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No BS: How school trains you to lose

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No B.S Friday: The school system is designed to get you used to losing.

Coming into the tail end of 2021, I wondered if it was time to update my bio. I found myself pausing at the line, “Jon is a self-made millionaire, even though he failed high-school…. twice.”

It’s a standard line for me, but then I thought about it and rewrote it as, “Jon is a self-made millionaire BECAUSE he dropped out of high school twice.”

“Dropped out” is actually a nice way of putting it. Makes it sound like it was a choice. It was more like I was ejected… like the way a fighter pilot is ejected from a burning air-craft.

School and I didn’t get along. And you could point to the spit-balls, the fighting, the arson allegations but really, these were all symptoms. I just didn’t know how to exist within the system.

And this is what saved me.

Of course I didn’t understand at the time. I was 17. I didn’t even know what ‘system’ meant. I couldn’t understand it. All I knew was that school made me feel like sh!t.

Fast-forward a few decades, and now I think I’ve started to figure it out. The reason I was ejected from the wreckage of my burning school is that my principal was a dickhead, my teachers were angry lesbians, AND the schooling system is designed to acclimatise you to losing.

I’ll say that last bit again. The school system is designed to acclimatise you to losing. To being a loser. To giving up on your dreams, and accepting your fate as a quiet and pliable potato.

Think about the grading system.

The grading system is the feedback loop between the school and the student. It lets the student know how they’re going, and how they’re performing in the eyes of the school, and by implication, the eyes of the world.

But the system is rigged.

Imagine you get 95% on a maths test. Perhaps you forgot to carry one of the adverbs. That looks like a good score right. We’ve been taught to see that as a good score.

But what it really says is that you failed to achieve “right”. You got close, but you failed. “Perfection” was available, but you came up short.

Loser.

Same story with grades like A,B+, C etc. It’s all relative to some ideal. What a perfect student would have done. The further you get from A++, the less ideal you are. The more of a loser you are. Until you get to C-, where me and my mates used to hang out. At that point you’re closer to total failure than you are to ideal.

50 shades of loser.

And that might sound like sour grapes come from where I sit. But I remember a young girl in my class. Her parents were refuges from Vietnam and they had drummed an incredible work-ethic into her. She was amazing. Every assignment looked like a hand-written invitation to the Queen.

She killed it. And then one day, she slipped up on something, and she got 95% on her test.

She was devastated. She burst into tears.

For the first time, she had tasted failure. The system told her that she was ‘wrong’.

And from that day on, like the rest of us, she had to get used to the system telling her she was a loser (to greater or lesser degrees) until we graduated, acclimatized to the idea that you can never win.

(We don’t like the cogs in the machine getting too uppity.)

While it was a painful process at the time (mostly for my parents), ultimately I was lucky to crash out of the system so early.

But I still had a need to prove myself, so I turned to…

… money.

Money is a much better metric than %’s or grades. And that’s because there’s no upper limit.

So I started wheeling and dealing. From then on, 100% wasn’t my reference point. Break-even was. If I lost money, I felt like I’d lost. But if I broke even or better, I felt like I won.

And it’s not hard to do break-even or better, so slowly I got used to the feeling of winning. I liked it, and it drove me further and harder, til I was making big deals and enjoying big wins.

Something the school system never gives you, by design.

So my suggestion of course is that we should do away with grades and gold stars, and reward school performance with money. Less gold stickers, more gold coins. If we do that, our kids will slowly get used to the feeling of winning.

I know it’s radical. But I think it’s got merit.

Board of Education, I’m waiting for your call.

JG.

No BS: Why forwards feels like backwards

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No B.S Friday: If it feels like you’re going backwards, you might be making progress

“Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.”

This is something that I only got recently.

I always heard this and thought “yeah, yeah, that’s probably true… for other people. I’m just going to cruise from one level of awesome to the next.”

But the other day I got it.

And I got it because I went the physio.

I went to the physio to get my shoulder looked at. As you know, I hit the gym pretty regularly. I like the energy it gives me, and I like to keep myself looking like a Greek god (the god of eating and drinking.)

But my shoulder was starting to tweak out a bit, and I think all the time I was spending at the computer probably wasn’t helping.

Anyway, I won’t go into the details of the bio-mechanics (because there’s no way I remember), but my physio spent some time on my shoulder and loosened a bunch of stuff up.

And what I noticed was that my shoulder was feeling better. So that was great. But then my neck was feeling really sore. And under my arm pit. And across my chest.

I’d seemed to have replaced a single chronic pain with a whole bunch of minor ones.

So I went back to the physio and was like, “hey, what’s going on here?”

And they said, “Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better.”

And I’m like, “Oh don’t give me that. What do you mean?”

It turns out that what was happening is that I was using my shoulder in a particular way to protect other parts of my body.

So because my neck was tight, my shoulder was moving in a way that didn’t make my neck worse. And because my chest was tight, my shoulder was moving in a way that protected that.

Eventually, that funny way of moving started to create pain in my shoulder.

But what that meant was that when we got the shoulder moving freely again, it was no longer protecting my neck and my chest.

And without the protection of my shoulder, I now became very conscious of the pain in my neck and chest.

It felt like a new pain, but it was actually just an older, legacy pain being unsurfaced.

And so now I have more work to do.

And at this point I got it. This is why sometimes it feels like you’re going backwards when you’re going forward.

We build many different rigidities into our life to ‘protect’ pain points.

So maybe feeling poor is painful, so we cover that up with a resentment of rich people and an unfair capitalist system.

Maybe we felt shame about our creative urges, and so we cover that up with a hyper-macho commitment to being ‘business-like’.

Maybe we were rejected in love, and so we cover that up with an over-the-top righteous commitment to dead-end marriages, with an expectation that marriage should be dull and boring.

Whatever it is, at some point those protective measures don’t serve our broader life goals. They are protecting particular pain points, but they are holding us back from living a rich and happy life.

And so we need to ‘unwind’ them.

But when we unwind them, the old pains resurface, and now we’ve got to deal with them.

And so there comes a stage where all we’ve got to show for our work is a new set of pain – a new cluster of blockages – and a cluster of blockages that feels deeper and harder to shift than the original set, because they are.

And this is why sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.

So stick with it.

Keep going, and eventually everything will be moving in harmony again. That point exists.

Just got to push through it.

JG.

No BS: What the super-rich worry about

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No B.S Friday: There’s work we all have to do, no matter how much money we have.

Not long ago I was on a super-yacht in the Greek isles talking to someone.

(Yes, I know a lot of my stories start that way.)

Anyway, the old fellah I was talking to seemed like he had it made.

He owned a super-yacht for starters. That’s often a bit of a give-away. He also owned most of the island where we were staying, several mansions across Europe and America, a global shipping empire and an online shopping network, and there was probably enough gold around his neck to buy a small African nation.

The man had money.

And this was the tail end of the GFC, when everything seemed a bit topsy-turvey.

And do you know what he said to me?

“I just want to make sure I’m ok.”

I didn’t pick up on it at the time, but talking to my wife over dinner that night, I reflected on how strange it was.

He wasn’t being ironic. He wasn’t having a laugh about how much wealth he had.

He genuinely wanted to be “ok”. He was genuinely worried that he wouldn’t be ok. I could hear the worry in his voice.

It was ridiculous. There was enough seafood and whiskey, just on board the yacht, to last out a nuclear winter.

His companies made him more money in a single day that most of the world would earn in their entire lifetimes.

If he liquidated all his assets, there would have been so much cash that if you set it on fire, you could see it from space… and still have enough left over for him to live out the rest of his days in comfort. (He was already mid-70s.)

What does ok even mean?

And this is the thing.

(And if you’re starting out on your journey to exceptional wealthy, as I sincerely hope you are, pay attention.)

We all need to feel like we’re ok. That’s a basic human need.

And money helps with all problems. Money is very useful like that. Often, if you’re not ok – you’re sick or your relationships are rocky – more money is probably going to help.

(Rich people have much lower divorce rates that the rest of the population.)

But at some point, once you’ve solved this problem and that problem, you’re going to reach a point where money isn’t going to help you anymore.

You’ve reached a level where it’s about your relationship to your self. It’s about whether you like who you are as a person. It’s about your personal pride. It’s about your resiliency.

And it’s about whether you feel you can lean into and find support in the social networks you have around you.

Money is useful here, but it can not solve these problems.

It requires conscious work. It requires looking within and dealing with what you find there. It involves growing as a person.

Until you do that, you will never be ok. You will never know peace.

And it just takes the smallest global financial crisis to trigger it all off again, and for you to start worrying about whether you will be “ok” or not.

So take the time to be with yourself. I’m not talking five minutes after footy practice. I’m talking booking a weekend away to stare at the coast. Time by yourself.

Find that centre, that core – that place you turn to when life presents you with challenges.

Find that core, and you will always be ok. No matter what.

This is the work that we all have to do.

And money can’t save us from it.

JG.

No BS: Why you need slack, lots of it

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No B.S Friday: If you’re maxing out, the wheels are going to come off at some point.

Have you built enough slack and redundancy into your life?

This has been a bit of a lesson for me.

It’s something that’s come reasonably intuitively for my business, but it’s been a very difficult lesson to learn in my personal life.

When you’re running an organisation, it’s easy to think about redundancy and contingency planning.

I remember I once did a tour of a print-shop where I was getting some materials made.

This wasn’t your corner store printer. This was the printer those smaller printers turned to when an order they couldn’t handle walked through the door.

These guys were the big boys.

And they had some serious equipment. Like massive printers, worth half a million dollars each.

And I remember they had one of these things, attached to a winch and elevated over the factory floor, just hanging from the roof.

This was the back-up printer. The sole purpose of this printer was to step in if the main printer went down.

If the main printer broke down, obviously they’d turn it off and back on again, but if that didn’t work, it’s probably something that would take at least several days to fix.

And a printing business without a printer is not a business at all.

And so yeah, they had a massive printer worth half a million dollars, just hanging from the roof… just in case.

And it made total sense.

You need to have a bit of slack built into your systems… just in case.

Now, that’s obvious with a business, but what about in your personal life?

Have you built slack into your schedule?

Many of us don’t – well the many of us that step outside the box and start running our own show – whether that’s running a business or being a professional investor.

Many of us run our lives at 100% capacity – if not more!

I did. For years. It took me a long time to learn that I needed to build in some contingency.

I couldn’t plan to run myself at 100%.

Because, inevitably, something would come up, and then I’d be stuffed.

Especially when I had a family. Family life is constantly dealing with the unexpected.

And so slowly, I learnt that if I ran myself at 100% – if I filled every hour of my schedule with tasks – then at some point something would come up, and the wheels would fall off.

I learnt that I had to run myself at a comfortable 80-85%.

And the discipline there was in saying no. It was saying no to taking things on, even though in the moment I had the capacity. I had the hours. I could step up.

But I had to discipline myself into saying no – into running my self with a bit of slack in the schedule.

And the real magic here is what happened with that surplus time.

What happened with that 15% that was just sitting idle?

Well, it just became me-time. It became sweet nothing time. It became time just to have a coffee in the sun and mull on some of life’s big questions.

(Which ironically, ends up being incredibly productive time!)

It became some of the sweetest hours in my schedule.

And once I clocked into that sweetness, it actually became easier to defend it from the thousand and one things that wanted to encroach on the schedule.

So that’s my advice to people these days.

Don’t run yourself at 100%. Keep some slack in the system. Let it be easy.

And just enjoy the sweetness that it opens up.

JG

No BS: why you can’t handle the truth

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Social media is heating up. Conspiracy theories are everywhere. I tell you what you can believe with total confidence.

The journalist Gary Webb once believed in a conspiracy theory.

He believed that the CIA was importing huge amounts of cocaine, selling it on the streets of America, and using the money to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Turns out the theory wasn’t just a theory though. It was fact. And it was the biggest scandal of the day.

Webb got no thanks for his efforts though, and he later committed suicide.

By shooting himself in the head.

Twice.

Welcome to the strange, murky world of conspiracy theories.

Now, what’s really going on with the Corona virus?

Like, really REALLY going on?

I can see things are starting to get pretty heated on the socials. In the early days of the virus, the narrative was more or less, ‘uncontested’. Now there are more and more voices questioning what’s going on.

That’s a good thing. If you never question anything, you’ll spending your whole life in a nice safe job, until one day you watch your entire life savings go up in smoke in a bot-driven market crash.

But, there’s a lot of stories out there – from the official to the fringe. They can’t all be true, so how do we make sense of everything that’s coming at us?

Over the next few blogs, that’s what I want to try and do. Give you a framework for making sense of the conspiracy theories that are out there, and sifting the reasonable from the nonsense.

Now, when I put it in the context of a binary between ‘reasonable’ and ‘nonsense’ it sounds like it’s an easy thing to do. Like the truth will somehow appear obvious and untainted when we look in the right place.

But humans are not geared up for ‘truth’.

Let’s look at that for a bit, because we need to understand what we’re dealing with.

Okay, so let me ask you, how do we experience ‘facts’?

Well, facts are our things that we have perceived with our senses. Either directly, or second hand – through images to our eyes or meaningful sounds to our ears.

But even this leaves room for a universe of the unknowable. Our senses have evolved. Early organisms didn’t have eyes or ears, but we do.

However, ears and eyes have been selected to help us survive in our environments. That is, they are specifically designed to help us eat, root and avoid angry things.

By design, they give us just enough information to do that. No more and no less.

And they could do more. Insects can see whole spectrums of colour that we can’t see, because it helps them navigate their niche. We can’t see that spectrum because it’s kind of irrelevant to us.

So there’s spectrum of light and sound. But there are world of possible media – Vibration? Quantum phasing? Spirit?

If the earth was inhabited by gentle ultraviolet spirit beings who ate beauty and had no impact at all on our ability to eat, root or avoid angry things, then we wouldn’t be able to see them, simply because there would have been no evolutionary advantage in being able to see them.

So this is the first point. Evolution determines what you are capable of perceiving.

You are never seeing the ‘whole’ truth. Your sense organs are just not designed to do that. That’s not what they were built for.

They were built for survival, not truth.

The same story goes with the information you perceive and the way you process it.

Your brain’s job, as detailed in the job description evolution gave it, is to give you a workable framework for getting about in the world.

The ‘accuracy’ of that framework, again, is kind of irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether it successfully helps you eat, root and avoid angry things.

So perhaps you believe that when trees wobble, it creates wind, and when trees really start wobbling, a storm is coming and you should take shelter.

It doesn’t matter that you’re ‘wrong’. The framework helps you survive, and that’s enough.

The ‘truth’ is only ever a second-order consideration.

This is something that is useful to acknowledge.

Your brain has only a loose commitment to the truth. It is interested in relevant and workable truths, not complete truths.

In fact, it’s geared to not spend too long over-thinking the truth. Once the brain has a workable framework, it actually starts resisting the impulse to do any more digging.

Once you have a workable framework, you actually, sub-consciously, start filtering out anything that might disturb your confidence in that framework.

It’s why science tends to move in lurches – frameworks need to become completely untenable before we’ll invest the precious resources needed to create a new one.

And that’s all before we touch on social media thought bubbles, confirmation bias and the tendency to believe anything that ‘feels’ right.

So that’s the second point. Not only are you imperfectly equipped to perceive truth, you are imperfectly equipped to understand truth.

It’s an uphill battle all the way.

I’m saying all this because I think we all need to relax a little bit.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now because you don’t know what the truth is or who to believe, that’s ok. You not designed for ‘truth’. It’s still available to you, but you’re fighting your biology.

So take it easy. Find what’s workable for you. That’s what your ancestors would have done.

The second point is that if you’re shouting at strangers on the internet because they’re too stupid to see the truths that you see, maybe dial it back a bit.

First, while it’s possible that you have a grasp on the whole truth, it’s probably unlikely. Second, if you’re getting frustrated that people can’t embrace your truths overnight, it’s most likely because there’s a billion years of evolution getting in the way.

Go easy on them. They’re sophisticated monkeys trying to do the best they can… just like you are.

So take it easy Australia. Either way, we’re all in this together.

Now, I haven’t told you what I think yet…

More on that next week.

JG.

No BS Friday: I Give Up (Seriously)

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Give up trying to ‘make it’.

You are never going to make it.

But this is the secret that no one tells you.

There is no “make it”.

There is no point where you’re done, where you’re putting your feet up with a whiskey in your hand and thinking, yep, I’m a success.

Because if you’re defining success on your achievements – on your business successes, on your fancy cars, on you funds under management – you’re chaining yourself to the wheel.

There is nothing you can do that will ever be good enough. Think about Alexander the Great.

He’d conquered half of Asia Minor and it still wasn’t good enough.

Even the most mighty king is never free.

But freedom can be yours.

Don’t look to what you do in the world, but look to what you do in yourself.

Do you give everything every thing that you’ve got?

Do you rise to meet your fears and hit things with relentless courage?

Do you strive to see yourself clearly and honestly in the mirror, striving to be the best version of yourself that you can be?

This is the only definition of success that matters.

And so this is the secret I will share with you. When you set your soul on this course, then you can “make it.” You can be a success.

You can sit back, take a long look at yourself in the mirror and think,

“Yes, I am the person I want to be.”

Then you will have made it.

And peace and freedom will be yours.

Take the pressure off now… give up!

Surrender to the person that you truely want to be…

The real YOU!

NO B.S.FRIDAY: Who Was MY “Rich Dad?”

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I owe a lot to just one man.

At one of our conferences the other day, someone asked me who my favourite investor was.

I guess they were expecting me to go with Warren Buffet or Richard Branson or something like that.

And as much as I love those guys, the truth is I model my investment philosophy on someone else – a man named Alan.

I don’t expect you to have ever heard of Alan. He was a friend of my fathers, and was around when I was a teenager – when my father would have ‘the boys’ over for a drinking session on the back patio.

He also never amassed the kind of fortune that makes you famous (or notorious). But that never bothered him. He was never in it for the fame. For him, it was the creative challenge of it all. To him, investing was more like a sport.

And I know we’re all unique, but Alan was truly unique. Like he had been installed with a different operating system or something. He would be entirely, full-power present with you one moment, and then in the blink of the eye, he would be lost to some creative horizon, almost like he was talking to you from a different room (or different dimension).

But as unique as he was, he was a great role-model to young investors like me. Here are three things I took form the gospel of Alan.

1. Walk your own path

I’m struggling to think of a rule that Alan followed to the letter. Maybe, ‘wear pants in public’. (I never saw him without pants, but then again, it wouldn’t surprise me if he had a ‘pantless phase’ at some point.)

But Alan wasn’t a rebel for the sake of it.  He wasn’t anti-authoritarian by nature. He just didn’t see any rules as fixed. Everything was up for negotiation. Everything could be looked at with fresh eyes. You could write your own rules.

Many of us just accept the limits that are placed on us without ever really testing them – without even asking ‘why?’ Many of these limits are inherited – from society or from our parents, or from something an elf said on Lord of the Rings once. They’re not really ours.

Limits are ok, but we need to do the work to make sure that we’re ok with the limits we accept – that they are actually in alignment with our values.

2. Push yourself…. Hard.

Another thing that inspired me about Alan was that he seemed to be addicted to pushing his own boundaries. He was constantly challenging himself. Constantly taking himself off in new directions.

It was like one week he was doing property development. The next it was a tourism business in Queensland. The next it was family-run vineyard in New Zealand.

You know how some weight-lifters get addicted to doing weights. Arnold Swartznegger once said it was better than sex. (Might depend on how you’re doing it, Arnie.) But even though lifting heavy weights is a difficult and challenging and exhausting thing, they get addicted to it. They can’t get enough of it.

Alan was like that when it came to challenges that pushed his boundaries – that expanded his comfort zone.

Ultimately I wonder if Alan might have been a more successful investor if he had stuck with just one thing. It’s like me. I know what I like. I like property in general, and right now, town-house developments in particular.

The more experience you have, the easier something becomes.

But while I’ve probably now made more money than Alan ever did, I can say for certain that Alan had more fun doing it.

Every new venture was an adventure and an opportunity to learn a little bit more about himself.

This is an inspiring way to live.

3. Back yourself… to the hilt.

The other thing that inspired me about Alan was that he had absolute faith in his own resources. He was relentless with self-education and self-improvement (which is another thing I took from him), so he did have a deep-well to draw on.

But many people have a lot of skills. Not everyone has an unshakeable belief in their capacities.

It’s kind of why Alan was able to drop into so many worlds, and take on such different projects.

It was like he knew that whatever happened, he’d make it work. If that delicatessen in Fitzroy turned out to be a dud, he’d turn it into something. He’d make it fly.

And if he couldn’t? Well, it was like he just had faith that everything works out for the best in the end.

He had faith in himself and faith in the world.

Put those two together, and the world just becomes your playground.

An ordinary / not-so ordinary hero

The last I heard of Alan he was off to WA to manage a cattle station or something, and I think he’s probably passed away now.

But of all the characters I’ve met in my life, Alan stands out as one of the most inspiring – perhaps not as an investor, but definitely as a being determined to live life to the fullest. And after all, isn’t that what we’re really talking about?

Power Challenge 6/8: Receiving

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Your opportunity to win an I-pad – and make a full-power start to the year. Challenge Six – Receiving

Ok, so this is the Knowledge Source Power Challenge – your opportunity to set a cracking start to the year and win some great prizes.

We’re getting down to the business end, but it’s not too late to get on board. 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

Challenge Five: Connection

Challenge Six: Receiving

Challenge Seven: LOCKED

Challenge Eight: LOCKED

So today, I wanted to look at the often-overlooked art of receiving.

The Australia Day holiday is coming up. It’s a good time to reflect on our capacity to receive – rest, nourishment, anything.

It is actually an art. It’s a skill that we need to practice. I think we start out pretty good, as children. But as we grow up, we lose the knack.

In many ways, growing up itself is learning how to give more than we receive.

And why are children so good at receiving? I think it is because they are ok with being vulnerable. They are little. They don’t have fire-arms. Vulnerability is their natural state.

When we receive, we are put in a vulnerable state. Power lies with the giver. They are the one with the gift. They are the one orchestrating the transaction.

And so as we become adults and no longer have the luxury of wallowing in helplessness, we turn away from vulnerability. It’s something we run from.

As a result, we become givers. We feel powerful when we are giving, and we find it difficult to withstand the vulnerability required to receive.

We cannot ‘tolerate’ it. It’s why so many of us just suck at receiving.

But receiving is a very important skill. I mean, think about your vision for where your life is going. Doesn’t it involve receiving a passive income stream from your investments, receiving love and affection from your family, receiving a Long Island Ice Tea from the pool boy?

Doesn’t the ultimate realisation of your vision involve a lot of receiving? So when are you going to practice that? You’re not just going to magically get better at it once you’ve made your money.

And what does the universe make of someone who is always pushing away opportunities to receive? What message is that sending?

So we need to practice the art of receiving. And to do that, we must practice the art of standing in our vulnerability.

So this is your challenge for today.

Place yourself in a situation of receiving. Ask your wife for a foot rub, ask your friend for a compliment, as the trolley boy to carry your shopping, ask your children to make dinner. It doesn’t matter, just find one thing that puts you squarely in the receivers seat.

Tell us what it is…

And do it.

And when you do it, treat it as an act of endurance. It’s like running a marathon, or jumping in an ice bath, or sitting in a super-hot sauna. But just notice how it draws on your inner resources just to be able to tolerate it.

Notice how we all have to learn to tolerate love, tolerate affection, tolerate care… as ridiculous as that sounds.

And maybe commit to building up your tolerance levels this year.

So that’s it. That’s the challenge for the week. Hit up the blog and let us know:

What are you going to do this week to practice the art of receiving? Just one thing. (And if you can’t think of one act of pure receiving, what does that say about your life?) How long were you able to ‘endure’ it?

And here’s hoping you’re open to receiving everything you deserve this year.

Jon

Ps – Hit us up in the comments of down below for this challenge, while –This link will take you to the previous challenges. It’s not too late to have the best year ever.

Power Challenge 3/8: Take the Reins

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Your opportunity to win an I-pad – and make a full-power start to the year. Challenge Three – Take the reins.

Alright, the Power Challenge is in full-swing. There are 360 (so far!) heroic individuals who have committed to making this an awesome year. I’m giving you eight quick but deep challenges to see if you are fully in alignment.

(Think of it as a tune up for your success engine.)

There’s still time to get on board. Find the challenges here. As long as you do all eight challenges some time this month you’ll be eligible for the prize draw. I’m relaxed like that.

Ok, so challenge number three. This is about self-discipline.

The road to self-mastery begins with mastering the body.

The Buddha said that the conscious mind’s controls the body the way a rider controls an elephant. The elephant is strong, and has agendas of it’s own. It won’t just do what you say unless you have established control.

So today, I want you to hit up the blog and write down one thing that you’re going to do this week that goes against the instincts of your body.

Maybe it will be taking a cold shower. Maybe it will be going a day without food. Maybe it’s walking up the stairs to your office, which was Stephen B’s answer to our first challenge. (Stephen, you’ve got to come up with something else.)

Think of just one thing you can do this week. Declare it to everyone on this blog.

Then do it.

And when you do it, whatever it is, I want you to pause just before you do it and watch for two things.

1. The Whingeing

First, listen to your body’s excuses. Standing on the edge of a cold lake, you might here yourself complain, “It’s too cold, I’m might catch a flu, I’ve just eaten, I look ridiculous in these budgie smugglers.” Sometimes your body is crafty. Sometimes just whingey. But it always pushes back.

But notice how your body sort of has a capacity to over-ride your inner monologue. Notice how your body’s thoughts can be mistaken for your own thoughts, if you’re not watching carefully. Notice how your boldest agendas can be derailed by the worst and whiniest instincts of our body.

This happens to us ALL. THE. TIME.

There is an art to knowing when your mind is raising reasonable objections, and when your body is just being a little wuss bag. It takes time to know the difference.

2. The Loving Command

Second, I want you to force yourself to do whatever it was you were planning to do. Jump into the lake. Get up at 5 a.m. Fast.

(Actually, fasting is great because you are constantly being presented with temptations.)

Whatever it is, assert your authority, assert your control, and just do it.

But as you’re doing it, I want you to hold an attitude of “loving command.”

Don’t go hating on your body. Don’t go screaming at your body, “Shut up you flabby ball of failure. We’re doing this. I’m throwing us in this lake. F-youuuuu!”

No. Hold an attitude of loving command. Say, “I can see you don’t want to jump in this lake. I know that it’s cold. But I want this for us. And I have the reins. I am in control.”

And then do it.

I think an attitude to loving command is the key to having sustainable, heart-centred self-discipline, which in turn is one of the key pillars of success.

So that’s it. That’s the third challenge. Share the act of discipline you’re going to commit to this week right here in the comments section. And then watch for those two things – The Whingeing and The Loving Command.

I really believe it will help you grow a more powerful self-discipline and self-mastery this year.

Power on!

Jon

Ps – Why not rope somebody else into this challenge. Who do you know who could travel the road of mastery with you? Forward them this email and get them on board.

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