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NO B.S. FRIDAY: Great investors don’t learn from their mistakes

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Do you take the time to unpack your wins?

There’s an old adage investing that I really like:

“A good investor learns from their mistakes. A great investor learns from their successes.”

I think this is a really good one to remember.

In a way, it’s much easier to learn from our mistakes. When things go wrong, we’re much more interested in deconstructing what actually happened and what went wrong.

We’re primed to learn. We’re eager to avoid the embarrassment and setbacks that come with failure.

But when things go well… When a deal goes perfectly and we end up with a lot more cream than we were anticipating, we get on a high.

We’re full of juice and go. We just want to launch into another deal as soon as we can.

And the human biology is programmed to unquestioningly repeat successes. If eating those berries turned out well for us in the past, well then lets do it again.

But the modern world is more complex than our evolution ever imagined.

And there’s a real danger here if you’re not critically evaluating your successes.

I mean say you buy a site for development. You get a few months into planning and the numbers aren’t really adding up. But then the land gets rezoned, and you flip the site on to developers for a very tidy profit.

Win, right?

You made money because you made a smart buy.

But actually no. You made a mistake. You didn’t buy well. If you bought well, then the development numbers would have added up.

You made a mistake. But you got bailed out of your mistake by the re-zoning.

So this should be a big red stop sign saying, I need to take a look at my method here, because I’m buying lemons.

But that’s going to be hard to do if you just double or tripled your money. You’re going to be thinking. Let me at ‘em. I want to buy again.

In this situation, even with the best intentions and critical self-awareness, it is actually hard to hold your horses and take the time to analyse just how the deal went down.

And that’s when it’s actually fairly easy to unpack.

What about when you’re buying and developing in a market that’s got a run on?

How much of your profit margin is due to buying well and putting in a quality development? How much is just due to the market? How do you even know?

And right now, across Australia, there are 1,000s of property experts. People who’ve made lots of money and have sure-fire strategies for success.

At least they think they do. But the truth is most just got lucky. They bought at the right time and made their money off the market.

They just don’t realise it. In their minds, they’re geniuses. The results speak for themselves. If I wasn’t a genius I wouldn’t be making all this money, would I?

This is also one of the reasons why we see this bubble and bust dynamic play out in markets the world over.

On the way up, every one thinks they have the secret formula. They have some insight and strategy that 99% of people don’t have, and they’re turning that into coin.

They all do.

But at some point, the fundamentals bite, and the emperor realises that they’re naked. People realise that they’ve been buying junk, and there’s no way off a sinking ship.

Does this sound familiar? Dot-com bubble anyone?

Crypto-currency?

Now, I know I’ve been sitting on the fence a little bit over crypto’s, but now I’m calling bubble.

Why?

For exactly this reason. I’ve got all sorts of people in my ear about buying into crypto-currencies, and most have no idea what they’re talking about.

And we are well and truly into LaLa land.

Take “Fuck Token” (seriously, I’m not making that up.) That was up 370% in 24 hours last week.

I don’t even know where to start with that one. But it’s actually chump change compared to some of the numbers getting round…

There are now thousands of companies issuing coins. Rather than selling shares, they’re selling investors digital tokens (to people who mostly pay in Bitcoin or Ether).

So rather than IPOs we now have ICOs – Initial coin offering. It’s pretty much the same, just more ‘crypto’.

And some of the stories there are ridiculous.

There’s a token issued by Stratis that is up 101,168%. And that’s in a single year!

The NXT token is up 672,989%

They’re not typos. They’re actually results. In case your head isn’t spinning already, if you put $1 into a NXT token a year ago, you could now cash out $672,989.00.

(oh for a time machine.)

But what’s going on in the underlying business?

Maybe they’re doing great things, but is there any conceivable way that the business is 672,989% better than it was a year ago?

Short of discovering cold fusion, perpetual motion (or a time machine), there’s no conceivable way we can justify these results.

We’re in LaLa land.

And look, I know crypto has substance. There are multiple uses that have profound implications.

But then so did the internet in 1999. That didn’t mean that Pets.com was the billion dollar unicorn people thought it was.

Having a kernel of substance doesn’t protect you from hype and irrational exuberance.

But I am now being told to ‘get into cryptos’ by people who really don’t know what they’re doing.

I ask them what a crypto currency is and they say it’s like digital money. And I say, yeah, I’m aware of digital money. I do my banking in the 21st century.

“But it’s so easy, Jon.”

“Yeah, it’s easy until it isn’t.”

And look, that’s not to say there isn’t still money to be made. You might make another 670,000% before the whole thing topples over.

But if you’re going to do that, just be aware that you’re gambling now. The herd is on the stampede, and all the supposed ‘fundamentals’ in the world won’t save you when the herd turns.

There’s value in cryptos for sure, but now, more than ever, you need to know what you’re doing.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

What’s your shoe-shine boy telling you?

NO B.S. FRIDAY: What you should really do with your talents

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I don’t think our great spiritual teachers really want you to disappear up your own clacker.

Some one sent me this charismatic young man’s interpretation of The Parable of Talents.

In case you weren’t perfecting spit-balls in Sunday school like I was, the Parable of Talents is one of Jesus’ more mysterious stories.

In short, a nobleman is going on a long journey. Before he leaves he gives three talents to one servant, two talents to another, and one talent to a third, “each according to their ability.”

A talent was the common term for a shi!tcan of money. Like 4 years wages. So it was serious coin.

(The modern word talent meaning “special skill set”, seems to derive from this parable!)

When the nobleman comes back he asks the servants what they did with the money. The first two traded and invested their money, and doubled what they were given.

The master is pleased.

The third however buried his talent in the backyard, and so only has the original talent that was given to him.

The master is pissed. You could have at least stuck it in the bank and earnt interest. (He actually says that.) He then takes his one talent and gives it to the one who already has the most.

There’s nuance I’m glossing over here, but this is the idea. The third servant wasted his talents, and wasted his life. God’s rewards go to those who make the most of their “God-given talents”.

This story struck me in Sunday school. I wanted to know what the first servant had invested in. How long was the master gone? What was the annualised rate of return? But it also stuck out from the other parables. It just felt different.

So coming back to our charismatic young friend. I’ve heard this one before. Not this one specifically, but this kind of new-agey interpretation.

In this version, the talents are a metaphor for what we currently call “talents”, and God wants you to take your talents and share them with the world. Don’t bury them inside you. If you can sing, then sing. If you can paint, then paint. If you can knit clothes for small dogs, go and take that sh!t to the Flemington flea market.

And shine, star bird shine.

This interpretation is getting a bit of play these day. It resonates with the times. But the fact that the word talents transitioned from a word meaning, “weight, unit of currency” in Jesus’s time, to the current meaning of “skills and abilities”, probably means that you could say this is, more or less, the standard interpretation.

I guess I used to run with that line as well.

(No, I will not come inside! God wants me to play soccer, mother!)

But these days, something doesn’t ring right.

I mean, why does Jesus place the whole story in a commercial context? The whole trading story just complicates the picture.

I mean, why not say the master gave his three servants a trombone. Two of them played, but the other did not. “Wicked and slothly servant. Why hast thou not made use of the trombone given unto thee?!?”

That’d be cleaner if that was really Jesus’ point. But no, he made it about trade and investment.

Of course I have seen people put a free-market spin on this as well, but I’m not sure I buy that either.

Historians are divided as to whether the Lord Christ ever said, “You’ve got to risk it to get the biscuit,” but I tend to side with those who don’t think the bible was meant to be a substitute for a Cert IV in financial planning.

And remember this was a man who lost his nanna and started whipping the merchants and money-changers who had set up shop in the temple.

So it’s really interesting that he chose to make this story about money.

I don’t pretend to know why, but as someone who knows money on a first name basis, I have some thoughts.

First I think that money, trade, finance, commerce, all that – that’s the human world. We’re not about ethereal dimensions here. We’re not talking divine qualities like justice and grace. We’re talking the nitty-gritty of messy humans living in a messy society, playing out their greed and selfishness and selling animals for sacrifice in the temple and all that.

But this is where our work is. This is where we should be engaging.

We could just say, nah, I don’t want to get involved in that. I’m just going to stay here and cultivate my righteousness. Or I’m just going to devote myself to my singing and macramé doggy vests.

But that is not what the gift of life is for.

We’re here to play the game. We’re here to fully engage with this messy, painful and constantly disappointing world.

And as much as we can, we should bring the talents that we were born with to the table.

But the other point I’d make is that when we’re talking about talents here, we’re not talking about the genetic dispositions we are born with. In the context of this parable, our talents are not ours. They don’t belong to us.

They are the things that are bigger than us – those higher ideals. They are our generosity, our grace, our charity, our faith, our giving people a second chance, our love.

The things that seem to come from beyond.

And so I actually wonder if this means exactly the opposite of what young mate is talking about. Jesus isn’t saying, go and invest in and cultivate the things that make you ‘special’.

Rather, it is a warning against disappearing up your own clacker. It’s not about you.  Don’t make it about what you’ve got. And don’t withdraw from the world either. Don’t think you’ll win any browny points for keeping the browny taint of the material world off your talents.

Get out there and get messy.

That’s your job.

But I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting grumpier and more conservative in my old age.

What do you reckon?

What is a house? (asking for a friend)

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Housing isn’t the concept that we thought it was… have you caught up?

What is a house?

If like most people you said something like, “a place where people live”, then you’d be right, but you’re missing a big part of the story.

Even if you put on your investor hat and said, “a place where people live, that you can also own and earn a rental income from,” again, you’d be technically right. Full marks from Investopedia for you.

But again, this is only part of the story.

Housing, as a concept, is changing.

And if you’re not watching this space, then you’re going to miss the biggest opportunities on offer over the next twenty years.

For a long while, you’re “a place where people live” definition would have served you well. Up until about the late 1980s, that was pretty much right.

But then ordinary Australians started cottoning on to the investment potential in property. They realised that housing was a place where people lived, but it was also something you could invest in.

The game changed, and a big part of the story behind the ongoing boom we’re living through is that more and more people are making property part of their portfolio.

But now the game is changing again.

Some of those changes are easy to identify.

Take the evolution of AirBnB for example. That has surged in recent years, and it’s a whole new way of thinking about housing.

Now a house is somewhere that people live, that can be invested in, and can give you access to the Tourism dollar if you fancy being a hotelier.

The latest stats show there are 115,000 listings on Air BnB right now.

And a study from the University of New South Wales shows that in Sydney, 60% of Sydney’s 20,000 listings are for entire homes.

That means there are 12,000 homes in Sydney, that used to just be a place where people lived, but are now a sort of quasi-hotel.

And if we extend Sydney’s experience around the country, that means we’re talking about something like 60,0000 to 70,000 homes, across the country, now dedicated solely to the short-term accommodation market.

This is a real shift.

I mean, we’re talking about almost a full year’s worth of housing supply, just never making it to market. That’s got to have an impact on prices.

Or take the way housing has become a ‘store of wealth’ for rich globalists.

Rich people (even aspiring rich people!) from China to the US, from the UK to Russia, are looking to Australian property, not because it earns an investment return, but because it gives them a way of storing their wealth…

(… and possibly hiding it from the authorities back home.)

There were almost a million empty homes on Census night. We don’t know how many are due to investors deciding that they’re better off leaving their investment empty, but we hear stories of entire apartment blocks in inner-city Melbourne and Sydney being used for just this purpose.

Again, this has got to have an impact on the market.

And again, we need a new framework for thinking about housing. This isn’t just “a place to live” or a place to invest in.

This is something different.

So what is it?

This is important. The people who made money in the early days of the internet were the ones who saw what the paradigm shift was really about. It wasn’t just a way to connect a bunch of boffins at elite universities.

(It was an unprecedented vehicle for porn!)

Same story with the blockchain technologies. The ones to make money will be the ones who see the full promise of the technology on offer – a promise that may take years to realise.

So how should we think about housing?

Well, at the risk of drifting off into abstract space, I would say this:

Property is the gateway between the real and the unreal worlds.

I don’t mean that if you set up your Ouija board in the right way, property becomes a portal for communicating with the dead.

I mean that there are fundamentally two types of economic activity. There’s real world activity – making cars, growing fruit, building stuff. And there’s unreal economic activity – writing blogs, marketing, mining for bitcoins.

No one is any better than the other, but at some point, all economic activity needs to be made real. We work so that we can ultimately buy real things – food, housing, clothing etc. You can’t live on blogs.

And while you can have a real economy without any unreal elements, you can’t have an unreal economy without any real elements.

So the unreal rests upon the real.

Property – and land in particular – are unique then because all real activity must be grounded in the earth. The minerals that make up your IPhone have to come from somewhere. Your factory has to be located somewhere. Your zucchinis have to be grown somewhere.

And so property is the place where all the unreal economic activity – the vast billions and billions of dollars that rush about producing nothing anyone can touch or see – it is the place where all this activity grounds.

It’s the way that lightning needs to ground to exist. A lot like that.

The great colossus of human economy must at some point pass through the gates of property.

And the bigger the economy becomes, the bigger those gates have to be. The more value they hold.

And so as our economies continue to expand rapidly, and as the balance continues to shift from the real to unreal, as it has done for the past 50 years, the relative value of property increases.

And so we digitised hotels – that revolution grounds out in property values. We digitalised taxi’s. Now everyday parking spaces are factor of production.

China produces a thousand billionaires. They want to ground their wealth into something real before it is taken away from them.

So this is what I’m suggesting. Over the long, long run, I’m thinking about property this way – it is the gateway between the unreal and the real worlds.

No modern economy can do with out it.

And once you have that level of necessity, its potential long run value becomes limitless.

What’s your framework for thinking about property?

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Achievement is a trap and its instinct’s fault

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We’re hard wired not to care what’s on the other side of our goals.

I should never have kissed her.

I shouldn’t have got her number. I shouldn’t have asked her out to dinner. I shouldn’t have brought flowers.

And I definitely shouldn’t have put on that firefighter costume.

In hindsight, it was all a mistake. In foresight, it was a mistake too. I knew that it would cause nothing but trouble. But somehow it just seemed like a mistake worth making.

And it taught me a really interesting lesson: sometimes “achievement” is a seductive lie.

It’s like the other day I was talking to a friend of mine. We played soccer together. We were talking about our golden days, and about how he got selected in the Australian Under 17 side to tour Asia.

He was reflecting on how he was never such a talented player. He didn’t work all that hard either.

But he said he wanted that Australian jersey so bad it would keep him up at night.

He would imagine how it would feel to put on that green and gold tracksuit with the kangaroo on it. How it would wear it to the shops and how people would be impressed by it.

“To be honest, that’s what I was focused on. I was focused on selection. On the honour that would come with that. I actually never thought past it – to what it would be like to actually play for Australia.

“I would just go over and over it in my mind. What it would be like to hear my name called out at the end of the state titles. Calling my family back home to let them know I was in. Getting my tracksuit and ticket to the AIS in the mail.

I wanted it so bad I could literally taste it.”

And in the end, at the state titles, which was where much of the selection took place, he just had a blinder of a carnival. Everything fell into place for him. He surprised everyone, including himself.

And he got selected.

The dream came true.

And what was it like to play for Australia? Well, he never went. He did his knee in Canberra and stayed home.

“I wasn’t as disappointed as you’d think. I’d got what I wanted, truth be told. The cosmos had delivered. It had given me everything I had called in. I’d just forgotten to ask for anything beyond the tracksuit!”

Good that he can laugh about it now. Getting old is good like that.

I feel like a see this a bit with people’s success journeys. When you dig into the kinds of things they’re striving for, often it’s the moment of the achievement itself, not the fruits of that achievement.

Take a simple example. Say someone wants a flashy new car. Now, do they really want a shiny merc? Or do they want that moment when their neighbours see their car in the driveway for the first time? Do they want bragging rights to their friends? Do they just want to be able to tell themselves, “It’s ok. Life’s going all right. We’ve got a merc…”

What’s the problem with this?

Well, one, you’ll never be satisfied. If the problem is the stories you’re telling about yourself, those stories will always reassert themselves, no matter how many cars or boats and vintage fighter planes you throw at them.

You’re chasing your tale.

(My entry in International Pun of the Year.)

Two, it’s a total waste of energy. If you want a new story about who you are and how you’re going in the world, just tell the story. You have that power and it is as easy as that.

I’ve covered this stuff before.

But the point I wanted to make today is don’t beat yourself up about it. Recognise that humans are hard-wired to focus on achievement, not the fruits of that achievement.

Our instincts drive us in this way. It’d be too much work and energy if your instincts had to convince you of the benefits associated with every motivation.

For example, our don’t instincts don’t say, “you should eat apples because they’re healthy and nutritious and they will give us the energy we need to sustain our endeavours.”

No. They say, “Get shiny sweet things and put them in your mouth.”

And that is literally where it ends. By design.

In fact, they deliberately create a blind spot around everything else that happens after that. From the instinct’s perspective, it’s just a distraction.

So take my friend with a thing for firemen. I knew that it was all a bad idea. But I just found it really hard to care.

My instincts had me focused on my attraction to her. Nothing else. They made it seem like the whole human story had only existed so that we could be together, and some great cosmic alignment would take place the moment we kissed.

Of course, that was never the case. And after the fact, when I looked to the instincts that had now gotten me into all that trouble, they were nowhere to be found.

You’re on your own now buddy.

Just another one of the joys of being human.

So my advice is this – be aware that we have a tendency to get fixated on the moment of achievement – the moment a goal is realised or a task is completed.

Be aware that while that feeling of achievement is awesome, it’s fleeting, and if your happiness is tied up with achievement, rather than the fruits of achievement, you’re on a treadmill to nowhere.

Take stock of your goals. Do you actually want what comes with them, or do you just want the satisfaction of achievement? Feel it out. What does it feel like once you’ve had that new car for a while?

Do you even care?

If not, your energies are better placed elsewhere (probably on the stories you’re telling.)

And finally, the tram to St Kilda is no place to be caught impersonating a member of the emergency services.

How do you keep yourself focused on the other side of achievement?

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Change your difficulty setting

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How a computer nerd hacked the universe

So I went around to my friend’s house to talk about a development we were doing together.

We go into his home office – kind of a man-den. It was obvious that this was where he did his work and his whiskey drinking.

I’d been to their place to dinner a few times but I’d never been given access to the den. It felt like I should have learnt a secret handshake or something.

Anyway, after a while hanging out and looking over some designs I notice he’s got this little wooden sign on his desk.

It was an unusual thing.  On the top part it had “Difficulty Setting:” embossed into the wood. Below that it had EASY, NORMAL and HARD. There was also this kind of pointer thing – like those score counters in pool.

It was set to EASY.

I point to it and ask him about it. He laughs and looks a little bashful. He knows what I get up to and says, “If I tell you it’s not going to end up in one of your blogs, is it?”

I’m like, “nah mate.”

Anyway, he says that he first came up with this thing about 10 years ago. He was going through a rough trot. Things weren’t flowing his way. He had no money in the bank, he was in debt, someone stole his car, and then his dad died.

Life had hit him with a sledge hammer.

He thought about throwing in the towel.

And he said he was joking to his friend one day that it felt like the difficulty level on his life had jumped up to HARD while he wasn’t looking.

I got what he was talking about, but I wonder if everyone does. He says he played a lot of computer games in his teenage years – kind of when they were first coming out. A lot of those games let you choose the difficulty setting.

Easy meant there weren’t many enemies about, and they were terrible shots. It was a walk in the park.

Difficult was when you got swarmed by bad guys and they were all crack shots.

Normal was kind of how the game makers intended it to be played.

He said that back when he was a teenager, and back when games were super expensive, he couldn’t buy a new game every time he’d finish one.

So he’d go through and ‘clock’ the game on the normal setting. After that, he’d go back and set the difficulty to HARD and clock it again.

So that’s what he meant. It felt like his life had been set to HARD and everything was getting the better of him.

“You should set your life to EASY,” his mate joked.

And so as a joke he went back and stuck a sign, scrawled on some paper, to his desk: Difficulty Setting: EASY.

He meant it as a joke but something happened.

Because he had that experience with computer games – when the EASY setting was often so easy it was comical – enemy robots would practically blow themselves up – his sign evoked a really strong feeling.

And that feeling was that things were easy. All challenges were a matter of course. It was all about fun. You had unlimited ammo and infinite lives. There was no doubt that you might lose.

And so every time he looked at that sign, it brought back that feeling. It’s fun. It’s easy. All the odds are stacked in my favour.

I’m sure people stick motivational posters to their walls – pictures of dolphins with “The cosmos wants you to succeed you gorgeous snowflake” written on it.

But for him. This is what worked. This is what spoke to him.

And after a while, it started to work. After a while, life did feel easy. His challenges weren’t as hard to get through. He received help from unlikely places. His enemies blew themselves up.

And after a few years, he’d become so impressed with it, that he got his friend to make him up the sign that is still on his desk.

He confided to me that it really felt like he had “hacked” the universe. That something happened when he wrote out that sign that sent a very clear signal to the universe – “I’d like life to be a bit easier please.”

And the universe was only too happy to agree.

(Note two of the keys to manifestation here: write it down, and focus on the feeling first.)

And he reckons that since then, life has just been one success after another.

Nice. I’ll have one of your top shelf whiskeys then, thanks.

I asked him if he ever thought about setting the difficulty to hard.

And he said, “You know what. Sometimes I do. It’s like the computer games. There’s the thrill of the challenge. It’s exciting to overcome incredible odds.

And I used to worry that I was making myself soft – by choosing the EASY setting I was missing opportunities for growth.

But I’ve decided that I’m happy with the difficulty setting on EASY. I’m just going to focus on progressing through more levels.

I mean, even on the easiest difficulty setting, the journey to Prime Minister of Australia would be incredibly difficult and challenging.

So I’m just going to let everything come easy. I’m just going to go deeper and further than I ever thought I could. That’s my plan.

And at the end of the day, it might just all be in my head, but I just enjoy life more this way.

I’m playing for fun.”

This was too good. I said he had to let me write about it.

Ok. Just don’t use my name.

No worries Garry.

Now, I’m not sure if he really did hack the universe, but I am sure that if you approach life like a walk in the park with unlimited ammo, you are putting yourself in a very powerful state of mind.

And that state of mind will get results.

Where’s your difficulty setting at?

NO B.S. FRIDAY: End of the Secret Fascists

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Populism is on the rise, but I’m not worried.

What’s actually wrong with ‘populism’? (Seriously. Asking for a friend.)

More and more I’m hearing this term bandied about. It always comes as an insult. But it doesn’t seem to have any consistent political flavour.

Supporting gay-marriage? Populist. Being anti-immigration? Populist. Supporting minimum wage increases? Populist. Supporting tax cuts? Populist. Supporting new coal mines? Populist. Supporting clean energy targets? Populist.

It’s all over the shop. Seems that any politician or any piece of policy can be populist.

So at it’s heart it seems to be about a style of politics – a style where personal convictions and the “truth” are put aside in favour of whatever sells.

Sounds terrible right?

Only thing is, that’s what I thought politicians were supposed to do. In theory at least, politicians aren’t supposed to be following their own whims. They’re supposed to be ‘representing’ their constituents, and taking direction from them on the issues of the day.

The whole system is, in theory, populist. Or it’s supposed to be.

It’s like I laugh every time something is put to a conscience vote – where each member is free to vote with what they think is right.

But what are they doing the rest of the time? Backing policies they don’t think are right just because that’s what the party told them to do?

That sounds like a pretty flawed system.

I’d prefer my politicians to represent my interest thanks.

But don’t get me started. The modern democratic system is a total cluster-fuddle.

But still I’m interested in this idea of ‘populism’. It seems to me it’s a bit of trying to have your cake an eat it to.

Like, you’re saying, I support democracy, except when the majority are wrong. In that case, I’d like my own personal opinions to be implemented, thanks. In that situation, I’m a fascist.

And I think this is one of the weird truths that underpin our democratic system. We like to think that we support the idea of one person, one vote, but deep down, we know that a simple of majority of people can support some pretty stupid things.

The mob, with torches and pitchforks, can go pretty rouge pretty quickly.

And so I don’t think any body trusts 50+x% of the population to consistently come up with good decisions. It’s a recipe for mob rule. For the tyranny of the majority.

And so I think, secretly, we kind of hope that some sort of enlightened elite has got the reins. Like some sort of political Avengers, strong enough to resist the will of the mob, and do what’s right.

Secretly, we’re all fascists.

(Actually, tbh, I don’t really know what that term means. It’s probably not exactly what I think it is, but you get my point.)

And so I thought this chart here was interesting. It’s from a group called “Bridgewater”. It looks at the global share of the populist vote right now.

Each nation is weighted by their population shares, so it’s a bit rough, but the general trend feels about right.

But note that the authors admit that when they’re talking about ‘populism’ they’re really talking about “anti-establishment” parties – parties that are capitalising on an appetite for change and proposing radical alternatives to the status quo.

(They also include Trump in this sense, even though he’s representing an establishment party.)

They argue that the populist vote is now as strong as it was in the days leading up to WWII.

They argue that it’s kind of a scary prospect.

What do you think?

I’m not so sure. I think it does say some interesting things about where we’re at as a society. Remember the 1930s was a very rough patch that followed the great stock market crash. The past ten years has been a rough patch that followed the GFC.

I think there are parallels.

Generally, we’re secret fascists when the enlightened elite is doing a good job – when our economies prosper and hopes for the future are high.

But when the economy falters and hope dries up, then we start looking for alternatives. We become populists again.

So I think there are some parallels.

But I think there are some important differences.

The first is that modern populists parties are much fluffier than their 1930s predecessors. Even the nastiest can barely hold a candle to the Italian fascists or the German Nazis.

And personally, I just don’t see it ever getting that bad again.

And that’s because the internet gives us the capacity to draw out our collective empathy.

Say, for example, Australia implemented a policy that allowed you to kick a person of Greek heritage in the shins every Friday.

I would feel oppressed. But I could craft a pretty heart wrenching video on social media, and I think enough people would stop and go, you know what, that isn’t right.

Oppression relies on a disconnection from our basic humanity. German Nazis were persuaded to stop seeing Jews as people.

But that’s a huge deceit that takes years of carefully controlled social engineering.

Someone might try to do something similar with Greek Australians, but I don’t think it would get off the ground. It just couldn’t get the space it needs. The internet would quickly serve up witty and funny and touching counter points that would bring people back to their fundamental humanity.

And deep down, I trust that people are good.

So all this populism – all this anti-establishment feeling – I say bring it on. The system isn’t working and it could use a shake up.

But I don’t worry about us descending back into the horrible dark days of the 30s and 40s.

I think the internet protects us from that.

Like, how good is that? What a time to be alive.

What do you think? Am I taking things for granted?

NO B.S. FRIDAY: How to win a room

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A trip to the local council reminded me of some basic persuasion techniques.

So this week I went along with a friend to his council’s community access session.

He wouldn’t appreciate me going in to all the specifics here, but basically, he needed to go and lobby the councillors directly to get them to delay considering his D.A.

He had gotten word that his D.A was going to get knocked back, because he had these koala friendly trees on his property that he wasn’t aware of when he first put his DA together.

“Koalas?” I said. “Don’t you live alongside and freeway?

“Yep, and there’s pitbulls to the north and 3 cockerspaniels to the south. We haven’t seen a koala in over 20 years.”

But that’s the way DAs work. You’ve just got to jump through the hoops.

Anyway, I went along with him – mostly for moral support – but also because I’ve been through this process more than a few times, and maybe I’d be able to answer any questions he couldn’t.

Anyway, we get there, and there’s two hours allocated to community access, and there’s about 40 people on the list to speak.

Oh my god. I’m looking around the room and already I’m sizing people up. There’s the ex-councilors who are very long in the tooth now, but miss the days when they had something meaningful to do.

Then there’s the obvious cranks. (Why do crazy guys always have crazy hair? Is it part of the job description?) They’ve obviously been working very hard on their presentations because they haven’t found the time to shave or find clean pants.

And then there’s a mish-mash of local business owners and residents, coming along for the first time, and generally looking like they’re out of their depth.

And then there’s the councillors themselves, gritting their teeth and bracing themselves for the onslaught that was obviously about to hit them.

And it was seriously on like donkey-kong once it started.

Crazy pants guy is first cab off the rank and he’s speaking to the plans for a new waste-water treatment. Well he wastes no time going straight to “dereliction of duty”, “abuse of trust” and “legacy of lies and deceits”.

And I couldn’t even tell if he was for or against what was on the table.

Next there was a local cafe owner who had been asked to move his tables of the public side-walk. From what I gathered the previous owner had told him that he was allowed to have tables on the sidewalk, but that just wasn’t the case. But now, this was council’s responsibility and if they were forcing him to move, then he was going straight to the land and environment court.

The there was an ex-councilor. I have no idea what he was talking about. He was reading a prepared statement off a piece of paper, and it was full of technical terms about this that and the other.

In fact, come to think about it, pretty much everyone was reading off a prepared statement.

Now I’m watching the councillors, and they genuinely looking like they’re doing their best to keep up, but it’s obviously wearing on them. Within an hour they’ve been called everything from incompetent to corrupt, and that’s just from the presentations you could actually follow.

They were getting that glazed look in their eye.

I lean over and ask my mate what he was planning to stay.

He shows me the statement he’s prepared. It’s two full A4 pages of size 12 font.

“What? You’re going to say all that? In 5 minutes?”

“Yeah, I’ll read quickly.”

I’m like, “Mate, no way. I’m telling you that’s not going to work. Do you mind if I speak for you?”

He was reluctant but he comes round.

So when our time comes I get up and take the mic, and I look the councillors in the eye and say:

“Look, we’re just here to ask for a delay on the decision for the development application relating to such and such a property.”

“We’ve been working closely with the council planners, and that’s been great, they’re all very professional, but it’s come to our attention that there are some issues with koala habitat that we weren’t aware of when we first put the DA together, so we’d just like a little extra time to make sure we’re doing everything right.

So yeah, if you could delay the decision on such and such a property, we’d really appreciate that.

Thanks very much.”

And then I sat down.

At that point, I had every councillors eyes on me. I had their attention.

Mostly I think they were amazed that someone had only used 40 seconds of their allocated 5 minutes. An hour and a half in to community access that would have felt like a gift from God.

But I was speaking to them as people. I was conversational, I was “off-script”. That made my message easy to hear.

(I actually can’t think of a situation where you’re better off reading a prepared statement… maybe in court. Or maybe when you’re fronting the media to explain why you’re entire first division side has failed their drug test. But generally, that paper locks you up, it makes you sound like a robot, and it makes your message very difficult to receive.)

The other thing I did is I brought myself inside the tent. I didn’t set it up as some sort of adversarial show-down. This comes from face to face marketing. If you have to argue the merits of your product, if you’re in an argument with your customer, you’ve lost the sale.

So I made it very clear that we were happy, we were friendly. We just wanted this little procedural thing to move things along. Easy easy.

Seriously, if you start off with, “I’d like to remind councillors of the oath they took when they took office, which they seem to have forgotten….” how far are you really going to get?

If you cast someone as the enemy, then they’re never going to agree to what you’re saying, no matter what it is.

I would have thought all this was obvious, but after this week’s meeting, I had to wonder.

Oh, and the other technique there is top and tailing. I said up front what we wanted, so everything that followed had a context. And I ended with it so it was left there in their minds.

Anyway, long story short, we got what we wanted. I don’t know how much help I actually was – it was a pretty reasonable request to begin with – but I’m fairly sure my mate’s 2 page epic wouldn’t have helped things.

And I just thought I’d share this. I thought these techniques of persuasion were pretty obvious, but after listening to a dozen accusation-filled rants, I did start to wonder.

Rule 1 – get on the right side of the fence.

Sometimes it’s as easy as being the only friendly (and sane) voice in a room.

Any tips for dealing with council? Or being more persuasive?

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Give up the XXX, mate!

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Seriously, bro. Give it up.

This story cracked me up.

Some university scientists were trying to do a study on the way internet porn consumption affects the brains of young men.

They had the program. They had the technology. They had the funding. But they had to give it up.

Why?

Because they couldn’t find a control group. You can only isolate the effects of porn if you compare brains that have watched porn with those that haven’t.

But they couldn’t find any brains that hadn’t.

No matter how hard they searched, they literally couldn’t find any young American men who didn’t watch internet porn.

(I think there were men out there – on Amish communities and so on. But if you’ve grown up in a radically different cultural environment, that means you can’t be part of the control group.)

And so they quit.

I find this kind of staggering. Like, I’m sure there’s a lot of guys out there watching porn. I expected them to be the large majority.

But everyone?

Partly it makes me roll my eyes and laugh. Oh humanity. You go and build the internet – a vast neural network, almost capable of holding a transcendent human consciousness, and what’s the first thing you go and do with it? Pipe porn into every home in the free world.

Brilliant.

But part of this also makes me a little scared about the future. And I’m not moralising here. I snuck a few glances at the titty mags at the barbers when I was a kid. I’m not one to throw stones.

And what people do in the privacy of their own homes, or how many homes they’re slipping on into is totally up to them. Bodies were made for having fun. Knock yourself out kids.

But what worries me is what this does to our idea of “normal”.

Porn, in case you haven’t been introduced to the internet, is unrealistic. For the most part, the sex that it goes on there is some sort of strange, alien, hairless humpy-pumpy. The “actors” have unusual or even artificially inflated proportions, and their acrobatics have more to do with visual effect than they do with anyone’s sensual pleasure.

(Though I’m sure they do love each other very much. All 8 of them.)

So it’s not normal.

But then, what is normal? Well, I could invite you over to my place after a bottle of red and Daniel Day Lewis’ Last of the Mohicans, and that might give you some idea. But one swallow does not a summer make.

A sample of one doesn’t give you an idea of normal.

And that’s the interesting thing about sex. We’ve made it such a private affair, that nobody really has any idea what normal actually is. For centuries it was hidden behind taboo, and we only started unpacking it in the 60s.

But it’s still a very private thing. And so into this void steps Hollywood, with perfectly made hair and no kids banging on the bedroom door, and porn.

For curious kids, these things become the templates of normal.

Poor buggers.

But if I can guarantee one thing, the quickest way to misery-town is to compare your own mundane experiences of life to glossy, cleanly-shaven ideals.

It’s like I was talking to a mate of mine. He was saying that’d he’d lost interest in sex – well, with his wife at least.

And I said, mate, you’ve got to get off the porn. Don’t do it to yourself. You spend all this time watching 20 year old acrobats bouncing all over the place, what do you think’s going to happen when you’re wife shows you her soft-like-a-well-loved-sofa body?

You’re constructing a standard that no woman could live up to. AND you’re constructing a standard that your own life has no hope of living up to.

If you set your benchmark at cheerleader Nair commercial, you’re always going to come up short. You’re always going to feel that your life isn’t just making it. It’s always going to be disappointing.

So stop it. Don’t do it to yourself. Stop beating yourself up/off.

Now you might say, but I’m a rational being. I know that porn is unrealistic, and so I don’t let it affect my expectations.

And to that I’d say, bullshit. We’re talking about some deep stuff here. (The sex drive is designed to bypass the mental circuitry.) It’s way deeper than you can intellectualise.

And I’m not just talking about porn here. Your brain is constantly taking a stocktake of the world around you. What is happening? What do other people have? How are other people doing?

Through that process you construct an idea of ‘normal’.

But you don’t get to consciously control that process. That’s a background function.

The only hope you have of controlling it and setting your benchmarks at realistic levels is to control the input.

  • If you want to feel beautiful, don’t read “beauty” magazines that feed you images of unrealistically beautiful people.
  • If you want to feel successful, don’t compare your life to celebrities, or the filtered versions of people we see on social media.
  • And if you want to have fantastic sex, don’t train yourself to think that 7 gridiron players and the pizza delivery girl is ‘normal’.


And so I’m talking about porn, but I’m really talking about our ability to feel grateful for all aspects of our lives.

Remember that billions of people live without clean water. Billions live on the smell of an oily rag. For most of humanity, this is normal.

You have a lot to be grateful for.

But the only way you can maintain that perspective is to control your input. Intellectually ‘getting it’ isn’t enough. You need to wind back your idea of normal.

You need to consciously ask yourself, is my experience of the world, through whatever media I engage with, realistic?

If not, how do I make it more realistic?

The more aspects of life you can do that in, the happier you will be.

And seriously fellahs, I know it’s hard, but give it up. You’ll thank me later.

Are you consciously regulating your idea of ‘normal’?

Trump, property and how to suck at propaganda

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Three property experts fail to get there message right, while Trump is out on his own.

So a bit of a mixed bag this week. The things that stuck out for me this week weren’t so much in the data, but in the stories people are telling.

Propaganda is a fine art, even in property, and here are three complete fails and one total home run.

The first is from Real Estate legend John McGrath:

Have you noticed that the speculation has started? The property market is “grinding to a halt”. The boom is over. The banks have lent too much. The bubble is going to burst…

The key is not to panic…

… The two most likely eventualities are as follows:

  1. The pace of growth in property prices will slow down but not stop. Property prices will keep growing but at a lesser rate per year.
  2. We have a minor correction, where the market will do as it has done before and give back about half of the prior year’s growth, so that would be around 5%…

… If you are in the market to buy, don’t put it off because you think prices will plunge – it never happens that way. Take a sensible measured approach, set a budget and buy the right property for you.

If you are thinking of selling, now’s the time. It feels to me like we’re at, or close, to the peak of this cycle, so if you want to fully capitalise on this boom, now is the time to sell.

Ok, so in short, don’t believe the hype. The market is not going to crash, and now is the perfect time to buy, and the perfect time to sell.

Only a real estate agent could pull that off with a straight face. I’d agree that the negative press is overblown (again!), but I’m not convinced I see prices falling or even stalling.

This “peak of the cycle” business is classic real estate fodder. What better way to convince people to sell than tell them that the market has peaked?

But you also need buyers, who will just sit on the sidelines if prices are falling, and so we have the logical double-twist with half-pike that says prices will fall, but only a little, creating the perfect time to buy, the perfect time to sell, and the perfect time to pay a real estate agent a nice fat commission.

Pull the other one John.

The second fail is from Macquarie Bank. They reckon the Bank Levy will have a “disproportionate and unintended consequences” on their operations and they may have to move offshore.

I think the “I’m taking my bat and ball and going home” argument can pack some weight if you’re a well-loved Aussie icon, like Holden or Vegemite. But who is going to cry for Macquarie?

All it says it that your only interest in Australia and Australians is purely financial, and you’ve got a bit of a glass jaw.

Don’t let the door hit you on the arse on the way out.

The third fail was from the apartment lobby, through Sue Jong, chief operations officer of Chinese real estate portal Juwai. They were complaining about the recent changes in NSW that slugged foreign investors with extra fees. She said:

“This policy could decrease foreign investment in NSW new property by as much as 15 per cent.

With every misguided new policy proposal, foreign investment will decrease along with new housing construction, housing affordability and construction employment.

For every unit a foreign buyer purchases, they enable developers to build four more homes for first-time buyers and investors.”

I’m not sure about that last stat. Sounds a little suss to me. But one thing I could tell you is that if I owned a highrise apartment in Sydney, I’d be praying for a 15% fall in foreign demand, since, by law, that demand must go into new dwellings.

And adding more dwellings to an already oversupplied market can only lead to more downward pressure on prices.

I think there is real anger in the community about the way some shoddy highrises have been thrown together, have flooded the market, and have neglected the needs of locals just to serve foreign investors.

In most people’s minds, Ms Jong just said the government’s policy was a good idea.

Fail.

Lastly, and just because I couldn’t resist having a go at it, was Trump’s ‘Covfefe’ gaffe.

In case you missed it, apparently, Donald Trump forgot to lock his phone, and arse-tweeted the free-world.

The internet, of course, went into melt-down.

The narrative, of course, is that Trump is unhinged and unpredictable, and can’t manage basic things, like his phone.

But am I the only one who thinks it was deliberate?

The tweet was left up for hours, even though the White House would have known within minutes what had happened.

And what does it say about Trump? It says Trump isn’t filtering himself. He’s not passing his messages threw focus groups, before spewing up the most banal version possible to the listening public.

For Trump’s base, he’s just reinforcing the message that he’s “authentic” and “not a politician.” They go nuts for that stuff.

And what was the complete sentence there? “Despite all the negative press…” That will mean different things depending on who you are. If you’re part of his base, he’s talking about a vindictive press that’s out to slander the President. If you’re not, then it has been a pretty gruesome month in the news.

So no matter who you are, here’s a funny word to break things up a bit: covfefe.

It’s genius right?

If only he’d use his talents for good, not evil.

What do you make of it?

NO B.S. FRIDAY: It’s not your fault

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Make peace with your past and you’ll take control of your future.

I’m not proud of everything I’ve done.

When I look back at my life there’s a lot of things I would do differently. There were mistakes I made. Girls I should have kissed, girls I shouldn’t have kissed. Deals I let pass me by, deals I shouldn’t have done.

(Girls I shouldn’t have done deals with.)

And for a long time, I would cringe when I’d think about the silly things I’d done. I was embarrassed. They were like that person you’re trying to avoid showing up at a party. I’d just shuffle around and pretend they weren’t there until the memory went away.

But the reality is that in every situation, I was trying to do the best I could do. I was trying to make a good decision.

(I mean, who ever consciously makes a bad decision?)

And so if I’m honest, the ‘bad’ decisions I made came through me, but there were also bigger forces at play.

Take that hair cut I got in 1987. I regret that now. But how much of it was ‘my’ fault? I was responding to the cultural norms of the time. I was vain because I was a blender of hormones on high-speed. I was insecure because I was a product of a society that attaches personal value to attractiveness and sex-appeal. The hair-dresser was hot.

And really I was just a kid. I still hadn’t learnt what it means to be human, and to consciously navigate all the emotional and hormonal drives that come with having a body.

I still had my training wheels on.

And so I don’t blame that kid. He was just doing the best he could as best as he could understand it.

And I think that as I’ve learnt the ability to accept and laugh along with (not at!) myself and all past versions of myself, I’ve learnt to have more compassion for others.

If I’m not judging myself, then I’m not really geared up to judge others.

Everyone is just doing the best they can, as best as they understand it.

We tend to have structures in society – like the legal system for example – that imagines humans to be perfectly rational beings operating with a single ethical value system, and unencumbered by their personal histories.

And so if people do something wrong, it’s because they’ve chosen, with a clear mind, to do something wrong.

When is that ever true?

I mean, show me someone who isn’t a product of their experiences, their culture, their exposure to music videos in the early 80s.

I’m not saying we don’t need systems that define the limits of acceptable behaviour; I’m just saying that people are the way they are for a reason.

I am the way I am for a reason.

So if you’ve made mistakes in the past, don’t worry about it. Laugh it off. You were doing the best you could, even if the best you could do at the time was a confusion of selfishness, vanity and a lack of foresight.

That’s ok. Offer yourself a bit of compassion.

But now I can imagine what the regulars here are thinking. Hang on, Jon. What about your ideas of radical responsibility? The idea that our lives are always what we create?

What room is there for personal agency if we’re just leaves in the winds of culture, history and Molly Meldrum’s CountDown?

Two points here. The first is that I believe everyone has free-will – even if it exists only as a puny and undeveloped muscle. No matter what your background, in the here and now, you have a capacity for choice.

If you listen carefully, you’ll be able to hear the voice of your highest self.

The second point is that personal responsibility is like a muscle, and muscles develop through use.

When I was 17 my hormones had the upper hand. I hunted soccer balls during the day, and girls at night. I was kind of wild.

But overtime, you learn how to master your drives (the hormones also settle down a bit which helps). The more you engage with it, the more you are able to separate yourself from the forces that push you this way and that, and you take the reins into your own hands.

Eventually, I think, you come to a point where your history and the world around you have no influence over you. Nor do your emotional and hormonal reactions.

In this space, I think, you are completely free.

You are not driven by your emotions and hormones. You are not a slave to your past, but the master of your future.

(Did I just make this sound like a Marvel comic? I have been watching a bit lately…)

I think very few of us ever achieve a state of ‘complete’ freedom, but I also think it is a spectrum. The more you practice ‘self-control’ the better able you are to act from a place of clear consciousness.

And the decisions you make will then be more in line with drives of your higher-self – drives that are aligned with love, compassion, generosity… all the good things.

And in that sense, they will be better decisions.

But like any skill, it’s something that comes with practice.

And the one point I would make is that if you’re going to master your history, then you need to face it. You need to square up and own it.

And I think that begins by coming to terms with all of it – even the bits that make you cringe and shrink.

You need to go back and find compassion for that moron doing doughnuts in the car park. Understand him. Accept him. Forgive him.

When you realise that the past is not your fault, the future becomes your responsibility.

Go Team Avengers!

Do we need to make peace with our past to take control of our future?