it come as any surprise that they’re struggling to meet their mortgage repayments?

I mean, imagine the headline: “Shock: Man with no income struggles to pay his mortgage”.

It’s hardly news right?

And then there’s the guy who was just about to retire, but then the bank rolled the loans on his portfolio of investment properties over to principal and interest.

That’s right, he had a “portfolio” of investment properties. They didn’t say how many, but it looked like a few.

Also, he had to have known it was coming. All interest only loans roll over at some point (usually after 3 or 5 years). So it was hardly a shock that he had to start paying more.

“Shock: Banks make man follow payment schedule outlined in his mortgage application”.

But I’m looking at these three stories, and I’m wondering what they’ve got to do with anything.

But they’re not there as evidence. They’re there purely to make you go, OMG, imagine if that was me. Imagine if I was in those shoes.

You have my complete and undivided attention.

And at that point, your prospect is primed for your sales pitch. But hang on, 60 Minutes doesn’t have a sales pitch..? Oh, but that’s right. Their sponsors do.

Roll commercials.

And this is how the media industry works.

So long story short, 60 Minutes is scaring the good folks of Australia, because that’s how they sell advertising air time.

It is regrettable that such a trusted institution is playing this game, but that’s just how it is, and how it’s always been.

You might also wonder if 60 Minutes is the hard hitting news force it used to be.

Because what followed the housing story?

A story about a woman who worries that the people who said they would clone her dead dog for her, just went out and bought one from the pet shop.

Just saying.

JG

No B.S. Friday: This Guy’s Interview Sent Sane People Bonkers

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The reaction to Steve Bannon’s interview was as predictable as it was off-beam. This is why it’s dangerous.

This is one of those things you get used to, but then you step out of the country for a bit, and you realise how ridiculous it actually is.

I’m talking to the reaction to Steve Bannon’s interview on ABC’s 4-Corners program.

The general flavour of the flak the ABC is getting is that they shouldn’t be in the business of ‘enabling psychopaths’.

The poor ABC must feel like there’s no way they can win. Conservatives continually accuse them of bias, but then when they actually interview a conservative, the progressives start howling at the moon.

Andrew Bolt had the inside running:

The Four Corners interview with Steve Bannon this week has caused a deep rift at the ABC between those who believe holding figures like Bannon to account is exactly what the flagship program should be doing and those who are unhappy the former White House adviser and Breitbart editor was given an ABC platform.

Those in the first camp include, of course, the interviewer, Sarah Ferguson, and her executive producer, Sally Neighbour, and established ABC stars Leigh Sales and Virginia Trioli.

Those in the other camp tend to be the younger, more ethnically diverse journalists including ABC Life’s Osman Faruqi and digital news producer Jennine Khalik.

Unbelievable. Have all those social justice warriors learnt nothing in the past couple of years?

First, how is Steve Bannon not interview worthy? He was literally one of the key figures behind getting the most controversial American president elected, ever. Of course, we should be taking an interest in what he’s got to say.

Especially, for the record, what he’s got to say about China. He reckons the US is at ‘economic war’ with China, and Australia is at risk of becoming a ‘tributary state’ if we don’t start taking them more seriously.

That is definitely an opinion that needs more air-time. I find the press’s silence on China, which, remember, is still pretty much a totalitarian dictatorship with clear global ambitions, just baffling. Almost conspiratorial…

Anyway, back to the ABC story. So the ABC go and interview arguably one of the most important figures of our times, love him or hate him, and progressives go into conniptions about it.

The ABC should not be giving “ethno-nationalist racists” a platform, they argue. The media, and especially the ABC, should “challenge enthno-nationalism through a journalism that reflects Australia’s diversity.”

And that means, apparently, not talking about it all.

Seriously, what world are they living in?

They seem to believe that if they can ‘control the discourse’ – control what gets said where and the sorts of ideas that people get exposed to, then they can control reality.

There is all sorts of wrong with this.

First, f#&k off and leave me alone, Dad. What kind of paternal crap is it where you don’t trust people to have exposure to controversial ideas?

Seriously, do we really think that listening to some of Steve Bannon’s ideas is going to flip a regular, latte-sipping suburban liberal into a cross-burning racist? Really?

And rather than dealing with the expressions of the problem, why not deal with the actual causes? Why not start wondering why Trump’s ‘deplorables’ are feeling totally f%@ked over by the elite and the global trading system. Ask them about their tragically high suicide and substance abuse rates, their broken communities. Ask them why they’re looking for radical solutions.

But no, the left’s solution is to throw piss-bombs at the movement’s figure-heads, and yell “racist” at any one who takes an interest.

Second, even if it was a good idea, you just can’t control reality this way.

We know this at a personal level. We call it “repression”.

I mean, imagine if my heart was yearning to be an inner-city theatre director with a small dog. But the controlling mind of me decided that I needed to be a construction worker with a SUV.

Historically our strategy has just been to try and banish any tendencies to take an interest stage design at their inception. Treat them as a thought crime. Beat my self up about it. Get angry at my inner theatre director, and then at all theatre directors. Smother, shut down, deny.

This is repression. And we know it doesn’t work. It doesn’t solve the problem, it just makes the problem show up somewhere else.

This is literally the left’s strategy with Trump and Bannon.

It’s not acknowledging pain or any problem at all. As soon as anyone speaks to that pain, they get shut-down, denied.

So that pain will find an outlet, one way or another.

And what I would say to those bleeding heart liberals is that if you actually wanted to create another Hitler, an actual populist monster, this is exactly how you would go about it.

Apply more and more pressure on the working people while denying any outlet for their pain.

Sooner or later, boom.

From where I sit, it’s as obvious as the nose on my face.

But seriously, Australia and the ABC are just lost in a dream.

No BS Friday: Why I’m betting on ‘lazy’ Greeks and Buying Property

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The international community isn’t betting on a Greek recovery yet, even though the signs are there. Are they telling the wrong story?

How do we understand abuse?

There’s an interesting phenomenon that psychiatrists have observed in victims of child-hood abuse.

The child will often construct a narrative that they are somehow ‘bad’. That they somehow ‘deserve’ the abuse they receive. That they did something ‘wrong’.

And this happens even if the adult figures in that child’s life are not contributing to this story at all. Even if they never tell them that they’re ‘bad’.

The child just comes up with it on their own.

The way psychiatrists explain it, there’s a comfort in understanding where your abuse is coming from, particularly if it has something to do with something you can somehow control (your own ‘badness’ for example).

The idea that the abuse you are suffering is random or completely out of your control just compounds the suffering. It puts you in a total state of helplessness, constantly on edge.

So a story that you somehow ‘deserve’ the abuse – that there is some reasonable logic to it, that maybe it is even ‘just’ – that becomes a strange sort of comfort.

(So sad that any child would have to lie to themselves in this way.)

But I think it points to a tendency we all have – a survival tactic we all have: we will lie to ourselves if it makes us feel better.

I’m in Athens right now – centre of the Greek universe. I’ve been to Greece every year for the past seven years now. I’ve watched the crisis unfold.

… and unfold and unfold and then keep unfolding. Like some magical foldy flag of misery.

And I’ve seen the effect it has had on the people.

At first, there was just confusion. Then anger. Then more confusion. Then confused anger. Then sadness, depression and resignation.

This year there is hope. I’m feeling that. There’s a change in the air. Things are happening. But this story will take a long time to get over.

It’s like there is a lingering depression. A self-doubt that will take some time to shake. It’s there at a national level. Like people are wondering if Greeks themselves are up to the challenge.

This is a sad thing to see come into the national character.

In part, it has a lot to do with European lecturing. The righteous finger wagging at the ‘lazy Greeks’. The Greeks who partied too hard and now refuse to pick up the tab. The reckless and irresponsible Greeks.

You hear that enough and you start to wonder if it’s true.

I mean, obviously, it isn’t. Even if the blame did lie on the Greek side of the economic ledger, it’s ridiculous to go and start blaming Greek people en masse.

I mean, the Australian cricket team got caught cheating. Now imagine that the whole world thinks that all Australian’s are cheaters, and treats you accordingly.

Worse still, imagine that the world judged you on the standards set by our politicians. I mean, would you let anyone in Canberra represent the Australian people, the Australian work-ethic, the Australian moral character to the world?

Of course not. (I mean, except Barnaby Joyce, obviously.)

But this is what Greek people have been copping for the better part of a decade – that this is their fault. Even if they weren’t the ones in government signing up to onerous, foreign currency denominated debts – the debt crisis was still, somehow, ‘their’ fault.

It’s not about complex monetary arrangements. It’s about the Greek character. It’s about what it means to be Greek.

And the complexity is a killer too. Huge pieces of the puzzle are still hidden from the public, and those that are on the public record, are often pretty hard to get your head around.

We’re talking about what it means to give up your sovereign currency and join a pan-European monetary block. We’re talking about how much responsibility lenders should take for the loans they made via various financial instruments. We’re talking about the best way to pump prime an economy after crisis.

None of this is clear-cut. Economists are totally divided. The public is just totally lost.

I mean, I could tell you a story.

I could tell you a story about a national government and a European commission getting high on their own hubris. How they sold the world on the miracle of ‘integration’ – the idea that integrating with Europe would mean that Greek living standards would rapidly ‘catch-up’ and that would, therefore, mean massive leaps in Greek economic growth.

I could tell you a story of the banks that believed that hype, and were more than willing to lend easy money to the Greek government. I could tell you about a run-up in government debt that didn’t really worry anyone at the time – not the Greek government, not the banks and certainly not the European Commission, because everyone thought the miracle of integration would run for decades.

I could then tell you a story about the Global Financial Crisis that just came as a massive flipping wake-up call to all of this.

I could also tell you about a little sovereign nation that no longer had its most important policy levers available to it. It couldn’t devalue its currency, as Australia would and has done. It couldn’t print money either, as America did. It had given its economic sovereignty to Europe.

And what was Europe worried about? It’s banks. Not Greece, and definitely not the Greek people, it was worried about it’s banks going under.

And so rather than going bankrupt (which in hindsight would have been a much better option for Greece), the IMF made the largest loan in its history (relative to contributions) to keep the Greek government solvent.

Which is really to say, to keep the Greek creditors solvent. Over 70% of the money coming from the IMF went straight into the pockets of creditors. Europe wasn’t bailing out Greece. It was bailing out its own banks.

At the same time, a just-never-seems-to-work Austerity agenda was enforced on Greece. Wages were cut, taxes were raised, anything profitable and not nailed down was sold off – ports, railways, shipping lines, you name it. European venture vultures made off like bandits.

And the Greek economy just never recovered… because it was never meant to recover. All this was about protecting European banks and protecting Europe. Greece was to be sacrificed for the greater Europe.

And so almost ten years on, the Greek economy is still down a massive 25% from its peak. More than 400,000 Greeks have just up and left the country. House prices are down 43%. Unemployment is still an unfolding tragedy.

But Europe was saved, so, you know, totally worth it.

That’s the story. It’s a story for the ages.

But then, that’s just the story I’m telling. The way I see it, Greece got screwed, and there just isn’t anything wrong with the economy, the people, or Greece’s future.

But I have an interest in these things, and I’m happy to spend my leisure time reading about it, but what do I know really?

Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. I can guarantee the truth is a lot more complex than whatever I’ve got in my head.

But if someone like me, with a nerdish interest in this stuff, is having trouble putting the pieces of the puzzle together, how is the average Greek person going with it?

It must just seem random, right?

But we know that random is terrifying. We feel much better if we think that things have a reason.

And so here comes the ‘lazy Greek’ story again. This happened to us because we’re lazy, because we’re irresponsible, because we couldn’t get the politicians organised to sort it out.

I can’t tell you what it was, but it was our fault.

Victims blaming themselves.

This is the real tragedy of this crisis, and sadly, I think it’s going to take years to get over.

But in adversity there is also opportunity.

Because things are definitely picking up, and as I said, now that the Troika has packed up and left, the fundamentals look primed for recovery.

The vibe on the street this year is definitely different. There are less shops for rent. There’s new cafes opening up. A few new hotels.

And people are letting themselves feel hopeful.

And even the property market, which has taken an absolute battering, things are really picking up. Some markets I’ve been watching have doubled in just a few years. Off a low base, sure, but still you’re doubling your money.

Of course a lot of the buyers aren’t locals. They’re Chinese, Russians, Americans, Israelis.

They’re looking at a Mediterranean location, with all that sun and beauty, on the doorstop of Europe, with full access to European markets, and things look like an absolute steal.

I do a bit of travel, and seriously, if it wasn’t for the lingering cloud of the crisis, most Greek cities are massively undervalued.

A lot of the activity here in Athens is around the e150-300K mark. For that price you can get a decent city-centre, 80-150sqm, 2 bedroom apartment – more of a townhouse really.

To most foreign investors (like me) that’s a bargain.

So my prediction is that we’ll see an internationally-lead recovery in property prices. The local sentiment cycle is already turning, but once they see foreigners loading up on bargains, Greeks will be quick to cash in as well.

(Greece also has a Golden Visa program to wealthy individuals, giving them full access to Europe. That’s going to be very attractive.)

And so in maybe four years, we’ll have doubled back to previous all time highs… that’s kind of what I’m thinking.

And I’m already looking around. I’ve teamed up with an old friend and local investor to form a small syndicate to purchase a few city buildings.

One example we were looking at is a derelict 8-storey building at a fire-sale price of 1.5 million euro. That’s less than 200K per storey!

… with 12 months settlement!

Wow.

And from where I sit, it’s very easy to see the price doubling in 3 to 4 years.

Now some people will say I’m crazy to invest in Greece. Why would you take a risk on those lazy, irresponsible Greeks? You can’t trust them.

But that’s not the people I know, and it’s not the story I believe.

I see a people who just got screwed over. It’s rattled their confidence.

But they’ll bounce back soon enough.

And I’m backing them all the way.

No BS Friday: Hyper Death Triangles – why our democracy is f$@ked

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There’s a serial killer stalking our Prime Ministers. But nobody is talking about it.

So just who did kill Malcolm Turnbull?

I wasn’t sure I was going to wade into this one. It’s not like there’s a shortage of digital ink being wasted on the topic.

But that was sort of the thing. A lot of what I was reading was just wasted ink. It was miles off. I’m kind of surprised that nobody really seems to be getting it.

So let’s reopen the case. Just who or what killed Malcolm Turnbull?

There’s a long line of suspects being fingered in the mainstream press. Was it his climate and energy policies? Was it gay marriage? Was it the arch-conservatives and Tony Abbot lobbing bombs from the back bench?

Or was it Rupert Murdoch? (I think it probably isn’t a coincidence that Turnbull gets knifed just weeks after Murdoch lands in the country, but while Ol’ Rupe might be responsible for the timing, I don’t think he’s to blame for the fact.)

Was it GetUp and a conspiracy of Unions?

I would say, leaning against the mantle, lighting a cigarette, it was none of the above.

Da Da daaaa.

I think all this fingering of people and policies just misses the point.

I think what we’re actually looking at here is a structural issue. The Prime Minister is a dead duck – no matter who’s got the top job.

The way I see it, we’ve kind of set up a system that is impossible to sustain. It has no integrity. The centre cannot hold. It’s designed to fall apart.

And I reckon if we don’t figure out how to make it workable, it’s going to take democracy down with it. I give it two to three years tops.

And the serial killer is not Abbott or Dutton or Rupert or any one personality. It’s what I call ‘hyper death triangles’.

Hyper Death Triangles.

(Yup. I’m coining a new phrase there. Pretty sexy right?)

But let me break it down. The first thing we’ve got to get our heads around is what the Prime Minister’s job actually is.

Now, you might think that the PM’s job is to ‘lead the country’. To formulate and deliver the policies that will help us build our wonderful nation.

That’s cute. You could win an all-schools essay writing competition with that.

But that’s not what the PM’s job is.

The PM’s job is to keep the rabble of his party together, raise a sh!t-tonne of money, and then win enough votes to come round and do it again.

That’s it.

There’s three parts hidden in this equation, and I reckon they’ve become impossible to square away. That’s why I call it a death triangle.

So let’s break it down. The MPs are the first point of our ‘death triangle’. Everyone’s focused there right now, so lets begin our analysis there.

It is true that this was a bug-bear for Turnbull. As one of the ‘wetter’ members of the party, he was always going to be at odds with the ‘drys’ – the more conservative wing – and that wing is significant.

That’s always been a challenge for any Prime Minister, but I reckon it has got all the more curly in recent times with the explosion of ‘echo-chamber thinking’.

MPs are like everyone else in society. These days, we just don’t get exposed to opposing views any unless we actively seek them out. We subscribe to news and opinion channels that give us the facts and angles that already align with our existing beliefs.

Yeah, no thanks. We don’t have to suffer the discomfort of being challenged in our beliefs any more.

(Unless you’re reading this blog of course because I am completely unbiased).

Anyway, these echo chambers give us the impression that everyone already agrees with us. It makes alternative views seem completely fringe and left-field.

That then makes us diminish them. ‘Why should I compromise with people who disagree with me? There’s only like four of them.’

As a result, everyone in politics believes they represent the ‘silent majority’. (Watch out for that phrase).

And that means that they’re not going to tolerate a leader who doesn’t embrace their ideas fully. (Cory Bernardi just up and left the party altogether).

So balancing the demands within your own party has become very, very difficult.

(Especially if you believe that some of their more ‘colourful’ views might get you annihilated at the ballot box.)

But that’s not the only balancing act. Because a Prime Minister’s ‘backers’ also includes some very powerful lobby groups and their industry masters.

These money-bag men are the next point in our death triangle.

More than ever, money talks in Canberra. And whether it’s the mining lobby or the pharmaceutical industry, you have to be developing policy that very carefully tends to their interests.

I mean take a recent Price WaterHouse Coopers Liberal Party fundraiser. For just $12,500 a head, you could literally buy time with the politician of your choice, as well as a seat at an ‘intimate’ dinner with the PM and cabinet.

PWC called it ‘The Policy Exchange’.

A stock exchange is a place where you buy stocks. A policy exchange is where you buy policy, apparently.

Anyway, I’m not telling you anything new here, but Turnbull, who was a always a business man more than a politician, did seem to be pretty tangled up in his commitments to his financial backers. To name just a few examples, he found himself hopelessly wedged:

• Between the demands of the east-coast gas cartel and rising electricity prices.

• Between business tax cuts and a population who just couldn’t see the need to give the big banks a hand out.

• Between a religious base and a population who had moved a long way on gay marriage in recent years.

• And between a business lobby keen on massive immigration and population growth, and a population seeing their infrastructure under strain and their standards of living collapsing.

He just couldn’t square these things away. And to be fair, how could he? There’s no middle way here.

There’s just a conflict of interest – between what’s good for the lobbyists and their financial backers, and what is going to win you votes.

And that brings us to the third point in our triangle – the voting public.

The voting public expects that the Prime Minister should be there primarily to serve their interests, which they generally conflate with the interests of the country.

(I know. So entitled.)

But too often they felt themselves come off second best to the interests of the party or the party’s financial backers. Voters have felt increasingly alienated from politics, and rage has been brewing for years.

(Trump pretty much rode it into the White House. Hanson will try and do the same.)

But the voting public has become more energised in their demands recently too. Like politicians, they’re stuck in echo-chambers where they believe that they occupy the ‘sensible centre’ – no matter how fringe their views are.

They’ve also become acclimatised to a ‘customised culture’. If they get a vote on who goes through to the next round of Australian Idol, why shouldn’t they get to choose who is Prime Minister, or what countries we’re doing trade deals with or whatever.

The slow, disenfranchised cycle in politics, where you get one little vote every three to four years, is completely at odds with people’s day to day experiences, where they get to vote for mark of the year, or the classic catch of the season, or the name of the new Sydney Ferry, anytime, anywhere, simply from their phone.

As a result, the slow political cycle is increasingly frustrating.

And so this is what I mean by a Hyper Death Triangle.

The death triangle has always existed. It’s always been a tough gig to manage these demands – the demands of your MPs, your financial backers, and the voting public.

But it has become exponentially harder in recent years. MPs are more uppity because they’re living in personal echo chambers like everybody else, thanks to Facebook and the polarisation of media.

Businesses and financial backers are harder to work with because lobbying has become a highly professional industry, and there’s just a lot more money out there.

And the voting public has also become more intense in their demands, because they’re living in a customised culture where they get to have a say on everything all the time.

And so while we weren’t looking, the Prime Ministers job has actually become impossible. It is just impossible to navigate a hyper death triangle – not just on any one issue, but on all the issues that come across a Prime Minister’s desk.

It’s a flipping swarm of hyper death triangles!

And so when we try to understand what Turnbull did wrong – or what Abbott, Rudd, Gillard etc. did wrong, we’re completely missing the point.

The game has simply changed. It’s a new reality. It just doesn’t matter who’s in the top job – the top job itself has become untenable.

But no, we’ll just keep complaining about the ‘current generation’ of Australia’s political leaders, without ever realising that the system itself is broken.

But what are we going to do? Keep lining politicians up against the wall, until the public gets so sick of the spectacle of firing squads that they rise up in revolution?

I’m serious here. I don’t think we can keep limping along like this. What have we got? Another couple of years at most?

We run the risk of writing ourselves off as a joke – internationally but also to ourselves.

Australian democracy itself is on the line here.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but I’m pretty sure it starts with recognising what the actual problem is. We’ve got to face up to the realities of our system, and think a new way forward.

So yes, Turnbull was disappointing. (I personally had very high hopes). But that wasn’t why he got axed.

The hyper death triangles got him in the end.

(Sexy right? Someone nominate me for a Walkley.)

No BS Friday: Death. It’s a bitch. Do this.

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I have two strategies for dealing with the randomness of life.

Ok, let’s get real.

The world is a terrifying place.

I know people look at me and think, “Jon, what on earth do you have to worry about?”

“You’ve got as much money as any sane man could want. You live in one of the most beautiful and prosperous countries on earth, at one of the most peaceful times in history. And those lessons you’ve been taking in armoured tank operation are really starting to pay off.”

“Surely, you’re as secure as man can be.”

And that is all true. But the world is still a terrifying place.

The truth is that despite my money, my social networks, my armoured tank and cache of 40-pound shells, I am still just a fragile clump of animated meat.

And all meat has a use-by date.

When I pause, in between drinks, sometimes the thought comes: “Death is coming for me too.” I don’t know when or where it’s going to get me, but I know that it will. There’s no way round that one.

And all the fortresses I build to protect me from suffering and misery – the money to buy me a certain standard of living, the social networks to insure me against misfortune, the sons to look after me in my old age – none of these are set in stone. They’re subject to the dice-rolls of fate, just like I am.

And even this tank would be pretty useless without fuel. I wonder how it would go in an apocalypse really.

As humans, we crave security. It’s a fundamental need. We need to know that we are safe.

But there are just no guarantees.

In fact the only guarantee really is that you’re going to die.

So it’s kind of ironic. The only guarantee we have is that, at some point, all our efforts to protect us from suffering and to keep us safe, will fail.

We are united in a common destiny and that destiny is compost.

(Ok, bear with me, this is going to become uplifting and inspirational soon, promise. I’ve just got to set the scene. For the time-being, imagine a beautiful woman climbing to the top of a mountain. Look. Look how happy and satisfied she is.)

 

The point I’m trying to make is that we give a lot of energy to trying to create ‘security’ for ourselves, but we’re giving a lot of energy to a fight we just can’t win. Not in the end.

I guess this is a feeling that comes over me every time I come to Greece. Greece is no stranger to disaster and calamity, and hidden in each of those history-book entries are thousands of stories of individuals having the rugs of security ripped out from under their feet.

Take the Greek Financial Crisis for example.

I’ve met loads of people whose lives were as secure as you could imagine before the crisis. They had iron-clad jobs with the government, in senior roles, paying very well. They had modest mortgages and made sensible financial choices. The people they hung with all did the same.

And then the crisis hits and bam. They either lose their job or are forced to take a massive pay cut. Now that modest mortgage becomes unmanageable, and they start eating into their savings (all the while worried if the money they put in the bank will actually be there when they need it!)

That’s ok, we’ve got enough to tide us over for a few years. But two years become four. Four becomes eight, then ten. You’re selling jewellery and the heirlooms your grandmother gave you, but it just isn’t enough.

Suddenly you’re in the cue at a soup kitchen, wondering what the hell happened.

You thought you were secure, but fate had other plans.

But the truth of it is that in the greater scheme of Greek history, the financial crisis is one of the more palatable disasters.

I’m thinking about the Smyrna disaster for example. Smyrna was the Greek name for what is now Izmir in Turkey.

Before World War I, Smyrna was a large cosmopolitan city and a peaceful home to Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

But after the war, Turkish forces entered the city and set fire to the Greek and Armenian quarters. Massive swathes of the city were razed, and up to 100,000 people were killed, and as many again became refugees.

Now you might say that the fate of people living in a foreign land was always going to be precarious, but there had been Greek people living in Smyrna for over 3,000 years, as boundaries shifted this way and that.

And I reckon the Greek people living there, with their businesses and ancient churches and large communities, would have thought that this war and geo-political argy-bargy would pass the same way, and leave them in peace.

But it didn’t. And any gold and wealth they had was stolen from them at the port… if they survived at all.

Security is pipe-dream.

Or go back even further. Like the city state of Thebes in Ancient Greece. Thebes is all of 50km from Athens, so it’s hard to imagine they were once enemies. It’s like Brisbane and the Gold Coast getting in each other’s grills.

Anyway, Thebes fell under control of the Macedonian empire under Alexander the Great. They were never happy about this, and in 335BC, when Alexander was off fighting another war somewhere, the leaders of Thebes rebelled.

Alexander wasn’t happy about this of course, and marched promptly back to Thebes to sort it out.

He surrounded the city and initially offered some favourable terms for their surrender, but the leaders of Thebes refused, and the city was laid to siege. It didn’t last too long, and Alexander showed the world that the girls of Ancient Greece didn’t call him ‘the great’ for nothing.

But he was worried about other cities getting uppity too, and so Alexander decided to make an example of Thebes. He slaughtered thousands in the fighting, and the 30,000 that survived were promptly sold into slavery.

He then DESTROYED THE ENTIRE CITY, burning every house to the ground.

Actually, not every house. He left he house of Pindar standing. Pindar was a famous lyric poet who had once said some nice things about Alexandar’s father, Phillip II.

So that was nice. He left his house standing. Thoughtful.

Anyway, within this epic would have been thousands of individual stories – of rich merchants and noblemen who lost everything. Entire houses and family dynasties destroyed.

And all the trappings of security they amassed – their wealth, their political influence, their slaves and personal guards – it all came to nothing.
Nothing can save us from our destiny of compost.

As Pindar himself wrote:

Creatures of a day! What is anyone?
What is anyone not?
Our mortal being is nothing,
Nothing but a dream of a shadow.

(Phillip was awesome
Please don’t mess me up.)

The grim point I’m trying to make is that fate is cruel and random. In the face of that, there is nothing that can guarantee your security and safety.

The best you can hope for is a series of temporary defences, before your own body just claps out and you die in your sleep.

(No wait. Seriously. Uplift coming soon. Remember. Pretty girl on a mountain.)

I have two strategies for dealing with this.

The first is I keep my skills sharp. My personal skills – the skills I can take with me anywhere.

I don’t know if you know, but I started out in sales and copywriting. Mostly my work life is more entrepreneurial and managerial these days, but I like to keep my writing skills sharp. That’s half the reason why I write these blogs – to stop my tools from going rusty.

(The other half is that I just like the sound of my own voice.)

But for me, if I know I have a capacity to create value, and that capacity is something that lives inside me – is not dependent on anything else – then that gives me a sense of security.

The second strategy is that I just try not to take it all too seriously. I try to make a discipline of facing the random cruelty of life, and just accepting that this is the game we are playing out here.

In a world where there are no guarantees, I try to just be ok with the downside.

And by that I mean, when that fear comes, as it does – when I become aware of my painfully vulnerable situation – I don’t try to block it. I don’t try to raise my defences or quickly turn my mind to other things.

I just try to be ok with it. “Yep, Jonno. That’s just our situation. Animated compost.”

If I can be with it for a bit, and when I realise that we’re all in the same boat, I can find a way to make peace with it. Life is just like this. A dream of a shadow.

And there is a bonus gift in here for lucky shoppers. When you are aware of how fragile and vulnerable life is, how lucky you are to know peace and security, then it becomes precious to you.

You become grateful for it, and live each day with a hunger to make the most of what you have.

I know that all sounds backwards. To live life fully, make a discipline of scaring yourself silly.

But that is just how it is.

You cannot protect yourself from fate. But you can squeeze the juice out of every wonderful day. That choice is yours.

No.B.S.Friday: Sorry. Not Special. I’m So Relieved!

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Mass culture is going through the most important rebirth of modern times.

Not everyone is strong enough to realise that they’re just not special.

I feel sorry for them. Those people still clinging to the idea that their life will ultimately mean something. That it has a purpose. That the universe or humanity cares much one way or the other what they do with their time here.

What a burden!

I think the “I’m special” mindset might go down as one of the shortest-lived cultural phenomena in history.

It’s a relatively new thing. Up until the television age, it was pretty much just kings and queens that suffered from the delusion that what they did mattered. That they were divinely selected for a life of special destiny.

Nowadays, that delusion is available to everyone. We mass produce it.

Our stories used to be about heroes – demi-gods effectively. Ulysses. King Arthur.

But with books, then cinema, then television, our stories became about everybody. They became ‘common’.

And that’s a great thing. Except that it sent the message that we could all be the heroes of our own movies. And we consumed that message, over and over again.

And so it became an affirmation. “I am special. I am the hero of this story. What I do totally influences how the story plays out. Everybody cares.”

We didn’t even realise we were buying into it, but we bought it hook line and sinker.

And having set up this unrealistic expectation, we then became miserable when the movie of our life kind of sucked. How’s that Fight Club quote go?

“We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

But I think we have now passed the peak of “I’m special”.

(Thank god!)

The internet makes information flow far and wide. It is incredibly hard to maintain the illusion that you’re special when you understand your tiny role in a population of 8-billion.

Even if you are one of the demi-gods of the moment – a Mark Zuckerberg or a Jeff Bezos or a Vladimir Putin – if you’ve got any sense of history you’ll know that you’ll have the world’s attention for the briefest moment.

We have all seen stars burn and then flame out. Whatever happened to Britney Spears?

And so in just a few years, you’ll just be another footnote to history… if you’re lucky.

And the rest of us won’t be remembered at all.

But don’t be sad. This is a delusion. The sooner we bury its sorry corpse, the better. And if the internet helps make the delusion untenable, then we should be grateful.

We are not special.

You are not special.

Ooohh. I know. Sorry. I know it’s a hard thing to hear.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that we are nothing but a brief and transitory clump of galactic compost, we cling to our belief that we are special like a drowning sloth clings to the timbers of a shipwreck.

I know this. As a blog writer. As a marketer. Nothing sells like, “you’re special.”

I could join those American guru’s with their “you’re special” sales pitches. I could join them pumping people up – “you’re special, you’re important, you’re going to change history. The school children of tomorrow will memorise your name and put your face against quotes you never actually said. “

But I never have and I never will. (Probably cost me a million dollars over a lifetime.)

Because it’s just not true. And nothing will make you more miserable than clinging to the idea that you’re special.

It’s such a heavy burden.

You want to know happiness? You want to know lightness? Let it go. Let go of the idea that you need to do or be anything.

Be ridiculous. Be silly. Be humble. Be insignificant. Be inconsistent and confusing to people.

Just don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t let the pressure of living up to some historical ideal distract you from the joy of living the life that is simply yours.

Live to make yourself happy, not get written up in a history book.

Let your own joy tell you you’re on the right path, not the roar of the crowd.

Do things because they’re fun, not because they ‘matter’.

The sooner you can let go of the idea that you’re special, the sooner you can start living a life you really love.

Be strong. It’s worth it.

No BS Friday: Why dirty people aren’t rich

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Would it be better to start treating money as a chore?

A few weeks ago I asked a provocative question: why haven’t you got your money situation sorted?

If it doesn’t feel like it’s sorted, then you should really ask yourself why. Your answer will be illuminating. Take a look at your excuses. How many of them are real? How many have relatively simple solutions?

(You might be surprised).

Anyway, I wanted to look at one excuse I get a bit. It goes something like, “I haven’t focused on money because I’ve been living the life I love and doing what I want.”

“What I want” might mean extreme BMX. It might also mean something more righteous, like feeding the homeless or saving the planet. Whatever.

But it’s the idea that I put energy into non-monetary but meaning-rich pursuits, and as a result, I don’t have much money.

There’s nothing really wrong with this, as long as you are genuinely happy with the results, especially the part about being poor.

But I find most people aren’t really all that happy about being poor, actually, once you ask the question.

I also don’t really get the level of analysis – like why we’re even setting money and meaning up as competing pursuits.

The way I see it, taking care of your finances is like taking care of your house – it’s like doing housework.

Very few people derive their life’s meaning from housework. But you very rarely hear people say, “I’ve chosen to spend my time on more meaningful pursuits, and so as a result, I live in squalor.”

No one would really buy that. They would say, “Don’t try and pull that crap on me again Jon. There are some things in life that you just have to do, that are just a basic part of living – they are basic responsibilities that create the foundation from which you can launch more meaningful pursuits. So give your mother a break and pick up your clothes.”

We all need structures that support us in life. Money is one of those structures. It’s not the only structure, but if you’re not going with money, you still need to go with something.

So taking care of your finances is as basic as taking out the garbage.

The other thing with it is that money is just one of many essential things we need to get by in the modern world. But it’s the only one that has the meaning razor applied to it.

For example, money is an energy that helps me do what I need to do.

So is food.

But I don’t spend time worrying about whether my eating habits are increasing the amount of meaning and happiness in my life.

And so a statement like, “I’ve decided to focus on the things that make me happy, so I’m spending less time making money” sounds like it makes sense. You might even get a pat on the back for being so righteous and wise.

But if it’s true then a statement like, “I’ve decided to focus on the things that make me happy, so I’m spending less time eating” should be equally true. But it’s not. You sound ridiculous.

And so giving less time to your money, to me, makes about as much sense as giving less time to eating, household chores, personal hygiene, and time spent in traffic.

Some things you just have to do.

Of course there is a sweet spot to be found. If you spent all of your day in the shower grooming yourself, you’re life would be pretty shallow. Likewise, if you spent all your time working and chasing money, you are also wasting your life.

But I think the solution is to see your finances as a sort of ‘cost of doing business’. As rent on planet earth. Time spent there is just a necessary expense.

The flip side of that is that money is not an end in itself. It’s like electricity. The wise person stays focused on what they’re going to do with the power they have, not the power itself.

And that’s all not to say that you should stay in a job that makes you miserable. There are better ways to earn money – methods that are better suited to your personality – just as there are nicer things to eat, better vacuums to use, more efficient ways to commute to work.

It’s worth spending the time finding the systems that work for you.

But don’t think you’re winning any righteous points by shirking your chores.

Pull the finger out and just get it done.