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No B.S. Friday: Slaying energy vampires…

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I haven’t been taking enough care with the company I keep. I need to follow this advice.

Be careful who you share your soul with.

Not everyone is going to get it. 

Not everyone is going to see the vision you have. Not everyone will be able to see it all coming together, you – in the full richness of your life, your dreams taking shape in the wake of your hands. 

Not everyone is going to be able to see that. 

They will say your crazy. An idealist. A dreamer.

I’ve heard it all before. 

And not everyone is going to be able to support you in your dreams, even if they can see what you are trying to create. 

To many people, your success is scary. It’s a challenge to the victimhood stories they are telling themselves – the mythology of a horrible universe where there’s never enough and there’s no possible way to succeed. 

People need those stories. Otherwise they’d be forced to take responsibility and forced to take action. 

They’d much rather see you fail. They’d much rather talk you out of your dreams than actually have to do anything with their lives. 

You don’t need that. 

I really mean that, you don’t need that in your life. Nobody does. 

And you know who they are. It’s like they pull a plug in your belly, and your energy just drains away whenever they are around. 

Keep these people at a distance. Don’t share your soul with them. Don’t invite them into your inner world. 

You have enough on your plate with your own fears, your own insecurities, your own doubts. 

You already have the fight of your life on your hands. You need every ounce of energy you can muster. 

There’s no room for energy vampires. Keep them at a distance.

And careful the company you keep. 

No B.S. Friday: Love the cold.

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Exactly. No point crying about it. If you don’t think you have a choice you need to see this. 

I was on a ferry from the Greek mainland out to one of the islands, and I ended up chatting to a Norwegian fellow. He said that he loved ice-fishing – it was one of his favourite things to do.

Personally, I couldn’t imagine anything worse. Out in the freezing cold, standing on a big block of ice, just waiting around for hours and hours, like a penguin at a bus-stop.

It would drive me mental. 

But you know, I try to keep it polite. 

“Sounds like fun,” I say. “But how do you handle the cold?”

He says, “It’s not so bad. When I was young, maybe 4 or 5, my father took me ice-fishing. It was freezing. I started to cry but my father said, ‘look, you’re here now. You can either spend the whole day crying about it, or you can learn to love the cold. You’ve got a choice. You can either choose to be miserable, or chose to love the cold.’ And so that’s what we did. We just learned to love the cold.”

To me this is life in a nut shell. 

Existence is suffering. You have a body that breaks down and eventually wobbles its way into poor eyesight and wetting your pants. You have more dreams than can ever be realised, and you heart will be broken again and again and again. 

Life is suffering. The world is a hard place. 

But look, you’re here now. You can spend your whole life crying about it if you want to – how you’ve had to suffer from this or that, been on the receiving end of this or that injustice, seen your love ones betray you and pawn your antique golf clubs to buy breast implants. 

We’ve all been there. 

If you wanted to spend the rest of your days having a massive sook, you’d have every excuse. 

I give you permission. 

But is that what you really want to do?

Because you have a choice.

You can choose to accept the suffering that is your lot, and just see it as the entry price to Amusement Park Earth. 

That’s what I do. 

You can just choose to see every sling and every arrow and just another experience, another pattern in the rich tapestry of life.

Scars are the consequence of a life well lived. 

You can choose to take every blow that’s coming to you, and just have a flipping good old time anyway. To dance and laugh and live fully. 

That choice is yours. 

So what’s it going to be, penguin?

No B.S. Friday: If you hear wealth advice like this, run like hell.

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So many wealth gurus are just pretenders. This is what wealth advice looks like.  

So, I have wealth blog. I’m wealthy, I built my fortune from scratch, and people want to know how I did it.

And I actually think my blog is one of the rarer wealth blogs out there.

Because on a lot of blogs you’ll get advice like:

Buy a second hand car and drive it into the ground. Cars lose a lot of value as soon as you drive them off the show room floor.

Or,

Trawl op-shops for clothing bargains. You can find many designer brands hiding in the racks.

Or,

Remember that money can’t buy you happiness. Focus on your relationships, and the things that fill your life with meaning.

What a crock of crap.

Now there’s nothing wrong with this advice. It’s fine. But it’s not wealth advice. It’s advice about how to manage being poor.

I mean, imagine if I wrote a fitness blog and offered people a bunch of ideas about how to live with being fat:

“Do you really need that second scooe of ice-cream. Why not try having just one a day for a while.”

Or,

“Have you tried wearing black? It is a slimming colour. Or have you tried growing a goatee?”

Or,

“Try to remember that getting your body mass into the healthy weight range is not the key to happiness. Worry more about your relationships than your waist line.”

Seriously unhelpful advice.

But you get this a lot.

When people think about wealth it often triggers a poverty mentality. It brings up fears, conditioning, imprinting – it makes people so uncomfortable that they just end up throwing up their hands and looking ways to make themselves feel better about being poor.

It’s so common that we often don’t see that what people are calling wealth advice is actually often poverty advice.

So check where you are coming from. Do you genuinely want to be wealthy and successful? Or do you just want to find a way to deal with being poor and small?

Be honest.

And then go and read the blogs of people who know what the flip they’re talking about.

JG

No BS Friday: How to find your super strength

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Wow. Chihuahuas used to be terrifying?!? I’ve never thought about strength like this before.

There’s a scene in the movies “Bug's Life” where the head of the evil grasshoppers is getting angry at his underlings for letting an ant get away.

“What’s the problem boss? It’s just one ant,” they say, in thick New York accents.

“Just one ant?!?” the boss says.  “They outnumber us 100 to one. The only thing that keeps us on top is that they don’t know how powerful they are.”

Like most Disney and Pixar movies, this is a thinly veiled attempt to call the proletariat into violent uprising, but there is an interesting point here.

For most herd, pack or hive creatures, their strength is in their numbers. In isolation the are puny, but collectively they are terrifying.

Like Chihuahuas. We laugh at them stuffed in to ladies handbags, but there was a time where they would form super-packs of thousands and thousands of dogs. When they did, they were unstoppable. The villagers of South America would just turn on their tails and run.

Herd, pack and hive creatures rely on each other for strength. And humans are a pack animal. We have always relied on each other. No human ever brought down a woolly mammoth working on their own.  This strength is so ancient it is hard-coded into our DNA.

And yet the modern world keeps us isolated. We work in fabric covered boxes. We know our phones better than we know most people. If we had to fight off a pack of super Chihuahuas, most of us would be lucky if we could rustle together a war party of three or four people.

And so we find ourselves cut off from our ancient, collective strength.

You do not know the fullness of your power. If you listen, you can hear your instincts calling out for your tribe – your brothers in arms.

And to reach the fullness of your potential – to step into the fullness of your power – you need to find your place in the collective, in the herd, in the super-pack.

You were never meant to do this alone. Your destiny is held in many hands.

They are waiting for you. Go find them.

JG

No B.S. Friday: Do you have to be smart to be rich?

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One of the key misconceptions I see holding people back is the idea that they don’t have the ‘smarts’ to be rich.

Maybe they never went to Uni. Maybe they didn’t do that great at school. Maybe they can’t tell their i-phone from their i-pad.

And so they think, ‘well I’ll never be rich. Smart people earn good money, and I’m not smart people.’

But you need to ditch this idea right now. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it’s holding you back.

And you know, I can understand where the misconception comes from. It might be easier to imagine a rich doctor than it is a rich waiter.

And like a lot of misconceptions it’s based on a kernel of truth. A recent study based on US Census data found that there is a strong correlation between education and income. It found that over an adult’s working life, on average:

  • High school graduates should expect to earn $1.2 million;
  • Those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million;
  • Those with a master's degree, $2.5 million;
  • Those with doctoral degrees, $3.4 million;
  • And those with professional degrees, $4.4 million.

So the more edumacated you are, the more income you earn.

But there’s two components to this equation. Part of it has to do with intelligence – they vague term used to describe brain efficiency. But a lot of it just has to do with training. If you train in an area that is valuable to a lot of people, then you’re going to make money from it – kind of regardless of how intelligent you are.

And if you’re a freaking genius, but you go off and do a masters and a post-doc in the 12th Century neo-feminist literature of upper Yorkshire, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to turn that into serious earning power.

So being smart, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll earn more.

Secondly, earning more doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be rich. Income is just one aspect of wealth. It’s what we do with the money we earn, where we invest it, that determines how ‘rich’ we’re going to be.

Personally, I think we get too hung up on technical intelligence. These are the kinds of things that I.Q tests measure. How fast you process information, make computations, calculate and make decisions.

But we now recognise that this is a very narrow way to define brain functioning. And if you think of all the wonderful things the human being is capable of – making art or music or love or other people laugh… then technical intelligence – our ability to understand what 2+2 is – is probably also the least interesting form of intelligence.

In recent years, we’ve expanded the definition of intelligence out to include ‘emotional intelligence’, and that’s a start. We’ve recognised that our ability to negotiate complex social relationships is an almost miraculous feat. And our ability to do it well can often be the difference between success and failure in life.

And so more and more, companies are rating the emotional intelligence of their employees as highly as their IQ.

But I think we can go even further with our definition of intelligence, and I’d like to introduce the term ‘value intelligence’.

By that I mean our ability to successfully relate to the things we value. And most importantly, to differentiate between the things we think we want, and the things we actually want in life.

Take my friend Roz.

Happily married in the suburbs, she bought herself a second-hand Mercedes A-Class as a little run-about. I’m not sure what Mercedes were doing when they built the A-Class. Horrid little fart-box of a thing if you ask me.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, the water-pump in Roz’s car goes. Back in the day when I used to roll in a Toyota Celica, if the water pump went, I’d call up George, and two hours and a carton of beer later, problem solved.

But I caught up with Roz the other day. Guess how much it cost her to fix it?

5 grand.

Yep. Five thousand dollars! To fix a water pump! You can buy a whole car for 5 grand, and a decent one at that.

5 grand. And for what? The water pump on a little run-about. Maybe it might drive a little better than other cars in its class, but Roz wouldn’t be one to notice. So what are you paying for? Slightly better quality, or that dinner-sized Mercedes badge on the front?

It’s the kind of dumb decision that millionaires rarely make.

Hang on, what? I thought millionaires were all about the flashy cars and diamond rings.

Nope. Some are. But most aren’t.

According to Dr. Thomas J. Stanley, the best-selling author of The Millionaire Next Door and an expert in the habits and attitudes of wealthy people in America, millionaires rarely splash out on bling.

Stanley found that the vast majority of millionaires in the US:

  • Live in a house that cost less than $400,000.
  • Do not own a second home.
  • Have never owned a boat.
  • Are more likely to wear a Timex than a Rolex.
  • Do not collect wine and generally pay less than $15 for a bottle.
  • Are more likely to drive a Toyota than a Beemer.
  • Have never paid more than $400 for a suit.
  • Spend very little on prestige brands and luxury items.

No, they know that their hard-earned money is too valuable to waste on things that are simply about putting on a front.

That’s not to say they don’t enjoy their money. Of course they do. But when they splurge, they splurge on things they actually enjoy. They buy a Porche because they really love the way it drives, not because they’re trying to live up to some one else’s ideals.

I mean, take your own ambitions for example. What do you truly value? My bet is that quality time with your friends and family, free of financial stress, will rate much higher than wow’ing the neighbours when it really comes down to it.

This is value intelligence. To be able to think and act (and spend and invest) in a way that is aligned with your values.

So if you think you don’t have the smarts to be truly rich, forget it. It doesn’t matter. The question you should ask yourself is, ‘do I know what I truly want?’

If you can figure this out, and hold yourself to it, then you’re half way there.

And I can get you the rest.

Signed with Success

Jon

No B.S. Friday: DON’T GO BACK TO SLEEP!

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He’s right. Sleep is easier. No wonder so many people are into it.

What’s the first thing that happens when you wake up?

You probably feel grumpy, disorientated. Maybe you’re angry at whatever it was that woke you up – your partner, your alarm clock.

You were in a lovely dream-world. You were at rest. The needy demands of your body were quiet.

But now you’re awake. And now they’re here, at full volume – the ache in the back, the knees, the hunger, the feelings of inadequacy…

…the listlessness around your ankles like lead.

Things were better when you were asleep weren’t they?

Growing up is a journey of a 1000 waking ups.

At every stage of our growth, we have to wake up into a new way of being, a new understanding of the world.

We must wake up and realise that our parents don’t control the world and can’t protect us from everything.

We must wake up and realise that we are not the centre of the universe and we have to work hard and support ourselves like everyone else.

We must wake up and see that ideals like justice, fairness, reason – the world has a passing commitment to these at best, and it’s nothing less than a miracle that the human race keeps it shit together at all.

And then there is the greater waking up…

But each time we wake up, it’s the same. We’re disorientated and agitated. We’re angry at whatever woke us up. We long to go back to sleep.

It’s not easy. It’s why some many people choose sleep…

… their whole lives.

But if you are seeing this video, then you are probably walking the path of courage. I congratulate you for that.

And I wish you strength, because sleep is a lot easier than what you’ve got in store for you.

And I wish you a good sense of humour, because everything is about to start looking pretty odd.

And I wish you companionship, because it can be lonely too.

But you’re not alone. There are many people doing the best they can to live courageously and consciously.  Cherish them when you find them.

But this above all, don’t go back to sleep.

When the alarm clock in your soul starts ringing, answer.

… however hard it feels.

No B.S. Friday: THE TRUTH: It’s no an accident

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I’d never noticed before but he’s right. They’re using pity to control us.

The world has a massive double standard.

And it’s the difference in the reaction we get when we celebrate ourselves, and when we feel sorry for ourselves.

Imagine two scenarios.

In the first, you’re standing on the seats at the train station, pumping your chest like some kind of Conan the barbarian, singing your own praises.

“I am really good at my job. I am dependable friend. I am a loving and attentive father and I have nicely defined calf muscles.”

You’ll probably get locked up, right?

Now imagine you’re at the train station again, but you’re complaining about how hard your life is.

“My back is continually sore. My children never call me. I’m behind on my mortgage repayments and I can’t eat muffins any more because they give me gas.”

What happens? Probably nothing, right? It’s actually pretty normal.

We live in a world where self-pity and feeling sorry for yourself is totally normal, but feeling great about yourself and outwardly celebrating yourself is treated as strange, almost pathologic.

That’s an interesting double standard, right?

But let me ask you this. Which one of these is more useful to you – which one puts you in a better state of mind, is more attractive to be around, and helps you get more done with your days?

Self-worth or self-pity?

And let me also ask you which one is more useful to the powers that be? Which one makes you demotivated and compliant, de-energised and cynical, disempowered and apathetic?

Which one makes you a better cog in the machine?

Self-worth or self-pity?

This double-standard is not an accident.

You are not here to be small and I don’t want to hear you complaining about how hard your life is. Don’t give in like that.

Create a discipline around celebrating yourself – around recognising your strengths and allowing yourself to just feel good about yourself.

It’s a simple act.

But it’s one of the most revolutionary things we can do.

No B.S. Friday: Right and Wrong? IT’S ALL A LIE!

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Ha! He just flipped this old philosophical problem on its head!

There’s a popular thought experiment in philosophy called ‘The Trolley Problem’.

Basically, a rail car is hurtling down a track, on course to kill 5 people. You have the power to switch it on to another track, where it will only kill one person. Should you do it? Should you kill one to save five?

What is the ‘right’ thing to do?

The trolley problem first surfaced back in 1905.

And we’re still talking about it.

More than 100 years later, philosophers are still debating it, writing endless essays and journal articles on all the nuances of moral obligation.

It’s been going on for so long that the Trolley Problem even has its own Facebook group!

And this isn’t just a thought experiment to entertain scholars. Soon, autonomous vehicles will be everywhere. What do we tell them to do if given the choice between ploughing into a school bus or swerving on to the curb and killing a pedestrian?

Someone’s got to program that.

For me, I think the reason why the trolley problem is so hard is because we’re making the job too difficult for ourselves at the get go. We start with the assumption that there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ thing to do.

Right and wrong only exist in abstraction. Like in maths. 2 + 2 = 4 is ‘right’. 2 + 2 = 7 is ‘wrong’.

But the world is not abstract. The world is complex. So this need we have to cling to simple ideas of right and wrong is like trying to cram a square peg into a round hole.

It says more about our inability to deal with complexity than it does about our wonky moral compasses.

And the tragedy is that we bring this need for simplicity into our daily decisions. What is the right thing to study? What is the right career to choose? What is the right way to invest?

Who should I marry?

There’s no right or wrong answer here because, in reality, these aren’t right or wrong questions.

They are complex. They can be considered from different, sometimes competing perspectives, you rarely have all the information that is relevant, and you often don’t know what you would actually prefer if you really got down to it.

You just don’t know yourself that well.

It’s just complex, and you can bend your head if you spend too long trying to figure it out. And you can waste precious years if you spend too long trying to figure it out.

Such a waste.

What I think it means is that we’ve got to be ok with just doing the best we can.

Do some research, but then just pick your career, pick your investments, pick your partner, and just make it work.

This is where the living is – in just making it work.

And this is where the richness of life is – in the bewildering complexity of life, feeling yourself bundled along by forces much greater than yourself.

So let go of your attachment to right and wrong, it doesn’t serve you, and step into a state of action-driven wonder.

No B.S. FRIDAY: The One Key to UNLEASH YOUR POWER

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Now THIS is the key to real power in the world.

You are a powerful being.

But all that power is useless if you don’t know how to use it.

Most people seem to think the success journey is about becoming more powerful. It’s about learning new skills, become more efficient, more effective. Learning how to bend the world to your will.

And it is. But that’s not all it is.

Think about it this way. Imagine you have an old Datsun car. Now you strap a booster jet from a military cargo plane to it.

That car just got a tonne more powerful.

But will that power do it any good? Power is just dangerous if you don’t know how to handle it.

Or imagine you want to go to an awesome Vietnamese restaurant across town. You’re trying to figure out how to get there and you’re friend says, lets put some extractors and a supercharger on this thing. Make it fully sik.

Again, that will give you more power, but power wasn’t your problem.

If you don’t know where you’re going, more power just means you get lost more quickly.

This is true in all things.

It’s not enough to focus on your skills, your techniques, your strength. It’s not enough to focus on the things that give you power.

We also have to be constantly cultivating wisdom. We have to be cultivating the awareness and maturity that will help us navigate through life. We have to know where we are going.

And the only way to do this is to live. To live broadly and courageously. Seek out new experiences, meet new people, take on new challenges.

Be playful, brave and be constantly curious.

This is the discipline of power. Wisdom is nothing but experience made conscious.

And it is wisdom – wisdom is the key to realising the promise of the power you already possess.

No BS Friday: I Give Up (Seriously)

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Give up trying to ‘make it’.

You are never going to make it.

But this is the secret that no one tells you.

There is no “make it”.

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

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

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

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

Even the most mighty king is never free.

But freedom can be yours.

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

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

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

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

This is the only definition of success that matters.

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

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

“Yes, I am the person I want to be.”

Then you will have made it.

And peace and freedom will be yours.

Take the pressure off now… give up!

Surrender to the person that you truely want to be…

The real YOU!