No B.S Friday: It’s not as bad as you think

The world isn’t as oppressive as you think it is.

You’ve been conned.

There’s a conspiracy to make you see conspiracies where there are none.

(Whooaaa. Am I blowing your mind? Conspiracies about conspiracies? …Just lie back and go with it.)

It breaks down like this:

Marketing is the science of separating you from your money.

(If that sounds like the definition of a con-job, trust your instincts.)

But the marketing industry – which is a gazillion dollar industry, with research institutes all over the world – has a problem:

You.

You don’t want to be separated from your money. You like your money.

And so when you see an ad for carbonated sugar-water, and you see all those young people having fun with perfect skin, and teeth and an ethnically-diverse friendship group, your inner child naturally arcs up: gimme, gimme, gimme!

The association is made, and the next time you’re at the shops and you see that distinctive brand of teeth-rotter, your child arcs up again. Gimme, gimme, gimme.

But you also have an adult inside you. An adult who doesn’t want to waste their money on stuff. That knows that sugar-water is bad for you.

And so the adult-mind – the commanding mind (the will) – kicks in, pulls up the reins, and no sale is made.

Marketing companies hate this.

Which is to say that marketing companies hate the commanding mind that throws cold water on the inner-child’s impulse to buy everything.

So what can they do?

(Montage of marketing industry scientists in lab coats, looking into microscopes.)

Make the commanding mind the enemy.

And you do that by modelling rebellion.

“Hey, you deserve to be free. You don’t need anyone telling you what to do. They’re just trying to control you. You should be free to do whatever you want.”

(This message sells incredibly well to the inner-child market.)

Make all systems of control a universal bad, and you make systems of inner control an evil too.

An evil to be rebelled against.

“Smash the fascist instruments of control! Buy soda!”

The narrative that there are sinister forces out there who desire nothing but to control you – and that these forces must be resisted at all costs, even if many people have to die in order to get the plans for the death star to HQ – this narrative feeds into the battle between your impulses and your control.

And it energises your impulses at your control’s expense.

I guarantee you the marketing machine knows exactly what it’s doing.

Think about KFC’s capitulation. How’s the song go? “I don’t care! I love it!” It is literally giving your impulses a script with which to resist your controlling mind’s desire to eat healthy.

Not even trying to come up with reasons. Resistance for resistance’s sake.

But the by-product of all this is a belief that there are sinister forces of control in the world.

Whether it’s Elon Musk or Communists who have magically staved off irrelevance for 60 years, I’ve never seen a time where so many people believe that they are being actively controlled by somebody for some reason.

Yes, you are being held back from your full-potential, but it’s largely through dumb mechanical systems that facilitate the flow of wealth upwards.

And yes, there’s dodgy people doing dodgy things, but no one is really thinking about you in particular. You don’t need to be controlled. If you’re working a day job, making someone else rich, who in turn is making someone else rich, you’re doing fine. You’re playing your part. No need to control you at all.

So any way, ask yourself, are there really forces out there trying to control me?

Or have I just been trained to instinctively resist my own internal systems of self-control?

Do they want to control me, or do they want me to buy fried chicken?

JG.

No B.S Friday: This is how to make progress.

I’ve noticed that there’s something that people often struggle with when they’re making the transition from working 9-5, to setting up their own story.

The transition is difficult. Not many people have the luxury of being able to quit their job before they’ve even started creating their own story – whether that’s becoming a full-time investor, or setting up your own business, or whatever.

It’s a long road – longer than you think. People think, I’ll quit my job now, then start working full-time on my new story, and I can afford to take three months off, so that should be enough time.

It rarely is. And people very quickly run out of cash and runway, and then they’re forced back into the workforce before they’ve really achieved anything.

So unless you can stay solvent without working for 12-18 months, it’s not a path I would recommend.

Typically, I would recommend doing them in parallel.

But obviously that’s easier said than done.

Because now you’re trying to shoe-horn in all the extra things you need to do, in a schedule that’s already a bit tight around the seams.

So first up, sit down with your friends and loved ones, your footy club and the Work Christmas Party Planning Committee, and have a tough conversation. Say, hey, for the next 18-months I’m going to be working on this thing, and I’m not going to be available as much anymore.

But know that I love you, and I will come back to you when I’m done, Work Christmas Party Planning Committee.

Manage those expectations, and clear some room in your calendar.

So that’s one.

But having done that, there’s another challenge that seems to be pretty common.

And that’s because our project planning tends to be pretty task-focused.

So we look at where we want to be in 18 months, figure out all the things we need to do, and from that, create a sequential to-do list.

This is how the work world is organised. We rock up to work, and there’s a list of tasks waiting for us. And we just put our head down and make our way through them.

But this process often falls down when we’re trying to run our own story in parallel to our own story.

Because we’re not being paid to be at our desk or be on the tools.

And so we say, I need to do task X, and I think I have time for that Thursday afternoon. But then Thursday comes and your kid skinned their knee and needs to be patched up and cuddled.

So you think you’ll just do that task Tuesday. But Tuesday comes and there’s a leak in the gutter that needs fixing. So you say you’ll do it this coming Thursday, but then your bestie is in the middle of a break-up and wants someone to join them in ritual alcohol poisoning…

… and so on.

And this can go on for months. I’ve seen it go on for months.

So what I recommend is that after you have mapped out your tasks, have a look at how much time they’re going to take, and then come up with a rough estimate of how much time you need to give it each week.

Don’t be crazy ambitious. If you’re already working 40 hours don’t imagine you’re going to do another 40 hours every week. Maybe it’s something like 6 or 10 hours a week, every week.

And then make that your commitment. Just say that by the end of the week, I promise to do ten hours work on this project.

(In the same way you commit to your boss, by the end of the week I will have done 40-hours work.)

I find it much easier to defend my project’s time in my calendar if I have a quota I have to hit.

So this is the hack. Commit to time, not tasks.

This is how to run a project in parallel to your day job.

JG.

No B.S Friday: You can complain about it, or you can ride it.

The world isn’t often fair.

Talk to gazelles. They spend most of their days trying to not get eaten by a lion… or a hyena. But they all get eaten by something eventually. Gazelles don’t die of old age, sitting in a retirement home with a blanket on their knees.

At some point, they just stop being fast enough to outrun their predators. They become the weakest link in the herd.

And they get eaten.

But still, you don’t hear gazelles complaining about how unfair life is very much. When was the last time you heard one? Because they know that this is just how it is.

In the human world, things are even less fair.

If it were fair, you would be paid the exact value of what you put in. Your effort would be equal to your reward.

But it’s not.

Even though they tell us, “You only get out what you put in.” That is never true. The ratio is never one for one.

And it can sit wildly on each side of the 1:1 line. A factory worker in China works a twelve-hour day at a sewing machine to earn a lousy six bucks. Kylie Jenner spends two hours swanning about at a movie producer’s party and earns $600,000.

The reward to return ratios are all over the place.

But this is just life. This is how it is.

We tell ourselves that this is the problem with capitalism or colonialism or whatever, but this is just how the world works.

Paul Graham – a Silicon Valley investor – calls this superlinear returns, and reckons understanding this dynamic is the most important thing you can do:

“One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.

Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. “You get out,” I heard a thousand times, “what you put in.” They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business.

It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity. In all of these, the rich get richer.

This is why it can feel like you’re slaving away for years and never getting anywhere.

And it’s also why you can slave away for years, getting nowhere, and then suddenly become an overnight success.

You’ve got to slog away on the lower part of the exponential curve, where the returns are well below 1:1.

Only after you’ve done that for a while can you jump to the other side of the curve, where the returns are much greater than 1:1.

It’s not fair, but that’s just how it is.

But keep at it. You’re going to get there.

Soon, you’ll be charging $600K to do balloon animals on a movie producer’s lap.

You’ll get there eventually.

JG.

No B.S Friday: The secret ingredient is always time.

I found myself down a bit of a rabbit hole around power poses last night.

In 2012, Amy Cuddy, a professor at Harvard gave a TED talk where she reported results of one of her recent studies. It showed that busting out a power-pose, even just for a minute, increased testosterone, reduced cortisol (stress) and increased risk-taking behaviour in a gambling game.

Her conclusion? Power poses were the simplest way to bio-hack yourself for greater confidence.

(Her TED talk is still the second most watched TED talk of all time.)

But then there was a bit of a problem. Other researchers had trouble replicating her results. Some critiqued her methodology (they got participants to bust a power-pose, or a disempowered pose (think grovelling), but they didn’t have a control group that busted no pose.)

Now it seems that the data is mixed. Cuddy stands by her work. Others thinks it’s rubbish.

And I guess I found this interesting because when I heard about the power-pose study, it made intuitive sense to me. In my experience, my sense of strength and power in my body is connected to my sense of strength and power in the world.

(We’re not as complex as we like to think we are.)

So I wondered why other studies were failing to register an effect.

But I think I’ve figured it out.

(Harvard, hit me up and I can tell you where to send my honorary doctorate.)

I think the thing about all the studies is that they’re incredibly short term.

Do a power-pose, once, for one minute, and then in a few minutes we’re going to run some tests.

This is not how change in the human mind works. It’s not how neuro-plasticity works.

For meaningful change to happen, you need repetition. Lots of repetition.

My guess is that the first time you ask someone to bust a power-pose, the overwhelming feeling they’re going to have is, “Wow, this feels really weird. I’ve never done this before.”

That’s not a mindset that boosts testosterone.

My bet is that you need people to do them every day for a month, for them to get through the initial discomfort, and ‘relax’ into the practice.

That’s when meaningful change is going to happen.

Real change only comes through dedication and commitment.

To conclude my case, I’ll leave you with a quote from a Spanish bull-fighter I came across once:

“Have you ever seen a bullfighter in the ring show anything but supreme confidence? Have you ever seen them mope around with rounded shoulders, saying, ‘Oh, I’m having a bad day. I don’t feel like I’m on my game today,’ being negative or a little bit pessimistic and irritated at the bull because the bull is just not cooperating or whatever?”

“We start training as a young boy at a very early age on how to walk, how to turn, how to carry our shoulders, where to put our eyes. Every single detail is done meticulously.”

“The bull can see that and knows that you have no fear, and that you dominate the bull by your presence. We control fear by our physical presence.”

My guess is that the real value of power poses is as a life practice. Not as a one-off magic pill.

Harvard, waiting for your call.

JG.

No B.S Friday: What’s the fantasy they’re selling?

I’m not sure I can handle another superhero movie.

At first they were fun. They’re supposed to be fun. A bit of escapism. They’re based on comic books after all.

But I’m not sure they’re healthy.

And it’s not that they glorify violence in a PG13 kind of way. It’s not whether glorified lycra is really appropriate in combat scenarios. Though there is all that too.

It’s about the fantasy they’re peddling.

And what’s that?

That everything is easy.

When you watch superhero movies, they’re never really working that hard.

Want an amazing body, with six-pack abs and buns you could break a bad-guy’s nose on? Easy. Seems like there’s no effort required at all.

Want to move great distances at supersonic speeds? Easy. Just fly. You won’t even be tired when you get there.

Want to blow up trucks with a high-powered laser beam? Simple. Just concentrate a bit, my squint your eyebrows a little.

Want to shoot the detonator out of a boss’s hands at 100ft, bouncing your arrow off three separate obstacles before it gets there? No worries. You barely have to look, let alone set yourself.

And I don’t want to be too much of a grinch about it. I know I’m complaining about the exact thing that makes superhero movies fun to watch.

There’s a transference that happens when we watch a movie. When we watch a hero in action, we see ourselves in them. We move with them. We clench our amazing glute muscles with them. The mirror neurons of the brain light up and go crazy.

It really is the next best thing to doing it yourself.

And so it’s fun to imagine ourselves as a muscular god stomping through the world without a care for physics or fire power.

Of course its fun.

But in this we are being seduced by easy.

It’s fun to imagine ourselves leaping over tall buildings – we feel like that represents who we truly are on the inside – even though in our day to day reality we’re not jumping over buildings. In fact, peeling ourselves off the couch feels like too much effort somedays.

And the way I see it, this fantasy is running straight into the tech juggernaut of taught helplessness.

Technology wants to take every task from our hands. Soon, you won’t google anything even. You’ll just ask your phone.

You’ll ask your phone where to buy the thing you want, what you should eat tonight, how to get home.

Before long, that will become, just tell me when it’s time to eat, time to shop, what to buy. Tell me what I want – I can’t be bothered figuring it out.

All effort will become outsourced.

And for all intents and purposes, we will be useless.

So we don’t want to be glorifying easy at this particular juncture in history. We need the opposite. We want to be glorifying hard work.

Give me Captain On-to-it – who uses planning and systems to optimise his productivity.

Give me Mr Consistency – who always does the things he should, even when he doesn’t feel like it.

Give me Girl Delayed Gratification – who knows that great things tomorrow often come by giving up good things today.

These are the superheros we need.

Maybe I’ll write a script. Or get ChatGPT to do it.

No wait dammit.

JG.

No B.S Friday: Maybe just try getting out the way.

How do you make a helium balloon go up?

You don’t. It just goes up naturally. If you have to do anything, all you have to do is make sure there’s nothing holding it back.

In the same way, how do you reach your potential? How do you make it happen?

You don’t. All you have to do is make sure that there’s nothing holding you back.

I think this is the mistake that most people make. When they think about reaching their potential – when they think about doing great things and living a fully-authentic life completely on their own terms – they’re imagining a journey where they are 100% responsible for the energy and motion.

And naturally it looks overwhelming. It looks like crossing the Nullarbor on a quarter tank of petrol.

It just doesn’t seem possible.

But I don’t think it’s like this.

Rather, it is like crossing the Nullarbor, but it’s all downhill, all the way from Melbourne to Perth.

There’s a bit of drive required now and then.

But what is more important than drive is clearing any obstacles from the road. Making sure there’s no grit in the wheels. Making sure you’re on the right track.

We don’t have to come up with all of the drive ourselves.

Our greatness has a naturalness to it. An inevitability even.

We can lean into that.

And when we are on our path, and when our greatness is unleashed, there are moments where it will feel effortless.

We’ll still be working hard. We might be working 18 hours a day. But it will feel easy. It will feel natural. It will feel harder to not work than do the work that’s required.

If we have a job it’s to make sure that nothing gets in the way of this kind of flow state.

(This kind of flow state itself is a sign that we’re on the right track.)

And what do I mean by ‘making sure nothing gets in the way’?

Well, I think it means three things:

1. Avoiding limiting constructs

2. Avoiding limiting beliefs

3. Avoiding limiting habits

Limiting constructs are the norms that society gives us. Things like “it’s normal to work a 9-5 job.” “It’s dirty to aspire to be rich.” “Better to be small than make people uncomfortable.”

Throughout our lives we have to be conscious of the constructs we’re participating in, and constantly checking whether they’re serving us or holding us back.

Limiting beliefs are ideas we have about ourselves that are smaller than our potential. “I am not good with numbers.” “I am not good with people.” “I am not good with money.”

Our beliefs define our potential and we have to make sure they’re not putting a lid on things.

Finally, limiting habits are things that knock you off course. Eating too much food. Drinking too much wine. Spending too much time on the socials. Spending time complaining about others.

These habits creep into our lives unconsciously, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we can see that they don’t really serve us.

Anyway, try flipping the question on its head.

Rather than asking, how can I get more mileage out of the tank. Ask yourself, how can I free myself of the things that are holding me back.

You might find the journey is easier than you realise.

JG.