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No B.S Friday: Too busy making good money to make great money?

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We all do this inner calculation, and most of us get it wrong.

I went around to my mate’s place the other night, and we head into his study to do a bit of business.

He opens up the door an apologises,

“Sorry, the bulb’s blown in the light. I’ll just turn on the lamp.”

And then he fumbles his way over to the desk in the dark, and turns on the desk-lamp. It’s pretty dim, but it gives us enough to work with.

I say, “Is that still the same blown light bulb from last time I was here?”

“Um… oh. I don’t know. Possibly.”

“Mate that was like four or five months ago.”

“What? Really? No way.”

“Yeah, mate.”

And it starts to dawn on him that for four or five months he’s been stumbling around in the dark, pretty much every night, for the sake of one blown light bulb.

“Here. I’ll fix it while you’re booting up your computer.”

And so I unscrew the light shade, take out the bulb, follow his directions to the laundry where the new bulbs are kept, get a new one, put it in, screw the shade back on, and we’re done.

It was a little bit of mucking around, but no more than a five minute job.

There’s an interesting kind of arithmetic here that I think we can all relate to.

On any given day the calculation makes sense. It’s a five minute job, I’m only going to be in here for a few minutes, the lamp kind of makes it work. It’s not worth mucking around with. I’ll do it later.

And this makes sense. When you’re busy (and who isn’t?) the calculation adds up.

But zoom out to, say, a period of four or five months, and the calculation starts to look ridiculous. There’s hours of stumbling around in the dark, stubbing your toe, messing around with a lamp and it all could have been avoided with a simple five minute job.

It makes no sense at all.

But we live in this wonky arithmetic all the time.

If you look around at your life, how many things are just not quite right? The relationship with your partner or your mother-in-law. Your job. The storage situation in your pantry. Your garage.

None of them are bad. None of them are at crisis levels. But they’re not perfect either. It’s just not quite bad enough to do anything about… today.

I think this is why a human usually needs to find itself in crisis before it becomes committed to real change. If it can just muddle by, it will. There’s just so many things to do.

In that way the comfortable and the ok are the enemy of excellence. If we are busy (and everyone is), but comfortable enough, we can end up wasting decades in mediocrity.

It was like I was talking to an older fellah who had just retired. He’d done well for himself – he’d had a nice management job in the corporate sector. He’d put money away, and had a decent nest egg for retirement. He’d set himself up for a retirement that was going to be nice, comfortable enough. But it wasn’t going to be amazing.

As he said to me, “I was just too busy making good money to figure out how to make great money.”

So I think that if we want to live a life somewhere in the awesome spectrum – if we want to have a life that is several standard deviations away from the ordinary levels of wealth, excitement and fulfilment that most people enjoy, then we need to see that comfortable and ok are the enemy.

Partly that means keeping our focus in the long term. “If I fix this light bulb now, how much hassle will it save me over the next year?” “If I get a wealth strategy in place now, how much will that be worth to me over the next thirty years?”

But partly it’s about living at a different energetic level. It’s being in a space where as soon as you see you’ve got a blown light bulb, you jump into action and fix it. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired. It doesn’t matter if you’re busy. Just get it done.

Most people won’t or can’t live this way. They’ll leave change to moments of crisis.

But if you want to get out of the pack, you need to do things a little differently.

No BS Friday: What the tele-evangelist taught me about cashflow

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Hoarding is a human instinct, but it can skew your priorities as an investor.

Why do those hardcore Christians in America hoard food for the apocalypse?

Have you seen those guys? There’s like one particular tele-evangelist guy – says he’s a priest – that has a cable TV show. He got a bit of attention when Trump was elected because he firmly believed that Trump was God’s favoured candidate.

I would have thought if God was taking sides, he wouldn’t need our help to get his man elected.

[Shock: Divine hand identified in vote-rigging scandal.]

You might know him actually. His name is Jim Bakker. You might remember him from the 1980s, when “Jim and Tammy” (his wife), got convicted for embezzling $160 million from their flock.

And for you other property nerds, he convinced 165,000 people to fork over $1,000 each to help him build a resort at his Christian-themed water park. If they chipped in $1,000, they’d be entitled to a four-day stay in the resort, every year for the rest of their lives!

(The resort was never built.)

Anyway, without his signature hair and a new wife, he’s back on TV. And from what I can tell (and I could only watch so much), his new business model seems to be selling buckets of food to Christians.

Yup. Buckets of food. Buckets that have a 35-year shelf life. You can get curries, pancakes, slop. You name it. You can even get a Mexican themed “Fiesta Bucket”.

(Seriously, who on earth is buying this stuff.)

And for just a few thousand dollars you can buy yourself an 8-year supply of slop. And from the safety of your fortified bunker, you and your heavily-armed friends will be able to comfortably ride out the End of Times.

It all seems to be based on an unconventional interpretation of the Revelation. Normally, it says that the righteous will be raised up into heaven, and the rest of us (I’m guessing I’m probably not on that guest list), will be left to our own devices when the devil is given control of the world.

In Jim Bakker’s cosmology though, the righteous have to endure the Tribulations with all the other sinners before they can hope of being redeemed.

And Tribulations go better with a bucket of slop.

Yeah, nah, I still can’t get my head around this. I just can’t imagine how this makes sense to anybody. You believe in a God that is very picky about who is righteous and who is not, (a list that includes Donald Trump!), that God is very active in shaping the world to His liking, but when it comes time to wrap it up, he’s just going to leave all the righteous ones to their fate, so that only the ones with a big enough stash of slop will survive?

Am I missing something?

I think religions over the years have done a pretty good job of fingering people’s fears. And what I think happens is that our world has become so complex and so complicated, that many people feel an intense kind of fear that they just can’t name. They can’t get a handle on.

But then along comes the tele-preacher and says, yeah, there’s a good reason why you feel scared right now. That’s because there’s a massive wrath-God about to send the whole joint up in flames.

“Oh thank goodness. I thought I was crazy. That just makes so much sense. Better buy some buckets of slop then.”

It is a massive to release to be able to give your fears a name, and it is something that people will pay money for.

QED.

Anyway, this isn’t where I was planning on going with this piece. I didn’t plan to sink the boot into Jim Bakker and his sheep – sorry flock. What I find interesting about it is the psychology of hoard = safety.

This idea is primal and deep, but we need to disentangle ourselves from it is we’re going to make it in the world, and particularly make it as investors.

Let me break it down.

Hoarding is a fear response.

If you always believed that whatever you needed would come to you, you wouldn’t hoard anything. You’d just wait for it to arrive.

And I think most creatures on earth live like this. The only animals that hoard seem to be those that live in places with extreme winters, where the sources of food do all dry up. The rest lead a simple life. Eat when you are hungry. Make babies when you are full. Repeat.

Humans, however, hoard all the time. Not just through winter, but all the time. Our hoard instinct is constantly turned on.

And again, I think this comes from living in a world that is scary in ways that we just can’t understand.

Like, we can’t predict if the global economy will be up and running in a year or two, so better save up just in case. Better buy lots of food and weapons, and build up a bank of social credit so I can call in some favours if I need to.

We cannot predict what will happen, so we cannot predict what we will need.

(Spending several millennia growing crops that would periodically fail also probably drove this instinct pretty deep into the psyche.)

So hoarding is a natural response. It tempting to say it is humans being greedy, but I don’t think many people are taking more than they think they genuinely need. It’s just that they don’t know what they will genuinely need, and want to make sure they have a sufficient buffer.

Anyway, in a financial sense, we’re talking about wealth. Wealth is hoarded money.

And again, nothing wrong with that. I like wealth.

But as an investor, there’s something just as important as wealth, and that’s cashflow.

But cashflow doesn’t have an instinct driving it the way wealth does.

I mean, we like cashflow. We can see that it’s useful. We can tangibly get a sense of what it enables.

But it just doesn’t sit on top of an evolutionary drive the way wealth does.

I don’t get a soothing sense of safety out of my cashflow situation. But when I look at my bank balance, I breathe a sigh of relief.

(Ahhh. So many buckets of food right there.)

So where wealth accumulation is given a helping hand by our instincts, our drive to build cashflow is a little more naive, or pure. We’re like little birds, just eating the bugs as they come, when they come.

Cashflow comes when it comes. The seasons turn, rental income comes in.

But I think this difference helps us understand why most investors don’t give cashflow enough attention.

I mean, most get there eventually. After you’ve lost a few deals because you don’t have enough serviceability, you start to appreciate cashflow.

But when we’re starting out, most of us just aren’t giving cashflow the attention it needs.

And I think that is why many investors stumble three or four years into their journey.

If they’ve put all of their energy into wealth, and haven’t created any cashflow, they’re not really getting a first hand taste of the benefits. They’re stashing benefits away for a future self, but there’s nothing for them in the here and now.

You need cashflow to keep you nourished. It is a gift you can give yourself, either through some nice things, or best of all, free time.

Wealth is great, but cashflow is the juice of the here and now.

And since it is the juice of the here and now, it is in the realm of abundance.

When we’re focusing on cashflow, we’re closer to the birds and animals, just trusting that the rains will come, and the fruits will grow.

But as I’ve said before, the human is unique because it straddles time. It lives in the here and now, but must also live in the future as well.

And so there needs to be a balance. A balance between the here and now, and the future. A balance between the hoarding of wealth and the spending of cashflow.

The only point I want to make is that our drive for cashflow just doesn’t have the same biological drive that wealth has. So, left unchecked, we can naturally end up a little out of whack.

So my recommendation is, give a little more thought to your cashflow situation. In your mind, try to see it as just as important as your levels of wealth.

This is the ticket to being a harmonious and successful investor, I think.

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Scientists stumble on remnants of alien civilisation

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We may have just found the first proof that alien life exists.

Ok this is about space, aliens, theories of advanced technology, and the power of wonder. I’ve just had this stuck in my head this week, and I was wanting to right something about it, but it’s not property, it’s not makets, it’s not persuasion.

Where do I put it?

Of course. No B.S Friday. Because this is about being grateful for this wonderful strange old universe we’re living in.

So this all started about a week ago when someone sent this article about some weird asteroid to me.

So I had a look. I’m always wary about crack-pot theories about space on the internet, so I scroll down to see who wrote it.

Chair of the Astronomy Dept at Harvard. Ok, we’re not talking about some tin-foil hat crank then. This is science!

And what’s he writing about? The first ‘interstellar’ object ever discovered.

On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey. The experience was similar to having a surprise guest for dinner show up from another country.

They weren’t looking for it. They just happened across it. It was an asteroid, they think, but not one of those common ones that are trapped in our solar system. But one travelling between the stars, boldly going where no asteroid has gone before.

And it shot right through our solar system and out the other side.

But that’s not exactly right either. It’s more that our solar system, which is actually traveling quite fast, sailed right on past ‘Oumuamua, which was sort of stationary.

And this is where things start to get a bit weird:

‘Oumuamua is like a buoy sitting at rest on the surface of the ocean, with the solar system running into it like a fast ship. Could there be an array of buoys that serves as a network of relay stations or road posts, defining the average galactic frame of reference in interstellar space?

Now I’m starting to wonder if this is a spoof. But it’s on the blog of Scientific American. As far as I can see, it’s legit.

But it gets even weirder:

We do not have a photo of ‘Oumuamua, but its brightness owing to reflected sunlight varied by a factor of 10 as it rotated periodically every eight hours. This implies that ‘Oumuamua has an extreme elongated shape with its length at least five to 10 times larger than its projected width. The inferred shape is more extreme than for all asteroids previously seen in the solar system, which have a length-to-width ratio of at most three.

… The Spitzer Space Telescope did not detect any heat in the form of infrared radiation from ‘Oumuamua. Given the surface temperature dictated by ‘Oumuamua’s trajectory near the sun, this sets an upper limit on its size of hundreds of meters. Based on this size limit, ‘Oumuamua must be unusually shiny, with a reflectance that is at least 10 times higher than exhibited by solar system asteroids.

… The extra push exhibited by ‘Oumuamua’s orbit could not have originated from a breakup into pieces because such an event would have provided a single, impulsive kick, unlike the continuous push that was observed. If cometary outgassing is ruled out and the inferred excess force is real, only one possibility remains: an extra push due to radiation pressure from the sun. In order for this push to be effective, ‘Oumuamua needs to be less than a millimeter thick but with a size of at least 20 meters (for a perfect reflector), resembling a lightsail of artificial origin. In this case ‘Oumuamua would resemble the solar sail demonstrated by the Japanese mission IKAROS or the lightsail contemplated for the Starshot initiative…

Let me get this right, Abe. We found this weird object in space, that is most probably less than a millimetre thick and at least 20 metres long, but possible a couple of hundred metres long..?

And it’s just sitting there?

The Kepler satellite revealed that about a quarter of all the stars in the Milky Way have a habitable planet of the size of the Earth, with the potential to have liquid water on its surface and the chemistry of life as we know it. It is therefore conceivable that interstellar space is full of artificially made debris, either in the form of devices that serve a purpose on a reconnaissance mission or in the form of defunct equipment. However, to validate an exotic artificial origin for ‘Oumuamua, we need more data. As Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

I don’t really have anything to say about this. I’m not an astronomer and the opinions of an amateur philosopher aren’t really useful.

But I just wanted to share the sense of wonder that I felt. The way my mind spins beautifully when I imagine intergalactic civilisations leaving strange sign-posts just floating around in the cosmos.

The sum of human knowledge is still just a drop in the Ocean. There is still so much we don’t know.

And when we look at all the problems we face right now, that is comforting. We’re making a mess of things at the moment, but of course, we are. We don’t know anything about how the universe works, or what or who else is out there.

It drops me back into humility and wonder.

And I think we all need that from time to time.

JG

No BS Friday: Everything you want is yours… if you name it.

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Language is hard work, but there’s a deep an ancient power in naming what you want.

You have to give it a name.

“I don’t know Jon, that’s sounds kind of hard.”

I know. I get that. You go have a nice lie-down. Let me know when your ready to pull the finger out and do some real work.

But it’s there. It’s on the tip of your tongue. It’s waiting to be spoken. It’s waiting for you to wake your language into its freedom, so it can speak of the things that are still just beyond the reach of your dreaming.

It’s waiting for you to name it.

Your life.

But, I get it. Naming it is hard. I mean, even naming who you are today is hard. What do you really like? What do you really love to do? What are the scars you carry and how do they affect you now?

It’s hard work to get to know someone properly. Especially someone who likes to keep themselves hidden as much as you do. And harder still when you yourself have become complicit in the deceit – an agreement to not look too fully at your flaws, or meet your own eyes in the mirror.

A bald patch whose name cannot be spoken.

But you have to name it. You have to name as much of yourself as possible. Set out with a dozen camels and name every river, pass and mountain. You have to get to know yourself.

And beware the seductive and superficial names – the ones that are easy to take.

I knew a man who could rank his top ten whiskeys for you. He had figured out which golf clubs were right for his style of game. He could tell you why Suburus were the best in their class.

But he couldn’t tell you how much he loved his children, how much he mourned for his first wife, or if ultimately, he even wanted to be a builder or a dancer.

These things remained in the shadows beyond the reach of his naming. He never asked and he never saw.

And that’s not his fault. He had been raised in a culture of blindness – where you don’t explore your self too much, don’t pick at the surface. Keep the wounds covered and hope they heal in time.

His grandad lost two brothers to the war. His grandad’s grandad was a refugee from Ireland, who never saw his mother again.

Dig into any family history and there will be corpses of hurt held down by gravestones of ‘just getting on with it.’

That’s what humans do. We just get on with it. We turn a blind eye to the suffering that is too painful to bear alone (most suffering is too painful to bear alone), and we train ourselves to keep silent.

If it cannot be named then it can not take form.

Keep it hidden deep inside. Let the knots of grief and pain you carry unravel with your bones when you’re safely in your grave.

It might sound like I’m mocking it, but there is a nobility in this idea. We want to protect them from our pain. Don’t let the kids see it, they’re too young. Don’t let your friends see it, they have their own problems. Don’t let your parents see it, they’re too old to worry about you now. Don’t let yourself see it, there’s so many things you have to do.

Carry it with you to the grave. Release it beneath six feet of dirt, and the smothering weight of a tombstone. It will be safe down there. It will never find it’s way out to trouble any one.

But of course it does.

That’s not how it works.

Your hurt and your grief is not a zombie you can muzzle and bury in earth.

Your hurt and your grief shape who you are. And of course the contortion acts you pull throughout your life to keep it all hidden and to keep yourself blind – they shape you too.

And by those shapes, you kids will know it, and their kids will know it too.

Generations stalked by nameless ghosts.

But this is also not what I am talking about. I’m talking about you. I’m talking about how you name yourself and name your future.

But it is the same discipline. Putting what is hidden into words.

And yeah, it’s hard. I cut my teeth in copy-writing. Language is a bitch of a medium.

The way I experience it, it’s like there’s a barb-wire fence between the field of inspiration and the field of language.

In the field of inspiration, everything is possible. Nothing is named and everything is everything at once. Every possibility, every energetic form and movement. Every idea is perfect.

In the field of language though, that’s where these perfect ideas get distilled down into words, as imperfect and as limited as they are. They say that the Inuit people have 70 different words for snow. Australians have 70 different words for dingleberry.

But what if your language doesn’t have that sophistication and nuance? You just do the best you can. And the truth is, no language is perfectly sophisticated and nuanced. No language can name every point on the full spectrum of human emotion and experience. We’re all just doing the best we can.

And so what does writing feel like to me? It feels like I’ve got to jump over the barb-wire fence into the field of inspiration, grab a 300 pound ram, and wrestle the bloody thing back over the fence before it gets away from me.

… AND where I then have to apologise to people. “No really, I thought it was going to be awesome. Yes, no, it is a bit disappointing now you look at it… and you’ve got dingleberries on your shoes. Sorry.”

So naming things is hard.

Its doubly hard.

Naming your hurts is hard, because to get clarity on them you have to let them come alive within you. And naming your future is hard, because you have to learn what really excites your spirit.

But naming is also hard simply because the act of putting things into words is hard. It’s the most recent human faculty, and it’s a less than perfect process.

And lets’ be honest, fellahs in particular just don’t get all that much experience with the talky talky. So we are inexperienced users, trying to shape a bitch of a material with less than perfect tools.

Talk about a tough gig.

But it is important.

Why?

I think it’s exactly what I was talking about with staying blind to our hurts.

If it cannot be named, then it cannot take form.

This world is not a world of inspiration. Nothing is perfect. Your dreaming will always be bigger, more wild, more exciting than anything that this world can deliver.

Life’s still going to be awesome, but imagination knows no limits. This world does.

So the act of calling our life into reality is an act of drawing the inspiration that excites your heart into this fallible, fudgy old world.

And the first step in that is to give it a name.

“In the beginning was the word…”

And since that naming is doubly difficult by nature, we need to practice.

We need to take the time to start giving our dreams a vocabulary. Start building the capacity to put flesh on our inspiration.

(You say you want to go sky-diving, but is it the thrill of flight or the shiny jump-suits that gets you going?)

On this front, everything helps – vision boards, dream journals, chakara crystal suppositories. But everything helps – even just getting together with your mate at the pub and finishing this sentence: “You know what I think I really want in life, it’s…”

Just start talking it out. Just start throwing words at your dreams and see which ones stick. And forgive yourself if you don’t nail it straight away

… or even ever.

Just talk it out.

And this brings me back to what I said at the beginning: It’s waiting to be spoken. It’s waiting for you to wake your language into its freedom.

And by that I mean, it’s not an act of creation, but just an act of naming.

Just as your hurts lurk in the inspirational field and cast their shadow over your day to day life, so does the beautiful life that is waiting for you.

It has already been created. Maybe it’s destiny. Maybe it’s just unique to your soul. But you can feel it – the beautiful, charged and inspired life that’s waiting for you. It’s there at the tip of your tongue, just waiting to be named.

So build a discipline around naming it. Build the vocabulary of your dreams. Talk it out with anyone who’ll listen. Any time in this space is time well spent.

Name your life and the life will follow.

This is the way of creation. It’s with the word.

And yes, it’s hard. It’s doubly hard.

But do your best.

Because on the seventh day, you can rest.

NO B.S.FRIDAY: Such is Life…

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Why do we love bushrangers so much? Are we all just bushrangers too busy with our day jobs?

November 11th was Remembrance Day, but I also noticed it’s the 138th anniversary of Ned Kelly’s death. They hanged our most famous bushranger on November 11, 1880.

I feel like we must be due for another round of bushranger romanticism. Seems to come around every 30 years or so. I mean, it’s been 15 years since the last Ned Kelly movie.

(Update: they’re in the process of making one right now. There you go.)

But why do we love bushrangers so much?

Kelly has more brand recognition than any Australian has ever had, including Don Bradman, well over a century after his death.

And Kelly’s life was hard. He was born into a poor family, took a lot of knocks along the way, before finally going to the gallows at the tender age of 25. Not a lot to envy there.

But we collectively get starry-eyed, and imagine ourselves in an iron suit, both guns blazing.

(Or is that just me?)

Bushrangers were a product of that time, and our romanticism has as much to do with that period in Australian history as it does with them.

I mean, if Ned Kelly were alive today, he’d probably end up on Today Tonight, with a camera man chasing him through the streets of Melbourne. Clank, clank, clank. “Mr Kelly. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

No one is getting misty eyed about car thieves in tracky-daks and sneakers these days.

But still there is something in the archetype of the bushranger that calls to our spirit.

To me, I think the key selling point of brand bush-ranger is ‘rebelliousness’. That’s what elevates them from the muck of humanity’s dregs, into the rarefied air of cultural hero.

But what does that say about us?

Why do we love and celebrate the rebellious? The rule breakers? The trouble makers?

Do we secretly long to cast ourselves in that light – break the rules, trash the law, kick down the doors and leave our name in bullets in the wall?

Are we all just bushrangers, too busy with our day jobs to cause anybody any trouble?

Yes. Yes we are.

The world is repressive. It crushes our freedom, our unique spirits, our playful, child-like natures. It’s just how it is. As we get older, we find the adult world with all its rules and regulations has us all bound up in a straight-jacket.

The question becomes how do we respond?

Do we suffer in silence, taking a photo-copy of our bottoms when the boss isn’t looking in an impotent act of defiance?

(Brian, I know it’s you. Just stop it, ok. It’s unhygienic.)

Or do we go totally off the hook, become a renegade, dying in a rain of bullets and glory?

That’s sexier, but still pretty sad in the end.

Or do we find another way? A third way? Do we find a way to push back the prison walls of the world, and find a way to live on our own terms, with our own money, with our own drive and our own autonomy?

Do we find a way to keep expanding the sphere of our own freedom?

This has been one of the central missions in my life in recent years. Finding that freedom.

Sure, that’s partly about money. Money can buy you many freedoms in life – the freedom to travel, the freedom to follow your own interest, freedom from the stresses of a hand-to-mouth existence.

But it’s also about making it part of my life goals – finding a career that let’s me set my own hours and schedule. Living somewhere that gives me easy access to the things I love doing. Putting energy into my relationships so they are supporting me, rather than holding me back.

But ultimately, it starts with recognising that we are all living in Ned Kelly realities – realities where the system is not set up to maximise our freedom and fulfilment.

This is the first step.

The fight then and must come second.

Such is life.

JG

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Feel like you’re “living in a cage?” Here’s the fix.

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We all know what it’s like to be stuck in lives that are too small for us… Here’s how to get out.

“I feel like I’m living in a cage.”

There are some transcendent human experiences – experiences that straddle cultures, countries and history.

The feeling that comes when a mother looks in her child’s eyes for the first time is the same here as it is in China, as it was in Rome 2,000 years ago.

There are things we can all relate to. Watching your crush walk off in the arms of another. Watching your child’s first steps. Watching your team come from 4 goals down at three-quarter time to take out the flag.

And I think this is another one: The feeling that your life is just too small for you.

In this particular case, I was talking to a mate who was having some trouble at home. He and his wife were arguing about a particular career move he wanted to make – a move that would have meant less money and less job security, but more freedom and creativity.

She was having trouble coming to the party, and I could get that. With three small kids her appetite for risk was probably at a life-time low. That’s perfectly natural.

And my mate could see that too. Still, it felt like he was being stifled – held back from the life he really wanted to be living.

And I feel like I should give another example now. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m playing into a “wives are a handbrake” trope. I’m sure just as many women as men feel limited by their partner.

I mean, even my mate’s wife probably felt limited in this situation. “I just want to be free to love my kids and relax into our life, but numnuts here wants to go an quit his job and tip over the whole apple cart.”

But as I said, and based on my experience, I think this feeling that our lives are too small for us is fairly universal. It’s a very common experience. So I think there is a jewel of understanding here – something here that might will shed light on the whole human condition.

So let’s go looking for it.

For me, the first place I want to go looking is in our social mind.

If we have a feeling that our life is a cage, then the walls have been built by other people.

Like, I sometimes wish there wasn’t so much gravity around, so I could fly like the condor my spirit really longs to be.

(Soar, spirit-bird, soar.)

But despite the limitations gravity puts on my life, I don’t really feel ‘caged in’ by it. I never lose sleep over it.

And that’s just one of the restrictions placed on my physical body. Human is a pretty limited experience. I’m marooned on the land-masses of a watery planet, confined to the more pleasant climatic ranges, with my movements defined by current technological limits and my own capacity to endure red-eye flights.

But you know, that’s just how it is. It doesn’t plant the seeds of dissatisfaction in my soul…

… the way social limitations do.

And social limitations themselves come in different flavours as well. We could call them ‘hard’ and ‘soft’.

The hard limits are encoded in law or contained in explicit cultural expectations. So I don’t steal stuff, or drive on the right hand side of the road, because that’s against the law.

I also don’t cock my leg and let rip with a massaman-curry-flavoured-fart on a crowded tram. Not that there’s a law against that or anything. But there’s a pretty clear cultural understanding that that kind of thing is not ok.

(We’re a sophisticated culture.)

Interestingly, even though these hard limitations are more heavily enforced, I don’t really feel like they impinge on my life.

I mean road rules literally determine where I can go and how fast I move. That’s a pretty tight constraint. But most the time I don’t even think about it.

So that brings us to the soft limitations – the binds on our life that emerge from complex and nuanced social relationships:

The expectation that you’re not going to make risky career moves when your family is depending on you.

The expectation that you’re not going to invite Bryan, the PT from the gym, out for a drink, even though you’re totally just friends and totally both ok with the attraction you feel towards each other.

The reluctance to enrol in that art class because that kind of stuff makes your partner feel insecure.

The way you don’t tell your family about the new investment course you’re taking, because you get the sense that they’d prefer it if you were poor, like them.

The decision that you’re not going to challenge your mother in law on her interfering, because that just triggers her insecurities, and creates whole worlds of drama.

The social world is complex and navigating it is hard. We are constantly having to make concessions against our own instincts and our own interests, just to keep the peace.

But, after a while, it gets frustrating. We start to feel like we’re not living our truth. We start to feel we’re living in a cage.

That old chestnut.

But notice here how it’s only as we move right along the spectrum from hard to soft limits, that we start to feel frustrated.

That’s odd, isn’t it?

I think the key to understanding that is ‘inevitability’.

Like, gravity is a constraint. But it’s very hard to imagine a universe without it, and it’s not going to change anytime soon, so why worry about it. It’s inevitable.

Likewise, our laws are set in stone, pretty much. They evolve slowly over time, but that’s not a process you’re going to engage with, no matter how silly it is that it drops down to a 50 zone just there after that bend, and what was he doing there anyway, it’s just revenue raising.

The laws are the laws, and you just get on with it.

Same story with the more formal cultural norms. I personally think my duck imitations are hilarious, but I can see that society is better off if we don’t generally sanction farting in crowded spaces.

These structures give us hard limits, and because they are hard – inevitable – then we just get on with it.

BUT… those limitations that come from our immediate social relationships, they don’t have the same sense of inevitability.

We recognise this truth: different people create different limitations in our life.

And in that sense, we recognise that if there’s a limit that is holding us back, if the person creating the limit changed, the limit itself might change.

Like:

If you were braver and had more faith in abundance, you wouldn’t mind if I took a gamble with my career.

If you weren’t so controlling, you wouldn’t mind if I caught up with other men socially.

If you weren’t so insecure, we could have an honest conversation about your engagement in our family life.

If you weren’t so afraid that I might actually succeed, you’d be happy for me to be taking this investment course.

And here it is. The cruel and bitter truth:

When our lives feel too small for us, it is because the people around us are too small for us.

We can deal with limitations on our life. We deal with them all the time. The human experience is fundamentally limited. Most the time it’s fine.

But it is a bitter pill to swallow when those limitations come from a smallness in others, a smallness that could, perhaps with a little work, be overcome.

And so of course we feel frustrated. Of course we feel angry. Of course we feel resentment.

So yeah, screw that.

I thought I was going to write a piece about how limitations are a part of life and you just have to find some freedom with in it.

But that’s a cop out.

The truth is that if someone is making you live a life that is smaller than the life you want to be living, you should call them on it.

You have a right to be frustrated. You have a right to be angry.

(And hiding that anger and frustration from them doesn’t honour them. Filtering the reflections so they never see what impact their actions are having doesn’t honour them.)

And I’m not saying just go our and do whatever the F you want. That’s a quick way to call a tonne of chaos and drama into your life.

But I do think you can own your feelings front on.

“When you don’t want me to take this job, it feels like it comes from a place of fear, and that makes me angry.”

“When you stop me having friendships with other guys, I feel that’s all about your insecurities, and that makes me angry.”

“When you take the piss out of my desire to be financially secure, I feel that’s about keeping me in your comfort zone, and that’s frustrating.”

I don’t know where that conversation will go. It’s not going to be an easy one.

But I do think you have to go into bat for what you believe in. You have to call BS when you see it.

That might not win you the freedom you want, but you will have been true to yourself, and that will make things a lot easier.

And I think this will be an important evolution in our society – when we get to a space where it’s not ok to make people live small lives – where we look at a situation where someone’s unwillingness to do the inner work restricts another’s freedom and we say, that is just not ok.

It’s been a slow road. This is has been around forever. It’s a universal human experience, because we are all social beings.

But maybe it is changing. It has to change.

And maybe it’s up to us to take it there.

No BS Friday: How Halloween can change your life

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This quirky Halloween ritual made me see my family in a whole new light.

My friends have a tradition they do every Halloween. Since it is traditionally the day of the year when the veil between this world and the spirit world is at it’s thinnest, they have an ‘ancestor dinner’.

The idea is that everyone brings photos or memories of their ancestors, and we all eat a meal together in silence, with the memory of our ancestors. And then there’s some drinking and storytelling afterwards.

And so I was digging up some photos of my family to take along. There’s one photo of my grandfather on my father’s side that I’ve always like, so I got it out and held it in my hands.

And a strange feeling came over me.

I realised that right now, I am quite a bit older than my grandfather was when this photo was taken.

Suddenly I saw my grandfather in a whole new light.

I was young when I first saw that photo, and the man in the photo didn’t seem all that different from the man I knew then. My grandfather – wise, strong, in control.

(And from the perspective of an eight-year-old boy, everyone looks old.)

But now I’m looking at this photo with fresh eyes. He’s probably early 40s, and quite a bit younger than I am now.

And so now, rather than seeing my wise old grandfather, I’m seeing a man in their mid-40s, just doing the best they can.

I’m seeing someone who probably doesn’t have it all figured out. Few 40-year-olds do. (Few 90-year-olds do!) I’m seeing someone who is probably wrestling with all the usual stresses of life – work, raising a family, putting food on the table, educating the kids.

I’m also seeing someone whose daily life is hemmed in chaos. The war, the years after the war, the fascists, the communists, the nuclear age.

Suddenly, I’m feeling two things I haven’t felt before.

The first is compassion. Like, geez, bloke. You had it tough. You didn’t have all the blessings that I have now. You had to wash your socks by hand, and that’s just the start of it!

Us grandkids were never shown the realities of your life. We were too young. You don’t burden kids with stuff like that. You let them live in the peaceful fiction that everything is fine.

But now I know there must have been so much going on that we just never knew about. That your life would have been full of stress and anxiety and drama… just like everyone else’s.

And so I feel compassion for the hardships that you must have endured.

And the other thing I feel is gratitude.

When I looked at the hardships you must have endured, the challenges you must have overcome, the bullets you must have dodged, just to set us up in this lucky country we call Australia, I feel deeply grateful.

My life is the gift you gave me.

And now I feel ashamed that I never thanked you for it. I had to come this far in life before I could even recognise the gift for what it was. I’m embarrassed that I’d never thought to look up from my own indulged, self-centred and childish understanding of my place in the family.

Perhaps I just wouldn’t have understood until now.

But I just wish I could shake your hand and say thanks.

The other thing that comes is the realisation of that old truth – we’re all just doing the best we can.

My father and grandfather were products of a particular time and a particular culture. Maybe it would have been nice if they were more “emotionally available”. Maybe it would have been nice if their views were more ‘modern’. Maybe it would have been nice if they didn’t think moral character was won with the slap of a belt strap.

But that’s just how it was. They were just doing the best they could.

All my ancestors were just doing the best they could.

And the best they could do has won me the life I have now.

So thanks, ancestors. I wish I could go back in time and shake every one of your hands.

But I can’t. So I’ll have a drink for you instead.

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Die with this regret… and you’ve won!

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I take a look at some of the guff written on regret. The results will surprise you.

Today, I’m going to give you a glimpse into your future life.

I’m going to show you what lies at the end of your road, and the one thing you will regret, when your number finally comes up.

… I mean, if you’re lucky. Most people die with a thousand regrets. But if you live your life well from this point on, follow my advice, you will take just one, beautiful regret to your grave.

And I know that because it is the same regret that I carry now.

So pay attention. I think this might be about to be the most important blog I’ve written.

(And oh, haven’t I written some doozies!)

Anyway, a lot has been written about regret. There was a story doing the rounds a few years ago about a nurse who worked at a retirement home, who did a study on the things that people regret on their death bed.

I don’t know why we focus so much on that death-bed moment. It’s just like any other really.

I mean, maybe I regret not playing professional ping pong in my twenties. That’s something I might regret on my deathbed. It’s definitely too late do anything about it then.

But it’s also too late to do anything about it now. The window has definitely closed on my professional ping pong career. That horse has well and truly bolted.

The really interesting questions should be what do people regret not doing last year or last month. Regrets fresh enough to actually do something about.

Anyway, contrived scenario aside, this nurse reckons that people always regret the stuff they didn’t do, rather than the stuff they did.

That sounds profound until you think about it.

The stuff we do – that just tends to dissolve into the history of our lives. It just becomes part of who we are.

So maybe you regret selling your Bitcoin in 2010. But then you meet your future wife at a ‘no-coiner’ support group, and so you think it was all for the best.

Life has a way of working out like that. Which is really to say, we have a natural tendency to make the most of things, get on with it, and celebrate what we have.

(There’s even cases of people who have lost limbs in motor accidents who say that they are glad it happened to them.)

The other part of it is that it is very easy to romanticise the road not travelled.

So you think back to that girl you knew when you were 17. You should have kissed her. Why didn’t you kiss her? You fool.

And then you imagine the life that might have been. You imagine yourself falling in love, madly and foreverly. You see yourselves in Paris, eating croissants by the river’s edge. You see yourselves as an old couple, in a motor-home, driving across the Nullarbor into the setting sun.

You see her crouched over your grave, her tears falling on to a single red rose, the sky darkening overhead.

Sigh. What could have been…

But of course this is the romantic version. You don’t imagine her, at 3a.m, feeding the baby, hair electrified, giving you death stares because “YOU ALWAYS WALK TOO LOUD!!” You don’t imagine her at 60, cocking her leg at the breakfast table and letting go with one of her signature farts. You don’t imagine her at 75, pawning all your stuff and moving in with Shane from the bowls club.

You don’t imagine any of this stuff, even though it’s just as likely.

We romanticise the lives we never lead.

And so of course we regret the things we never did. Those things were gateways to these romantic and fantastical lives – lives that are always going to be more magical, more colourful, more wonderful than the ones we are living now.

So of course we regret the stuff we never did.

To a point.

And this is where we start talking about the one regret that I have.

Because I’m someone who opened the door and had a look at what lay beyond all the gateways of regret.

I have lived a life of relative freedom. And I’ve done it all.

When I was a young man, I threw myself into soccer. I gave it everything. I had my tilt at professional sport, and the glory it promised. I did my best. I took my chance. I have no regrets.

As a young man, I also threw myself into the feminie like a box of Whitlam samplers. By the time I found my wife, I was certain there was no one else I wanted to be with. I had found the perfect one for me. And I haven’t regretted a single day of our marriage.

(I can’t vouch for her though – I think she’s already thinking about pawning my stuff).

And I also had my crack at business. I chose not to follow the road of the nine to five and strike out on my own. It was a gamble and it paid off. Some people die not knowing.

I know.

And with that success, I now have freedom that most people only dream about. I can travel the world. I can track down the relatives in Greece. I can take part in bizarre medicine ceremonies in the Congo. I can throw myself out of an airplane over the French Pyrenees.

I can do whatever I want.

And my bucket list is completely cleared out.

So, all good then, hey? No room for regrets right? I’ll die a happy and regret-less man, quietly smiling into my last glass of whiskey..?

Not quite.

Because this is the thing I’ve learnt about having opened every door, having tasted every fruit, having ticked every box I could find:

None of it matters.

Having done everything on my bucket list, I can say that the amount of happiness I drew from each item on that list, is actually kind of minimal.

I mean sky-diving was awesome. It totally was. But knowing what I know now, would I go back to a younger version of myself and say, “You totally have to do this before you die.”

Nah.

And the same goes for everything on there. It was all awesome. It was all good fun. But was any of it “must do before you die” worthy?

Not really.

I mean, I do enjoy knowing that I have done everything I ever wanted to. That’s a nice feeling of completion – a feeling of satisfaction. That’s nice.

But that feeling of completion could have come with any bucket list really. It could have been a shopping list. The individual experiences just didn’t matter.

More and more, my adventuring has brought home that simple truth – happiness is an inside job.

Doing everything on the most epic bucket list in the world won’t make you happy – not if you’re not already primed for happiness from the inside out.

And this is what I regret.

I regret the hunger I brought to everything when I was younger.

I regret those days where I always wanted more. Where I had a great job, but I wanted a better job. Where I had a great girlfriend but I wanted a better girlfriend. Where I had great friends but I wanted better friends.

I brought a hunger to every thing I did, and that hunger always kept my eyes on the horizon, on the hunt for bigger, and better, and more exciting.

And in doing so, I missed out on a lot of life. The life that happens in the moment. The happiness that comes when you are just present to what is, when you are just grateful for what is.

In hindsight, I can see that I lived through countless blessings, through a charmed life full of wonders and beauty, and I was a misery guts for most of it.

My hunger kept me blinded to what I actually had.

And so this is what I regret.

I regret that I spent so many years as a slave to this hunger. I regret that I let so many moments for potential ecstasy and bliss pass me by, simply because I thought bliss was always over the next hill.

And I regret that it took me so long to figure it out. That the energy and the passion and the hormone-driven stamina of youth was wasted on someone who just couldn’t see how good he had it.

This is what I regret. And I’ll carry this regret with me to the day I die.

Funny old thing, life.

And I hope that this regret is the only regret that plagues you on your death bed too. I hope that from this day on, you heed this wisdom, and become present to and grateful for the wonderful gifts you have already.

But I don’t really expect you to.

I mean, I wouldn’t have. I couldn’t have been told. I wouldn’t have listened.

I had to see for myself. I had to taste every fruit in the garden before I could know that fruit was not the key to happiness. No amount of grey-beard wisdom would have helped.

And so if you won’t take my advice, then I wish that this journey will find you too. That you will have the freedom and the resources to chase down every desire, live every dream –tick everything off your own epic bucket list. Leave no stone unturned until you are convinced that happiness is nowhere to be ‘found’.

Perhaps it is the only way.

But however you find it, I hope this one beautiful regret becomes yours too:

I only wish that I had found my freedom sooner.

(… he whispers to the nurse, as she pours him a final whiskey.)

JG

No BS Friday: What your underpants say about you

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Budgeting isn’t about spending as little as possible. It’s about valuing things in the right way.

What do your underpants say about you?

“At some point we must all stand naked before the Lord and explain our tastes in personal grooming.” – Louis CK

To me, they say a lot. Show me the underpants and I will show you the man.

(I say ‘man’, because I do know a lot less about women’s underwear. Although, when I was seventeen I did teach myself to undo a bra with two fingers in 0.4 seconds… in the dark… hanging upside down… while my friends attacked me with wiffle bats.)

Your underpants say a lot about who you are and what your values are.

I reckon there’s two dominant underpant philosophies.

The first sees it as an area where you can save some money. Almost no one ever sees your underwear, so why invest much in it? Buy a twelve pack of jocks from Coles, and wear them til the arse literally falls out and they dissolve in a whiff of smoke and mushroom pores.

Bargain.

The other school of thought says that underpants are literally the most intimate thing I own. No one ever sees them, but they literally house the most precious inches of me. I need a gilded treasure chest, not the equivalent of a weather eaten cardboard box.

I will invest in my underpants and invest in myself. I will give myself that gift because I am worth it.

That’s how I think about it. What about you?

Now you might say, well, that’s all well and good for you Jon. Easy for you to say as a cashed-up millionaire. What about us poor plebs, looking to save a few dollars where ever we can?

And look, I get that.

But this is the key thing to remember about budgeting. Budgeting is not about spending as little as possible. A lot of people think that’s what it is, but it’s not.

Budgeting is about assigning the appropriate value to everything in your life, and bringing your spending into alignment with that.

To do budgeting well, the first thing to do is to track where you are spending your money. The next question you ask then is, does my spending reflect my values?

So you might notice that you’re spending $180 a week Mars Bars and Tim Tams. You could then look at that and say, “You know what, I don’t I really value Mars Bars that much. Not when I’m only spending $30 a week on insulin.”

And so you spend less on the things you don’t really value.

But the flip side of this, if we’re honest, is looking at the areas where you are under-spending. So you might say, ‘I really value health and fitness, but I’m only spending an average of $2 a week on sport and recreation. I need to increase my spending there.”

If you just did a budget and you didn’t increase your spending on anything, then you did it wrong.

And so this is how I think about underpants. Something so important should receive a decent allocation come budget night.

Now you might say, but hang on Jon, that’s just your values. I just don’t value underpants as much as you do.

And maybe that’s true. But my bet is that most people who say that have bought into this idea that money spent on yourself is wasted money. That money is scarce, and suffering is righteous.

They have never let themselves buy themselves gifts that weren’t about impressing the neighbours – that weren’t about changing the story they were telling.
They have never bought themselves gifts simply because their inner child just enjoyed the feeling of being nurturingly held by a high cotton count breathable bamboo blend.

And they have never known the elevating affect on the psyche that comes with a daily ritual that involves pulling a loving, slightly extravagant gift out of the underwear draw – a special something from you to you.

Something that says, I value you. I want you to have nice things.

Self-love. Acceptance. Pride and self-worth. Abundance. All these things are found in my underwear draw.

And I’m here to tell you that they could be in yours.

Go on. You’re worth it.

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.