Knowledge Source

Your freedom to create wealth...

You are here: Home / Archives for friday

No BS: Time to audit your ‘jumpers’

by 1 Comment

No B.S Friday: This is something we all do. We all have stories we automatically jump to.

Where do you jump to?

This is something worth asking yourself. When you get ‘triggered’ or upset, where do you jump to?

For me, it was the pain of not being understood.

Often things would happen, I’d have a reaction, and I’d jump to the pain of not being understood.

It was an automatic process. It wasn’t conscious at all. But that’s where my thoughts would immediately jump.

As I spent time watching myself do this over and over, I realised that these jumps had their own energy.

They were like a coiled spring, just waiting for something – anything – to come along and trigger them.

So I might notice that an employee hadn’t done what I was expecting them to do. Now, there might be a million possible reasons for that. Maybe they never saw the email because the server was down. Maybe they got pulled into a different emergency. Maybe they just got confused.

But in that entire universe of possible explanations, I’d jump straight to “that guy just doesn’t get me.”

Which then leads to “nobody gets me”. Which leads to “I’m all alone in this miserable-arse universe.”

Etc.

Now, given there were a million possible reasons, why did my thoughts jump there?

It’d happen at home too. Maybe my wife would come back from the shops with a brand of coffee I’ve said I didn’t really like.

Again, could be a million reasons for that. Maybe they were out. Maybe this other brand was on special. Maybe she just forgot because she’s got a million other things on her mind and looking out for my precious palette isn’t’ top of the list.

Doesn’t matter. I’d go straight to, “She doesn’t get me. She doesn’t really understand or appreciate me. She can’t fully comprehend the wonderfully unique cut of my soul.”

(I know, it’s ridiculous… in hindsight.)

And of course, there’s a lot of blame there. If she doesn’t get me then it must be because she doesn’t care, or she isn’t even trying.

So again, the question is, if there are a million possible explanations, why do we lock onto these particular stories?

Why do our thoughts jump there so quickly that the conscious mind doesn’t even have time to clock what’s happening?

Why does it feel like these thoughts are just itching for their opportunity to come leaping out of the dark corners of your mind to dominate your conscious thoughts…

… and your moods?

These are excellent questions.

I’m still not sure. My guess is that we have this residual pain and trauma that gets locked up in our being. For me, growing up in a bilingual household, straddling two different cultures, I often felt like nobody got me. Maybe that’s it.

And that pain and that trauma wants to be acknowledged. It wants the time we were never able to give it in the moment.

It doesn’t want solutions. It just wants space. It just wants to be heard.

And until we can create space for it – until we can hold space for it – it will keep muscling in on our thoughts, at any opportunity it gets, crying out for attention.

That’s my guess.

But it’s super interesting to try and do an inventory of your jumpers. What are the stories you automatically go to when you get triggered?

And what is at the heart of those stories?

What is the pain that wants to be recognised?

Do this, and you will know yourself in a deeper way than you ever have before.

JG.

No BS: This is the price of excellence

by 2 Comments

No B.S Friday: Excellence demands these two things from you.

Excellence has a price.

It’s care.

I don’t think you’re ever going to get far in life with a short-cut mindset. If you’re always looking to cut corners and do the most half-arsed job you can, you’ll pay for it eventually.

It will be in the things you create. It will be in the life you create.

It’s like one of my favourite stories about Steve Jobs. He was taking his biographer Walter Isaacson around his childhood home in a place called Mountain View. It was a house Jobs’ father had built by hand.

Jobs showed Isaacson a fence he had helped his father build 50 years earlier.

“He loved doing things right,” Jobs said as he directed Isaacson’s attention to the back of the fence. “He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

Jobs learnt the lesson early – a great carpenter wouldn’t use an ugly piece of wood, even on the back of a drawer.

Excellence is a lifestyle choice. It’s a way of being.

It’s not an attitude you can flip on and off. It’s not a strategy you deploy to achieve particular aims.

It’s something you either live your life by, or you don’t.

And this philosophy – this commitment to excellence – is what Apple became famous for. Apparently even the insides of Apple computers (not that I’ve ever opened one up) have their own aesthetic. They’re beautiful in their own way.

Because it matters. Beauty and excellence become an organising principle. It defines the whole.

It’s what pull the disparate parts together and creates something greater than the sum of the parts.

And this applies as much to a life as it does to a piece of consumer electronics.

It’s just worth taking the time.

And yes, I know time is scarce. I get that.

But there’s two thoughts I have about excellence and time.

The first is that you can let excellence be a shaping influence on you. If you hold a commitment to excellence, and your time limited, then it forces you to seek out efficiencies. It forces you to work smarter and better.

You can welcome that challenge.

The second thought is that maybe we just have to accept doing less. Excellence does mean being a specialist. It means choosing what you focus on and give your energies too.

Pick your line and stick to it.

This is how you build a beautiful life.

And this is ancient wisdom. The famous Stoic and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his ‘Meditations’ – a book that was only ever intended for himself – in beautiful and eloquent Greek.

“Beautiful things of any kind,” he said, “are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves.”

Such is life.

JG.

No BS: Authenticity the key to courage

by Leave a Comment

No B.S Friday: This doctor has given me a whole new outlook on authenticity

I used to think ‘authenticity’ was a bit of a magical thing.

It’s a drive we all have. I’m sure of that. We want to live in a way that’s authentic – that’s true to ourselves.

We want to feel that our outward life reflects our inner life. That we move in a way that’s true to our values and beliefs.

I didn’t really question where that came from. Sometimes I wondered if that authenticity was what the mystics talked about when they talked about a ‘soul’ – a potent energy deep inside us that longed to be expressed.

But I knew that authenticity was one of the keys to happiness. I knew that it didn’t matter what you achieved in the material world – it didn’t matter how big your penthouse was or how shiny your car was – if you weren’t being authentic to yourself then you’d never be happy.

So I was very interested this week when I watched a doco on Gabor Mate. He’s a doctor that’s worked a lot with trauma, and the way trauma lives on in the decisions we make and the way we live our lives.

(Amazing dude. Check it out if you haven’t had the chance.)

Anyway, he said that there only two basic needs we have as humans. Attachment (connection and intimacy), and authenticity.

But for him, authenticity wasn’t some airy-fairy idea. It was a biological imperative.

For him, it’s connected to our gut – our intuition.

The world we evolved in was too complex and too fast to meet with the conscious mind. If you suddenly heard the foot-fall of a sabre tooth tiger behind you, you had to react instinctively. You couldn’t wait for you head to process what was happening. You had to let your body drive. You had to move at the speed of instinct.

Authenticity then is a feeling that comes when your body’s instincts play out in a healthy way within you. It’s when there is space for them. It’s when it’s ok for the body’s instincts to be expressed.

This is authenticity. It’s a survival mechanism.

And that’s why we value authenticity so much. It’s why we feel so lost and despondent when we are living in an inauthentic way or living inauthentic lives.

If there’s no space for genuine emotion and genuine authentic expression, then we are cut off from the most important survival tool we have – the instincts of our own body.

And so when we deny anger and suppress it, we disconnect from our instincts. And when we deny grief and suppress it, we disconnect from our instincts. And when we deny our sensual and sexual sides, we disconnect from our instincts.

But we rely on our instincts. We’ve relied on our instincts for millennia.

So is it any wonder that if we’re being inauthentic – if we’re disconnected from our bodies – we feel alienated, alone and scared?

And isn’t authenticity then the key to courage?

So I don’t know. I’m still not sure where this lands.

But I’m seeing authenticity in a whole new light.

Living true to yourself and living on your own terms – it’s even more awesome (and important!) than I’d imagined.

JG.

No BS: What the super-rich worry about

by

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

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

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

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

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

The man had money.

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

And do you know what he said to me?

“I just want to make sure I’m ok.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does ok even mean?

And this is the thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the work that we all have to do.

And money can’t save us from it.

JG.

No BS: Why the powerful pay the price

by

Dollar sign blowing away

No B.S Friday: My friend was having relationship troubles, but I wouldn’t let him get away with that one.

Imagine I could get you to do just one thing that would set you up for life. (Me, Jon. Your fairy godmother.)

What would it be?

Get up earlier? Exercise more? Read more, study more? Kale smoothies and quinoa colonics?

No, it would be this.

I would make it so that every time you hit a roadblock, every time you got knocked back, you would say to yourself, “I am not willing to pay the price for this.”

That’s it. You just keep doing you. But the next time life throws some tyre-spikes in your path, rather than blaming the world or feeling sorry for yourself or accepting ‘no’ as the final word, you would simply say to yourself, “I’m not willing to pay the price for this.”

Everything has a price, and you’re willing to pay it or you’re not.

I was actually thinking about this after a conversation with my friend the other day. Without revealing any personal details, he was a bit grumpy because he and his wife hadn’t been having all that much sex lately.

And there’s reasons for that. They’re both working full time, there’s young kids in the picture, her health hasn’t been fantastic.

But he was in a bit of a grump. He was angry at a world that kept them so flat-out they didn’t have time for intimate time. And he was bitter at her for not craving physical intimacy the way he did.

So there seem to be some reasons to justify his sulky mood.

But I said to him, “You’re just not willing to pay the price for this.”

After he’d settled down and put down the bar stool, I explained that he knew what had to be done. His missus is burnt out, like most of us are. If he wants her to get physical, he knows he needs to lay the ground work. He needs to give her some kiddy-free time to relax and come back into her body. Maybe a bath and massage.

That’s the price. No arguing with it.

The point of recognising that there is a price is so we don’t give away our power. If we accept a no from the universe, it says that it’s all out of our hands. There’s nothing we can do. We have no power in the situation.

I don’t think that’s ever true unless we let it be true.

So there’s a price.

The question then is, are you willing to pay the price or not?

That’s your choice. It’s your responsibility.

You’re either willing to do what’s required, or you’re not.

And if you’re not you’re not. That’s totally ok. It’s totally reasonable to say that with everything else going on in my life, and in the hierarchy of my priorities, I’m just not willing to pay this price.

That’s ok. That’s still a statement of power.

But it’s with you then. It’s on you. You don’t get to blame the world or blame others because you can’t get what you want.

If you start blaming others or blaming the world, it’s admitting that you have no power in the world, and what do you think happens to your life if you admit you have no power?

Nothing good.

No, you have to stay in your power.

And if you’re feeling frustrated because you’re not getting what you want, you just have to recognise that everything has its price, and it’s always up to you whether you pay the price or not.

And this little mental shift is the one thing I would recommend to everyone.

It’s a doctrine of radical responsibility. But that’s what we want right? We want the power to make our lives exactly what we want them to be.

In all things, that involves paying a price.

You get nothing for nothing in this world. I know that for sure.

JG.

No BS: Expect more Trumps

by

No B.S Friday: What I think of the end of the Trump era.

So it looks like Trump is cooked.

I know it looks like he’s going to fight it, but I think he’s got nothing.

If he had something, we would have heard about it by now. There’s been an usually long period of silence from the former president.

And the longer it goes on, the worse it gets for him.

He’s an optics president. And the more people call him ‘former’ president. The more people who call Joe Biden “President elect”, the more world leaders who call to congratulate Joe on his win – the more Trump looks like yesterday’s news.

So I think we can expect a bit of messing around in the transition, but unless Trump is planning on a military coup, he’s on his way to his unique and unusual place in history.

What a ride.

I remember when I first caught whiff on Trump. I like to say I was on to it before it was cool. I saw his full potential in the early rounds of the Republican primaries. I put money on him when Sportsbet were paying 7 to 1.

I knew we were witnessing the birth of an entirely new political animal.

And I think it’s pretty fair to say that Trump has changed politics forever.

People like to call him a ‘populist’ president, but I think that misses the point. He was a partisan president. He knew how the political calculus worked. He knew he didn’t have to win any middle ground if he could rout enough energy into his base.

And so that was the game he played. And he played it like a maestro. He worked his base into a frenzy.

Remember in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protests how he went and stood in front of a church and waved a bible about?

There was never any doubt about what side Trump was on.

And remember, even though he lost the popular vote, he still delivered an incredible turn-out for Republicans.

But while Trump had game, he was also a man of the moment.

Over the past decade social media has created identity silos – isolated echo-chambers. He saw that his new brand of politics was perfectly tailored to this reality.

It didn’t matter what the facts were or what you did. Your fans were going to love you and your haters were going to hate you, no matter what you said or did.

And so Trump just said and did what he liked.

The shock the collective world felt at this was partly about Trump, but it was also in recognising how divided and isolated we had become – that we had entered a ‘post-truth’ universe where the facts just didn’t matter anymore.

And I don’t know that there’s any way back from this. This is just how the world works now.

And Biden might talk all he wants about ‘uniting America’, but you can bet that message isn’t making its way through to Republican thought-silos.

So, Trump will go down in history as an emblem for the social-media age.

And until that changes, expect more Trumps.

JG.

No BS: Don’t manifest until you do this first

by

No B.S Friday: The first step in manifesting anything is to drop into your power.

It’s one of the paradoxes built into manifestation.

The way people tell the story – I’m talking about law-of-attraction type theories, which themselves have been around in various forms for centuries – everything has a gravity. Even emotional experiences have a gravity, and they pull towards each other.

Like attracts like.

So if like attracts like, that means that if you want to attract peace, joy, beauty, material possessions, whatever, then you need to put yourself in that emotional state, where you are actually already enjoying, peace, joy, beauty, material possessions, whatever.

It’s these feelings – these body-based experiences – that then become the fuel that powers your dreams.

And to tap these feelings – this fuel source – you need to think past the sale. You need to put yourself in that place where you already have everything you want.

But, Question: if you already have everything you want, where are you then?

Answer: You are in your power.

That’s what I reckon this state is. This manifestation state.

You are in your power. Every desire is realised. Every need is sorted. Every loved-one is taken care of, and you cut cleanly and quickly through the messy world towards your goals. Always.

You are in your fully-realised power.

You need to step into this place to manifest cleanly.

If this is true, that means that when you are consciously dreaming – when you are deciding on what it is you want to be calling into your life – you need to make sure that these dreams are the dreams of your full-power self.

You need to dream the dreams that your full-power self would dream.

They can’t be coming from a place of lack. “I need a flash car so people will like me.” Rubbish. Is that something the most powerful version of you would say? Of course not.

“I need a flash car because I like riding an iron dragon and writing my name in the open road.”

That’s something your full-power self would say.

So before you dream into what you want, dream into the fullness of your power. Open the door to everything you are capable of.

That might require a bit of imagination. But isn’t that the magic that’s hidden in imagination – to call into being something that has never existed before?

So dream into it. Dream into what it’s like as your full-power self. Imagine what your full-power self would desire.

This is where it begins.

I’d say don’t even waste your time trying to manifest anything if you haven’t grounded here first.

The first thought should be on your power.

There will be time for flash and bling later.

JG.

No BS: Victorians. Total legends.

by

No B.S Friday: We did it. I was never sure we were going to make it…

Ok, today, I’m taking my hats off to Victoria.

Well done everyone. Well done.

Seriously, I know it’s been a big effort. I want to recognise that. It hasn’t been easy. Lockdown has been tough on everyone.

And for people who lost work or saw their businesses close, it was painful salt in the wound.

And it tested our resolve. Lockdown was only going to work if we all did it together. You only needed a few people to be doing the wrong thing, and we’d have to start over.

But it happened. Victorians sucked it up, did the lockdown, and got infections down to zero.

Massive.

I think we should be proud.

And I think we should take time to reflect on that success. We should really go into it.

Because I know that we’re not totally out of the woods just yet. The world isn’t. Resurging infection rates in the US and Europe show us that.

I pray it won’t happen, but there’s every chance that we could be asked to go into lockdown again. To go through the brutal grind again.

My fear is that when we hit that point, we’ve depleted our reserves of social responsibility.

In recent months, we’ve showed good community character. We’ve shown great social spirit by accepting what’s hard for the love of others.

These things feel like they’re in shorter and shorter supply these days. Watching the US election campaign, and you realise that the world is a just a more polarised and divided place these days.

Thanks Facebook.

And I know those divisions live here too.

And yet, despite that, we did it. We pulled together and go through it.

And really, it’s nothing short of a miracle.

So let’s celebrate that. Let’s celebrate the stuffing out of it. It’s a huge achievement.

When future generations look back at us and wonder what on Earth we were thinking with all the plastic and stuff, at least they’ll be able to know that we did this.

In the face of incredible odds, at a time of incendiary division, we pulled together and protected our most vulnerable.

Today, I’m proud to be Australian. I’m proud to be Victorian.

Good on you all.

Go get on the beers.

JG.

No BS: Is this goodbye Trump?

by

The polls are eye-popping. Is Trump toast?

So looks like Trump is on the way out.

You know, this is 2020, so anything is possible, but Biden has opened up a huge lead in the polls.

And of course, the answer to that is that the polls were wrong last time and they could be wrong again.

And that’s true. They could be wrong. But they would have to be epicly wrong for Trump to win this time.

You can actually look at the data on this:

So Trump is currently 10 points behind in the polls. That says that for Trump to win, the polls would have to underestimating the actual results by at least that much.

But the only time that the polls got it that degree of wrong was all the way back in 1948, and even then, they weren’t that wrong. In the modern era it’s a few points at most. In 2016, versus Hilary Clinton, it was just 1.1 points.

So for Trump to win, the polls would have to be the wrongest they’ve ever been, in a huge way.

You’d have to think that’s a low-probability outcome.

But you know, Trump is Trump, and this is 2020, so I’ll believe it when I see it.

But whichever way it goes, I think Trump’s first term will mark a turning point in politics, not just in America, but across the world.

But let’s not give Trump the credit for that. I think Trump just saw where the wave was heading and got in front of it.

And the wave’s name is polarisation.

Take a look at this chart. This tracks how many Americans think that it really matters who is President.

So back in 2000 it was pretty evenly split. 50% of Americans thought it mattered who was President, the other half thought that it didn’t matter. That’s either because they just didn’t care and thought it was irrelevant, or they thought both parties were pretty much the same anyway.

That is, they were either disengaged or cynical.

Fast-forward to 2020, and the numbers are totally different. Now, 83% think that it really matters, while only 16% don’t.

That’s another way of saying that the number of disengaged and cynical voters has collapsed 70%!

On the face of it, you’d think that’s a good thing. The more engaged in politics the citizenry is, the better outcomes you get.

But it is likely that this is largely driven by social-media driven thought-bubble polarisation.

People think it matters who is President because their news feed tells them that the other side wants to eat babies and sell war-veterans to the Russians.

This dynamic was in play before Trump (you can see that in the chart), but I think Trump was the first person to use it consciously.

He knew that there was just no way to talk to the other side – there’s no penetrating the though bubble – so he gave up pretending to be a “President for all Americans”, and focused instead on energising his base.

And it worked… for a while.

But has he lost the political centre?

This will be a very interesting election to watch. Campaign managers from every continent will be watching how it plays out.

And the key question is this, in the age of social media thought bubbles, just how far can you pull from the political centre?

We’ll see.

JG.

No BS: Caught in a regret loop?

by

A depressed woman sitting alone is a dark tunnel with light at the other end.

Caught in a regret loop, I saw that they were a total fantasy…

I found myself wallowing in a bit of regret recently.

It might be something in the ether. I’ve got a few mates who have gone back to certain turning points in their lives, and taken a wistful look down a road that might have been.

Maybe it’s the nature of Covid – a great big stop sign in the road of life. Maybe it’s just what happens when you’re cooped up inside all day.

Anyway, at first I’m like, “Oh, this is a productive use of my time. I’m taking stock of how some big life decisions panned out, so I can learn from them and make better decisions.”

I think this is a good approach to have to life (in theory). I think with every investment decision you should make a note of your thinking so you can go back and check it against reality.

(What was I thinking when I invested in Pets.com?)

Otherwise you never learn.

But I don’t think this is what I was actually doing. I think lockdown was just getting to me, and it was nothing but a bit of wistful escapism.

But I started watching my regrets and I noticed something.

What I found was that I was comparing my current life to a hypothetical life based on another life choice – making different financial decisions, different romantic choices, different creative pursuits.

But I noticed something.

The picture I had of my current life was pretty accurate (I think!). I had a sense for all the awesome stuff, and I was very aware of everything that wasn’t awesome – the annoying and aggravating stuff.

However, the picture of I had of my ‘alternate life’ didn’t have any of this nuance. When I imagined it, all I saw was how awesome it was. To the extent I saw any downside at all, I tended to minimise it or dismiss it as not that much of a problem.

I think that’s something about human nature – we’re good at imagining how awesome something might be. We’re not good at imagining the challenges and work involved.

But what that all gave me was an apples and oranges comparison. I was comparing my current life warts and all, to an alternate life which had no warts at all.

So of course I’m going to wistfully long for that alternate life. That alternate life doesn’t have any problems. Everything’s awesome there. All the time.

But obviously it’s a total fantasy.

And so regret is nothing but a longing for a life that is completely unrealistic.

The reality, I try to remind myself, is that any life path has problems. All it has are different problems.

And so it’s really unknowable whether it would be ‘better’ or not.

And in the end, I also know that it doesn’t really matter. Happiness is mine to create. It’s an inside job.

And so yeah, regrets. Total waste of time. You’re comparing your current life to a life that has no basis in reality.

Don’t bother.

Do some push ups instead.

JG.