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NO B.S. FRIDAY: Love – the most unrealistic expectation of all

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Valentines day reminds me of how good we are at burdening ourselves with unrealistic expectations

I saw something cute on Facebook this week. It was someone talking about being a working mother.

She said, “Working mothers are expected to work like they don't have children, and mother like they don't have a job.”

Too true.

If it's one thing we've become very skilled at in the west, it's placing totally unrealistic expectations on ourselves

… and then beating ourselves up with a spiky stick when we don't live up to our own ridiculous ideals.

How much misery is this causing us right now? I'm not just talking about moody teenagers – at least they have the luxury of imagining that their future might be different.

I'm talking about everybody.

We should be cut like an Olympic athlete (no matter how old we are), as creative as cocaine-happy graphic designer, as up-to-date as a news anchor, as enlightened as a Himalayan man with no pants, as compassionate as a nun but as staunch as Donald Trump…

Ok, maybe I'm being a little specific here. Perhaps some of these are just me. But you get the point, and you probably have your own version of this drama playing out in your own head.

Unless we're careful, we tend to ask too much of ourselves, and then make ourselves miserable trying to keep up. It's a contemporary epidemic.

And love is the worst.

As I wander past the post Valentine's Day clutter in the dumpster outside my office – wilting roses and teddy bears and all that guff…

(seriously, ladies, I'm married. To the fellah who dropped off the golf clubs… thanks. They're very nicely weighted.)

… I'm reminded at just how much industry and endeavour is geared up into making us feel totally inadequate about our relationships.

And I feel like I'm seeing a shift.

We used to worry about whether our partner was ‘the one'. Taking our cue from 90s romantic comedies, we felt that our lover should knock us off our feet, and keep us there on the floor. If we tried to get up, they should knock us down again. And again.

Even at 5.30 in the morning, after you've both been up feeding the baby all through the night, she's got breast milk stains all down her singlet, he doesn't even know where his pants are… even in that moment, the sheer attractive power of your immutable soul bond should knock you on your arse.

Love is not being able to get up off the floor. Ever.

This is the fairy-tale and it's incredibly seductive.

It's starting to lose its grip on us though, slowly but surely.

At a conscious level (if not wholeheartedly) we can see that the fairy-tale is unrealistic BS. We get it.

That's nice.

However, I see it being replaced with fluffy personal development mantras. About being, self-sufficient, independent, complete on my own.

That we should love our partner like we love our I-phone. We deeply appreciate its sleek design functionality, and would be proper pissed if someone stole it, but ultimately, they're easily replaceable.

And you know, it is good to be independent. It's good if your own sense of self worth has nothing to do with whether there's someone on your arm or not.

However, a relationship should not be a theatre for the expression of independence.

That's not what relationships are about.

To me, relationships are a shared journey – towards shared and independent goals. To make it work, you need to think of yourself as a team.

And I mean that in a very sporting sense. You have to work as a team. You have to share your vision of what life is going to be about, and you have to work cooperatively, picking up slack and supporting each other wherever possible.

Great relationships work like well-oiled teams. Each person in the pair is independent and autonomous, but they understand their place and their role in the team, without saying.

It's not a theatre for expressing independence. There's no “I” in “Get with the program, dickhead.”

And what we don't realise is that both of these misguided notions of love – the co-dependent and the independent – both of these have been driven by the same merciless machine that makes us all miserable.

Our ancients never put so much stress on their relationships. Why?

There's probably a myriad of reasons, but I think on the whole, they were just generally more secure. They didn't need their relationship, or their relationship to the relationship, to make themselves feel ok about themselves.

And that's because advertising.

The marketing industry has totally inflamed our sensitivities to comparative worth. It's human to compare yourself to others. But only modern humans compare themselves to photo-shopped waifs on massive billboards…

… and to the centre half forward for North Melbourne, and to Richard Branson, and to the Dalia Lama….

And so we crave love because we want to know that we're ok. That we have a place within it all.

But love was never meant to carry this burden. Love was only ever meant to unite us in a hormone-driven dance of horny pants, and then transmute gently into a content shared-sense of companionship.

(That'll never be a pop song, but I think it's the reality of it.)

Asking anything more of love – and especially asking it to make you feel ok about yourself, is just asking too much.

You've got to find the right donkey for the right burdens.

How do we get back to the old ways of thinking about love? Do we want to?

How do we cultivate a greater sense of ‘team' in all our relationships?

How do we separate love from the need to feel ok about ourselves?

JG

NO B.S. FRIDAY: The easiest and hardest roads to wealth

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You might be confusing struggle with virtue

Want to know the easiest way to be wealthy?

And I'm using ‘wealthy' as a bit of click bait here. I'm talking about anything you want to call into your life – happiness, greatness, sexiness, whatever.

(Fun fact: If I talk about wealth, people read. If I talk about happiness, no one listens. That's ok. Wealth is always the first stepping stone. I'm not judging.)

Ok, so there are two roads available to you if you want to call something into your life.

The first is to go “blockage-busting”. We go and get all Mario and Luigi and get into our plumbing to see why things aren't flowing.

Why aren't I wealthy? Well, I had abusive parents so I don't value myself, and so I don't expect others to value me either.

I've been conditioned to believe that money is evil.

I'm afraid to test my own potential, so I cling to excuses I can hide behind, like never having the money to do what I wanted to do.

The bloke on the $100 note looks like my Father.

Once we discover what these blockages are (and there's a lot of work just to get this far), then we can start trying to break them down. We can get our hands dirty with affirmations, visualisations, past-life regression therapies, whatever.

If we can deconstruct these blockages, replace them with positive beliefs, things start flowing again. Money comes.

This method works, but man, I'm getting tired just thinking about.

Is there an alternative?

I would say a better way to start is to drop in and connect with the part of you that wants to be wealthy (or you know, whatever.)

You have parts that don't want to be wealthy, sure. You don't need to change that. All you need to know is that within you, there is a part of you that wants to be wealthy.

So drop in and connect with that. Why do you want to be wealthy?

So I can help my friends and family.

So I can achieve beautiful things.

Because I am a better and more loving person when I am financially secure.

Whatever it is, align yourself with that part of you that wants to be wealthy. Align your energies there.

Feel now how you are not in opposition any more. You are not fighting against something. Rather, you are siding with something – in collaboration.

Align yourself with the part of you that wants to be wealthy. Give it energy. Drop in with it everyday. Connect with what you will achieve and do with the money. Give yourself a taste for the joy and happiness that it entails.

In time, and with relatively little (but consistent!) effort, it will become a force to be reckoned with.

It will start to shape your life.

You will still have blockages, just as you will still have a part of you that doesn't want to be wealthy.

But your life changes simply by changing the power relationship between these two competing forces.

And since the human must always be in balance, energising and empowering the part of yourself that wants to be wealthy may itself call change into your life. If you have limiting beliefs, they may just evaporate as less energy is given to them, and more to their opposites.

The point I want to make is that both strategies work. When you consciously change your internal energetic make-up, it changes your life.

However, working with alignment, rather than resistance, is just much more effective. It's quicker and you get more bang for your buck.

Not only that, it's more fun. It's more fun to dream about how you're going to spend all this money than it is trying to make space in your heart for your great grandmother's tears as some hippy smudges your chakras with patchouli.

That work is valuable in its own right. The only point I want to make is that we're also conditioned to believe that the hardest path is the most virtuous. Therefore, if I want to be wealthy, I need to work for it.

It's not true. It is not the only way.

And it's not the best way.

Alignment is better than resistance.

What do you want to call into your life?

Are you working with alignment or resistance? Which one gets more energy?

Are you ready to get what you want without having to work for it? Really?

What this year will be about?

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Let’s step back from the numbers for a bit. What is this year going to be about?

Welcome to the new year everybody.

It’s a pleasure to have you with us. I’m going to do my best to keep you one step ahead of the property market, as I’ve done for the past 4 years. I’m going to try and help you triangulate the keys to your own greatness, as I’ve done with the NoBS blogs for the past three years.

And this year, if you’re keen, I’m going to try and help you navigate the exciting Wild West of the crypto market.

So with this first blog of the new year, I wanted to step back and get a view of the bigger picture. Try and finger the key theme that’s going to hang all these threads together.

Less data, more philosophy.

To do that, I need to introduce you to Francois.

Francois is an old man who owns three VHS recorders.

I don’t actually know him. I’m mates with his son. It was son who told me the story.

At some point around the turn of the millennium, François decided that he was done keeping up with technology. He’d seen a lot of change in his lifetime already. So when the writing was on the wall for VHS, when it was clear that the whole world was moving to DVD, and then beyond, François chose something else.

François chose to stay behind.

“Let the world have their DVDs. I have VHS. I like it. I know how it works. It will do me fine.”

And so when the electronic shops had their final clearance sales of VHS players, François bought three, figuring that three should be enough to see out his days.

To those of us living in the high-definition Netflix universe, François’ decision seems ridiculous. But François doesn’t know any different, so he doesn’t care.

And in a way I can get where he’s coming from. It’s hard work keeping up with the times. And it’s only getting harder as the pace of change accelerates.

So in a way I can respect a decision to just hop off the train. Happiness is relative. François is happy in his Netflix ignorance, so good on him.

So right now, at the start of 2018, it feels to me like we’re at a train station, with the train just about to depart. You’ve got a choice. Do you stay on it, or just hop off.

I’ll respect you either way. Either choice is valid.

2018 will be a year like no other. (Every year is different, but there’s something in the air around 2018).

The investing universe is changing. The most obvious face of that is the crypto-revolution.

It feels to me like Godzilla is slowing emerging from the ocean, and the whole world is in kerfuffle because we’ve caught sight of his nostrils.

But there’s a lot more yet to come.

And this is already impacting all other asset classes. They say people are leaving gold for the safe harbour of Bitcoin (though there isn’t anypart of any of that story that makes any sense to me.)

I think we’ll see it in property too. For a few years we’ve seen a lot of the world’s rogue cash – cash set free by the incredibly easy monetary policy settings around the world – we’ve seen that rogue cash find its way into Australian property.

And for a while there, Aussie property, with the promise of security AND double digit returns was incredibly enticing.

Cyptos don’t give you security but they do give you the promise of triple digit returns!

To rogue international money, that’s going to be an attractive offer.

So the Australian property market is changing too. I think the strategies that worked in recent years might need a bit of an overhaul.

And that’s all before we try to somehow account for the x-factor of exponential technology. The tech landscape is in rapid transition right now. (I mean, they added 4 new elements to the periodic table just in 2017!)

Exponential tech is going to be throwing up all sorts of surprises, and some of those are going to be incredibly profitable.

So this is the reality we have in 2018 – Flux. Everything is in flux. Every asset class, every strategy, even our technological reality.

Staying ahead of this wave will be work. You will have to paddle hard (or read the blogs of someone else who is paddling hard.) You will need to keep an open and mind and be flexible with your game plan.

Or, you can be like François. You can say, you know what, I’ve done pretty well. I get stocks and I get buy and hold property. I’m good. You guys go on ahead. I’m just going to stay here.

And that is totally valid. If you’re in a financial position where you can just do that, why not? Take it easy. You’ve earnt it.

If not – if you want to get on this wave and maybe make some incredible money this year, then I need you to swim hard. There’s a lot to get on top of. There’s a lot to learn.

The only thing I would say is this. It’s easier to stay on the train than it is to get back on later.

If you’re not down with the basics of crypto1.0, crypto 2.0 will be confusing. Crypto 7.0 (which is maybe only 5-10 years down the track) will be totally baffling.

So that’s what I reckon this year will be about. We’ll need to work hard to stay ahead of the curve, but if we can, we could make some serious money.

Like, the kind of returns that we’ve never seen before, or even dreamed was possible.

I’m serious about that. This year could be huge.

So come along for the ride. It’ll be a wild one.

Toot toot!

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Maybe techmageddon isn’t inevitable..?

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It’s easy to get overwhelmed, but it’s hard to get a unbiased view of history.

Question: How many years does Western Civilisation have left in it?

10? 20? 100?

Answer: “There are forces that want you to believe that end of civilisation is inevitable.”

I’ve been talking with Dymphna Boholt. I’m helping her with the marketing of her “Next 10” event. Dymphna has one of those minds that is always hungry, and that hunger and curiosity is going to be on full display at this one.

She’s been doing a deep dive into what the future looks like, particular the future of real estate. And seriously? The stuff she’s found is mind blowing.

And its not so much the stuff that’s happening 10, 20 years down the track. It’s the stuff that’s happening right now.

We are living in the future.

So as I was saying last week, I went into a bit of a dark worm-hole looking into artificial intelligence. The future was looking a little scary from where I was, curled up in a foetal position clutching a McMuffin.

So I said, “So what do you think Dymphna? End of the day, are we going to be alright?”

Her answered surprised me:

“There are forces that want you to believe that end of civilisation is inevitable.”

What she’s saying is that the idea that civilisation is on the brink of collapse serves particular agendas.

Namely, if you’re agenda is introduce some radical solutions, you need a radical crisis to justify it. If you want people to swallow something as out there as fascism, then they need to be pretty worried about the future.

In fact, they need to be so worried that they can’t see any possible way through the malaise with the current tool set. They need to believe that the most probable scenario going forward is the end of civilisation as they know it.

But how many civilisations have collapsed in a burning pile of poo? And how many have slowly petered out, or been peacefully absorbed by the paradigm that followed?

I don’t actually know the answer to that, but I’m pretty sure no one else does either. And if we focus on the fall of the Roman empire, as the only data point in a uselessly small sample, our conclusions are going to be pretty biased.

I mean take the British Empire.

We can say that we’re definitely past the peak on that one. But has it been a disaster? Hardly (on the scale of human disasters). By and large it’s been a fairly peaceful transition to the new story.

So why are we so convinced that the only way empires go down is in flames? Why are we so convinced that the only way change can happen is in massive violent leaps?

The wane of the British Empire. The end of French colonialism in Asia. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The break up of the USSR. Sydney teams joining the VFL.

The evidence for the ‘messy transition’ theory is all around us, but we still believe that the mostly likely way forward involves queues for food and armed mobs on the streets.

But this idea serves particular agendas and so it sticks around.

“If you don’t vote for me, your children will be hunting for rats in the ruins of the state library.”

And so we stand at a similar cross-roads, with some mind-blowing tech already rolling off the production line.

There are and will be forces that want us to believe that the only way the human species is going to survive this radical upheaval is with the strong hand of a strong leader guiding the way.

We’re primed to accept this at face value. We’re not conditioned to say, hang on, the evidence overwhelming says that humans are exceptionally good at muddling through. Are things really that bad?

But this is the attitude that the times demand.

We need to be optimistic about the new tech on offer, and confident that humans will get messy, but ultimately muddle through… as we always seem to do.

And so at the end of the day, Dymphna is optimistic and hopeful about the future on offer. And she’s not buying the idea that collapse is inevitable.

And when you see the stuff she’s come up with, I think you’ll agree.

Are you coming to the Next10 event? It will all make a lot more sense if you do.

Secure Your Next 10 Ticket Here

Part 3: Bitcoin is Bitshoit!

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Last week I told you why Bitcoin could be awesome. This week I tell you why it could be BS.

Ok, so we’ve had a look at the Basics of Bitcoin, and I’ve given you the arguments for.

Now let’s look at the arguments against. I’m going to divide this into two sections. First I’ll look at the block-chain in general, and then I’ll have a look at crypto currencies and Bitcoin in particular.

The Block-Chain
Disruptive technologies are all the rage these days. Like the way Uber disrupted the taxi market, or the way AirBnB disrupted hotels. It’s very buzzy.

And people point to block-chain as the next big disruptive technology. The most recent example of anything like it was the birth of the internet, they tell us.

And I am loving what block-chain has to offer, but when I look into it, it looks less like a disruptive technology and more like a “foundational technology”.

So email disrupted regular mail. The internet was the foundation for email.

But even that’s not entirely right. The block chain is more like TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol), which created the shared language that made the internet possible.

Before that, computers had to connect to each other directly (or network to network). TCP/IP enabled all participants to join together in the world wide web, without the need for a central exchange.

It was ‘distributed’, and that’s why it’s a better metaphor for block-chain I think.

But TCP/IP launched in 1972. It would then be over 20 years before the first commercially viable internet-based companies launched.

So how long do we have to wait before the commercial promise of the block-chain is realised?

What’s more, you couldn’t monetise TCP/IP itself. You couldn’t make money of it. It was a common good. It was owned by everyone, it benefited everyone. That was precisely the point.

Same story with the block-chain. It’s set to make a whole bunch of amazing things commercially viable. But it doesn’t mean that the block-chain itself, or the first generation of block-chain thingys, are going to make money.

The other thing I’d say about the block-chain is that while it contains seeds for a social revolution, that revolution will take many, many years to materialise.

So say, you have smart-contracts based in the block-chain. That contract says that I owe you $5. There indisputable proof that it’s true. We know the block hasn’t been tampered with. It clearly says that I owe you the money.

But I refuse to pay.

So what do you do?

Contracts are useless unless they can be enforced. For that, you need some wholesaler of violence – historically the government.

But then you might say, but it’s a trust system. If you diddle someone, it’s recorded. You get something like an e-bay profile score. That disincentives cheating.

But hang on. I thought anonymity was one of the great selling points for the block-chain? And what’s to stop me from setting up a string of fraudulent identities?

A huge amount of social infrastructure goes into simply proving to others that we are who we say we are, so we can enter into contracts with each other.

If you take governments out of the equation, you take all this social infrastructure with them.

Ultimately, we may find better way to do all this, and block-chain may be a start, but it’s far from the final word.

Bitcoin
The first point with crypto-currencies is that money is power. If you think that governments are just going to sit back and hand all that power over to the people, I think you’re a dreamer.

But, you might say, “It’s too late. The block belongs to everyone. They can’t control it now.”

I think it is probably true that they can’t kill it, but I don’t imagine they’d want to. They’d either side-line it or co-opt it. Currently, neither option strikes me as particularly hard.

(China recently shut down all its crypto-exchanges and went and seized all their records. So much for anonymity.)

Of course there are ways round this. But if your solution involves every person in the global economy running their own virtual private network and putting time and energy into staying a step or two ahead of the crypto-police, again I think you’re dreaming.

The other big draw-back for cryptos is that transactions are not free. People talk like they are because, there’s no central fee processor (like PayPal), but there’s still a cost that needs to be borne.

Currently the processing that drives the Bitcoin network is driven by miners. They receive rewards in the way of coins, and fees from individuals who want to see their transactions moved to the front of the cue.

And currently, that whole system is being driven by five to ten companies, according to Business Insider.

That’s not sounding that awesome.

It’s not immediately evident to me that a global financial network organised by a couple of hundred nations is inferior to a financial network powered by five to ten companies.

Especially if those five to ten companies have an ability to control fees…

But the point is, unless transactions are free, there is a cost that must be borne. There is a price that must be paid, and a fee that must be collected.

Money is concentrating somewhere, and with it, power.

This might sort itself out in time, but the current generations of cryptos all seem burdened with this flaw to me.

The final point is about Bitcoin in particular.

Have a read of this statement from Amazon’s 1997 letter to shareholders:

“We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy.”

Of course they did. These were THE players in the internet space in 1997. Netscape was the first personal web browser. These companies dominated the internet just as it began to launch.

And how many still exist?

Maybe Yahoo, kind of, but apart from that, they’re all dead.

Now if block-chain is the next internet, as people like to claim, is Bitcoin the next Netscape?

Even ten years is a long time in business these days. If you’re betting on Bitcoin, you’re betting that no other player comes along and cuts bitcoins turf in the next.. what? 30 years?

That’s quite a gamble.

The way I see it, Bitcoin is very vulnerable to disruption. Its cost structures seem high, so there’s always the potential for undercutting.

Or, let’s say Amazon – the largest retailer in the world – launches its own coin – the Amazonian. At the time it says that you can only buy things with Amazonians but it will accept any Amazonians from anywhere.

(Remember when governments launched money in the past, they decreed that all taxes had to be paid in that money, to enforce widespread use. This would be Amazon’s equivalent play.)

People would find that they’d be happy to accept Amazonians, because there is a guaranteed use for them. If, at the same time, governments tried to block Bitcoin, but gave the green-light to Amazonians because Amazon committed to submit to the tax structures of the day (dodging tax seems to be one of Bitcoins supposed selling points) then the bulk of coin users will gravitate to Amazonians. It would just be easier.

In this game, user-numbers are king.

Bitcoin has the numbers for now, but there’s a long road of uptake ahead of it before it can claim to be the dominant player for sure.

And even then, how long do dominant players in any industry last these days? 10-20 years?

So to me, betting on Bitcoin is really a bet that no better system will evolve in the next 10-20 years. And I’m not talking about better from the perspective of an anarchist utopia, but better simply from the point of convincing more mum and dad users to get on board.

That is a HUGE bet in my mind.

So if you’re investing in Bitcoin – and really we should stop saying “invest”. If Bitcoin is actually currency, you don’t ‘invest’ in currencies. You speculate in them. You buy them on the speculation that they will increase in relative price. There’s no underlying value.

So if you’re speculating in Bitcoin, I would say that you need to be aware that the massive returns that are possible are equally balanced with the massive risks involved in any single crypto-currency.

Block-chain is a revolution. It’s amazing. But so was and is the internet. And a lot of money got poured down the toilet during the dot-com boom.

To me it feels like a case of history repeating.

???

What do you think? That’s my case against Bitcoin. Stronger than my case for?

I’ll leave it to you to be the judge. I’m just trying to shed a light on a world that has become very confusing very quickly.

And of course. I’m no expert. I’m just a smart guy with a few hours up his sleave. There could be huge parts of the story I’m missing.

Very happy to hear about it.

NEXT TUESDAY: I’ll look at wether Bitcoin is a bubble (what you need to be in a bubble) and look at ways you could still make money, even if it is. Look out for that.

What did I miss?

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Why I’m awesome like the Dalai Lama

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Australian culture is toxic.

What if I told you I’m one of the most dangerous players in the senior soccer league?

(Totally true.)

What would you say that says about my ego? What about my self-esteem?

Somehow we’ve developed a culture where we go out of our way to help people keep their egos deflated. If someone is celebrating their success a little too much, we feel we have total license to go and let the air out of their balloon.

We actually think we’re doing them a service.

I don’t know where that comes from. Maybe we’re all just products of a ruthless Western Civilisation.

Don’t get too attached to your possessions. It’s only a matter of time before some landed lord confiscates them and uses you and your sons as cannon fodder. If you keep a lid on things now, it will lessen the disappointment later.

And whether it’s raising our children or keeping our mates in check, we feel everyone needs someone to “keep their feet on the ground.” It’s what mates do. We stop our mates’ successes going to their head.

“Nah Giaan. You’re not that good. Maybe you’re in the top ten, but definitely not the MOST dangerous…. You’re welcome.”

I can’t tell you how frustrating I find this.

Often it's because the people offering you that public service of keeping your feet on the ground actually have no idea what’s going on with your ego. They have a need to preserve their own fragile image of themselves and the only way they can do that is by putting down the people around them…

… and then dressing it up as an act of charity after the fact.

Total garbage.

So there’s often dishonesty there. But even the intention is rubbish. Why on earth would you need to keep someone’s feet on the ground? I want people around me who want me to fly, like the glorious seagull of awesomeness that I am.

Why wouldn’t you want to give energy to your own and other’s successes? Unpack them, build confidence in them, make them part of who you are…

The trap here is that we have all these half-baked pop psychologists going around bastardising the idea of ego.

The ego is your sense of self. It’s the mental construct of who you are. It’s the story you tell about yourself.

So everyone has one.

But the idea that an ego can be ‘big’ is total nonsense. What does that even mean?

If anything, a “small” ego, if there even is such a thing, would reflect a lack of self-awareness.

And people with limited self-awareness give me the shits far more than people with a nuanced and conscious awareness of themselves.

But no, big, small, it’s ridiculous.

But where ego comes into play for me is around fragility.

That is, the story that they’re telling about themselves is so fragile that they constantly need to defend it and build it up.

These are the people that are difficult to be around.

They’re the ones cutting people down so they can keep telling a story about how awesome they are.

They’re the ones constantly inventing excuses for why they’ve never succeeded, and enviously resenting others successes.

They’re the ones bragging about their soccer skills in nationally distributed blogs, and then dressing it up as profound life lessons to make it seem less pretentious.

So it’s not whether it’s big or small, it’s what you do with it.

(Right, babe?)

And that’s about fragility.

But if that’s true and it’s about fragility, why aren’t we out there celebrating each other’s successes? Taking the time to go, look at what you did. How awesome is that? You are a successful person. You are someone who works hard and gets results. Good on you.

Why aren’t we out there helping each other build robust and durable egos, built on successes that are regularly recognised and celebrated?

But no, we go out of the way to make sure that each other’s egos are constantly under attack as if we wanted to ensure that our egos were as fragile as possible and that we were all as painful to be around as possible.

And we make this a national pastime.

Toxic flipping culture.

Let me ask you another question. What would you say about the Dalai Lama’s ego? What would you say about his self-esteem?

I’m not really sure what relationship the Dalai Lama has with his ego. He’s probably transcended it or transmuted it into a radiant lotus flower or something.

But I’m willing to bet that whatever he’s done with it, his ego is fairly robust. It’s not fragile.

And I’m also willing to bet that he has solid, or high, self-esteem.

He probably has a good sense of who he is, his strengths and limitations, and his role in the world.

(By all accounts he’s a lovely man to be around – not at all painful.)

And as aware of his awesomeness as he probably is, I doubt that he ever gets into dick measuring contests about who is better than who.

It probably never occurs to him to even think about it in that way. That’s the terrain of a fragile ego – needing to prove yourself relative to others.

So I would feel pretty confident saying that the Dalai Lama has a robust ego and a high self-esteem.

We’re both awesome like that.

So if that’s true, can all you people trying to ‘help me keep my feet on the ground’ so I can be more like the Dalai flippin' Lama just go and get stuffed?

If you want to help people, help them build a strong sense of self-worth – an inherent self-worth that comes from within, not from measuring your wing-wang against others.

Recognise, celebrate, support.

That’s the culture I want to live in.

It’s not that hard.

Anyone trying to keep your feet on the ground? What comes up for you when you notice you're celebrating your success too hard?

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?