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NO B.S. FRIDAY: Announced! Did you win an i-pad?

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Today we announce the winners of the Knowledge Source Power Challenge. Drum roll please…

Ok, through the first four weeks of the year we ran the Knowledge Source Power Challenge – 8 simple exercises to focus your mind, steel your will, and set yourself up for a full-power year ahead. 

So the Knowledge Source algorithm has cranked its gears and given us the following winners:

First Prize Winner

Congratulations to Timbo – You have scored yourself a brand new, top of the line i-pad. Well done mate.

I had a read through all of Timbo’s responses, and I have to say he is a very worthy winner. He was there throwing out lovebombs of support to other people, and was really honest with how the challenges sat with him.

I did want to pick out one question Timbo had about the ‘Know Your Pain’ challenge:

“Jon, I have to ask you, as much as you say we should connect with our pain, isn’t this emphasising the negative? Is this really the way forward?”

This is a really good question, and this is a dance we all have to work with. We have to maintain a positive and optimistic outlook, but this can’t be done by blinding ourselves to the uglier aspects of our current reality – through acts of deliberate self-deception.

Everything needs to be made conscious – our pain, our short-comings, our fears – it all needs to be held with compassion and honesty. Once this is done, then it is time to fall back our faith, and trust that everything will work out for the best.

But that can only happen if we are doing our best to make everything conscious.

So well done, Timbo. Keep up the great work.

Power Challenge Winners’ Circle

Okay, so we have selected another eight winners to join the winner’s circle. Each winner will receive the full Dymphna Boholt Library – 5 books valued at $149.75 . In no particular order:

1. Debra Moloney

Debra’s responses were really touching, and it was great how honestly she shared how hard it was watching the effect of the drought on the farm, and to see her husband still working at 70 years of age, even though it’s supposed to be ‘our time’.

Debra says she’s giving herself permission to dream big about the future and enjoy the benefits. You go for it Debra. You deserve it.

2. Adam Stone

Adam seems to have a very clear focus on how he’s going to get away from his day job and set himself up as full time investor. He also has some great practices in place already. I think he’s well and truly on the way.

3. Gina Scriven

Gina is an artist, and it’s great to see someone creative applying these productivity practices to their craft. Wealth is just one of the areas we are trying to take to the next level. Really what we’re talking about is living a full-power, full-spectrum life. Go Gina.

4. Andrew Thomas

I was very happy to see Andrew’s name in the list. Andrew has already achieved fantastic results, and I remember a couple of years ago we got him up on stage on at the ILRE super-conference as one of our success stories. But he’s not resting on his laurels. And here he is, still dedicated to his own growth and performance. This is the stuff that greatness is made of.

5. Malcolm Gibson

Malcolm promised to give up chocolate for a week.  Full props for that.  I also loved how grounded Malcolm seemed on his ‘why’. Seems to have his priorities sorted.

6. Jodi Taylor

Jodi shared some beautiful reflections on how hard it can be to ask for help sometimes. She also said,

“I have a property that is perfect for Mark to take on, but have been too scared to tell him about because I don’t know him and I don’t have experience. I don’t want to look like a fool.”

I say, just do it Jodi. Tell you what – I know Mark Rolton. As you know, he doesn’t take just anyone one, but I’ll put in a personal word you, and say that you’ve just completed the Power Challenge, and that you are obviously a woman of commitment and dedication.

7. David Thorpe

David’s triumph over his body was to force himself to wash his car. Bravo. Like a lot of us, David also seems to be getting a handle on his limiting beliefs. This is a powerful start. Once you have identified the problem, the rest is just logistics.

8. Alison Clunes

Well done Alison for recognising that sometimes fear holds us back from taking action, and congratulations on finding a beautiful new partner who lets you practice the art of receiving. Up you go.

Congratulations!

So congratulations to everyone who took part. I hope it gave you real clarity and drive as the year began. And I hope it continues through the year for you.

If you are one of our winners, we will email you on the email address you used to submit your answers in the comments section of each challenge. Keep your eyes peeled for a direct email from us.

And congratulations again.

So proud of you all.

No B.S. Friday: This humbled me. Totally humbled me.

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Your responses to the Power Challenge really showed me just how far I have come and how much I have to be grateful for.

Ok, I’m still blown away that over 100 people made it all the way through the Knowledge Source Power Challenge.

This really is phenomenal. I am totally humbled that people gave it their time and energy, just as the year was lifting off the tarmac.

I know you all had a 1000 other things to do this month. But I’m blown away that there are that many people in this community who are willing to back themselves, invest in themselves, and who have enough faith to answer a call to action when it comes.

And having read through the responses, I’m so amazed at the positivity, the passion and the radical self-responsibility that came through again and again.

I wonder if people get just how much this juices me up.

And for me it’s been a powerful reminder of just where I’m at in life right now.

It wasn’t always this way. I used to be stuck. I used to be surrounded by people who thought it was all too hard, or too unfair, or just too cruel to give it their all – to invest themselves in their dreams.

… to put their hearts on the line.

But reading through the responses I can see how far I have come.

I can see that I’m now thick in a tribe of passion. Everywhere I turn now I meet people who are backing themselves, who are taking action, who are getting it done with a smile on their face.

This is not normal. This is not the way most people live. This is the not the disempowered mud that most people find themselves stuck in.

We are the lucky ones.

I am a lucky one.

And I am truly grateful that people are willing to come with me on this journey – that they’re willing to even consider whatever insane advice I sprinkler all over the internets.

When I started these blogs, it was because I felt like I had something to give, even if I didn’t know exactly what. I was transitioning from young buck to wise old man (in step with my greying beard).

And I was at a stage of some sort of completion. I had become untouchable financially. I was well and truly sorted. And part of that journey was developing the inner resources that made financial success possible.

So I felt qualified to share something.

So I share from an intimate personal space – from my own personal experiences. … and then just hope that people resonate with it.

I still find myself writing stuff and then wondering, what the hell are people going to make of this? This kinda worked for me. But am I just tripping? Maybe for some people this is going to be totally inappropriate advice.

I don’t know their situation. I don’t know what particular challenges they are working with, what particular wounds they are trying to heal. Maybe they actually need to be a little less Jon Giaan, and a little more Elmo or something. I don’t know.

So yeah, take it all with a grain of salt. This is just one man’s journey from broke no-hoper to millionaire on a boat.

You have to feel it out for yourself. Only you can know what is right for you. Part of the journey is learning to litmus test everything against your own truth.

But yeah, today I find myself a little less worried about not meeting people where they are at.

Because having just done the Power Challenge – over 450 people took part, over 100 made it all the way through to the end – and having read through the responses, I feel like I have a better sense of what our “tribe” is.

I am lucky enough to be part of a tribe that is passionate, inspired, open and action-orientated. A tribe where self-responsibility is a focus, drive is a virtue and pretence can be left at the door, thanks. And it is a tribe that encourags and celebrates success.

That’s pretty awesome, right?

Today I see that. I see how far I’ve come. And I see how much I have to be grateful for.

So a big BIG thank you to you all.

I did say I was closing the Power Challenge today. Maybe I’ll let it run through to the end of the weekend before drawing out the prizes.

If you want to get on board, you can catch up with them here, or hit them all at once. I reckon you could get through them all in less than half an hour. And people are telling me that’s it’s given them real clarity, direction and motivation.

This is the full list of challenges:

Challenge One: Energy

Challenge Two: Know your pain

Challenge Three: Take the reins

Challenge Four: Radical Honesty

Challenge Five: Connection

Challenge Six: Receiving

Challenge Seven: Pure Desire

Challenge Eight: Full Permission

Go on. Change the tribe you run with. Change your reality.

Heartfelt thanks again

Power Challenge 4/8: Radical Honesty (e.g My writing is crap)

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Your opportunity to win an I-pad – and make a full-power start to the year. Challenge Four – Radical Honesty

Ok, so we’re almost half way through the Knowledge Source Power Challenge – your opportunity to set a cracking start to the year and win some great prizes.

But half-way in, I’m realising that my writing is crap. Or my ideas are crap. Or my understanding of the crooked-timber of humanity is crap.

We had 400 people sign on to challenge one. By Challenge Three, we’re down to 93.

Classic. Don’t worry. I’m not taking it personally. It’s actually better than I expected. I know it’s hard to follow through. It’s one of the biggest challenges we face – to take initial bursts of enthusiasm and sustain them over strategic courses of action – even if it’s just eight 5-minute challenges.

But it’s not too late. If you did the first challenge but I haven’t followed it up, I challenge you to complete the rest of the challenge. All I’m asking for is 40 minutes this month.

Do it.

Ok, so this is where we are at so far:

Challenge One: Energy

Challenge Two: Know your pain

Challenge Three: Take the reins

Challenge Four: Radical Honesty (You Are Here)

Challenge Five: LOCKED

Challenge Six: LOCKED

Challenge Seven: LOCKED

Challenge Eight: LOCKED

So today’s challenge is around honesty.

Now honesty is a virtue. It is it’s own reward. But I’m not interested in the effect it has on our higher psyche or whether it increases our chances of getting through the Pearly Gates or what not.

Today, I’m only interested in one thing: efficiency.

My holiday reading was ‘Principles’ by Ray Dalio – the most successful hedge fund manager in the world, and in history.

Mostly it’s about the debt cycle, but Dalio also talks about how he manages his team. One of the principles he uses there is ‘radical honesty’.

At first I was like, whoa. That sounds pretty extreme, flower child. But the point Dalio makes is that we can waste an awful a lot of time faffing about and dancing around the truth.

So say someone in your team is underperforming, or has a way of talking that alienates others in the team.

You could dance around it and hope the situation improves, or you could practice radical honesty and hit it head on.

“Look, Ted. I can see your rubbing some people up the wrong way. Can we talk about that?”

And maybe that doesn’t go well. Maybe Ted freaks out and trashes the break room. But Dalio makes the point that whatever happens, it’s better than spending months or even years in a sub-optimal situation, just hoping things improve.

To practice radical honesty you have to stand fully in what you want, and you have to be prepared to fight for it, or at least have a few awkward conversations.

It is a commitment to keep moving forward and to never let a fear of uncomfortable situations delay or derail you from your dreams.

It is a commitment to efficiency.

So this is your challenge today:

a. Identify one area of your life where you are dancing around the truth.

b. Identify what it is that is stopping you from attacking it directly.

So it might be something like. a. I haven’t told my husband that his ideas for the renovation are dumb. b. Because he gets a bit touchy about that stuff and I don’t want to freak him out.

Or it might be something like, a. I haven’t told my mother-in-law that her chicken korma is rubbish. b. Because it is good that she comes around and helps with the kids, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful.

Now, I’m not going to tell you to go out and write them a letter or anything. I’ll leave it to your innate wisdom and social skills to figure that situation out for yourself. I get that it’s complex.

All I want to do today is identify a natural tendency we all have – to dance around the truth.

And all I want for you this year is that if you are going to dance around the truth, that you do it consciously. That you are aware that you are doing it.

And maybe, bit by bit, we can all start doing it less.

*** BONUS CHALLENGE ***

Radical honesty is a great thing to bring to your relationships, but it’s most powerful application is with ourselves. We are born masters of self-deceit, but growth is only possible when we face our sh!t and deal with it.

So as a bonus challenge complete this sentence:

“I am pretty flipping awesome, but I know I annoy some people because…”

Even the most awesome people we have ever met have their quirks and their challenges. I can guarantee that you do too.

But can you identify what your most public failings are? This is harder than it sounds…

HIT THE BLOG (Comments Below)        

So that’s it. Scroll to the comments below and jot down your answers. Give it five minutes of thought, and 30s of writing.

Radical Honesty Challenge

a. Identify one area of your life where you are dancing around the truth.

b. Identify what it is that is stopping you from attacking it directly.

Bonus Challenge

Complete this sentence:

“I am pretty flipping awesome, but I know I annoy some people because…” And here’s to a more honest (and efficient) year ahead.

NO B.S. Friday: Power Challenge #2: Know Your Pain

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Your opportunity to win an iPad and make a full-power start to the year. Challenge #2 – Knowing Your Pain 

Wow, 326 responses to Challenge #1 and counting… If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check your email inbox or click this link. 

Let’s move on to Challenge #2 (Participate – Movement creates momentum). 

There’s a story where I come from of a master craftsman who kept his old apprentice’s apron in the attic.  

Every night he would go up to the attic and connect with the apron, as a way of remembering how far he’d come, and the road that he was still on.  

In a way, I think we are all escaping from something 

I mean, you don’t set out to overhaul your life if everything is perfect, right? You’re not here for the entertaining way I confuse ancient wisdom and footy coaching clichés. You are here because you want something more.  

But our mistake is to hide our pain from others and from ourselves.  

We pretend like everything is more or less sorted. We’re here just for a bit of spit and polish. Just to put the finishing touches on a life that is pretty much complete.  

And we can’t admit that our life is on fire – that it’s coming apart at the seams and taking on water.  

Maybe it’s pride. Maybe we think it’s polite to keep our suffering to ourselves.  

But whatever the case, there is an opportunity missed here.  

The human, in its pain response, is incredibly energised. Of course it is. You might struggle to get up off the couch, but if the house was on fire, you’d break land-speed records getting out the door.  

So if we muffle our pain, we muffle our pain response – and that deadens us, makes us less energised.  

So this is your simple challenge for today: Connect with your pain. Connect with your discomfort.  

Give yourself two minutes (that’s all it’ going to take), and just free-form it. Don’t think about your answer. Just write.  

Leave a short comment below:  

  • What in your life right now just isn’t working.  
  • What just doesn’t fit?  
  • What pisses you off?  
  • What would you leave behind in 2019 if you could? 

Go! 

Ok, be aware that you are sharing this with random people on the internets, so maybe don’t go into the specifics. Don’t name names.  

But spend time with the part of you that is uncomfortable. The part that wants to move – that wants to move forward.  

Despite what the happy-clappy success gurus say, it is a pain that should be central to our daily drive.  

So this is your challenge for today. Comment below.

And if you missed your challenge #1, here it is again. 326 people took the time to share, so the buzz is real. Check out what they’re responses were, plus add yours! 

Remember, everyone who completes the Power Challenge goes into the prize draw to win at the end of the month. 

Power on. 

JG 

P.S. – As a bonus, share this with someone who you think resonates with the pain you are pointing to. Say, “Hey, this wanker Jon asked me to do this. But I thought you might resonate with this. Is this how you would say it?” Copy and paste. 

P.P.S. Still reading? Good. Now time to take two minutes and do the work. Here are the questions again. Don’t think, just write. There are no right or wrong answers. 

  • What in your life right now just isn’t working.  
  • What just doesn’t fit?  
  • What pisses you off?  
  • What would you leave behind in 2019 if you could? 

Post your answers here.

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.