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No BS: Normal is dead. Get over it.

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No B.S Friday: Stop pining for the past and get ready for the future.

You know, I don’t think things are ever going back to normal.

I feel like a lot of us are in a mode of just “riding it out.”

We’ve just got our heads down, waiting to get through Covid, get through the next election, get through the climate crisis and the next flood or the next fire.

Get through the polarisation of society. Get through government lockdowns or get through all the conspiracies.

Get through super-low interest rates. Get through money printing. Get through the explosion in asset prices and the devaluation of everything else.

If we can just ‘get through it’, then on the other side, “normal” is waiting for us.

We’ll be able to go back to understanding how our phones worked and watching the Simpsons on TV.

But I don’t think it’s happening.

First, I think normal is an illusion. The pace of change might have been slower back in the good old days, but 1980 was a million miles from 1940.

Change is the only constant.

And we’re not going backwards because time doesn’t go backwards. Things don’t ‘unchange’.

Social media is not going away. Covid’s not going away. The reality that we are part of a complex society with a million different agendas at play – that’s not going away either.

And so I don’t think we have a choice here.

I don’t think we can resist change. I don’t think we can hold out for things to go back to a state of being we can understand.

No. I think we have to be a friend to the new.

We have to accept that radical change is just the price of entry to the 21st century.

We have to learn to ride the new and the unknown.

And that means rolling with change and rolling with uncertainty. It means learning how to act on limited information.

It means being comfortable to roll the dice and go with our gut or go with our best guesses.

Because what’s in store for us in 2022?

I don’t know. I’ve got no idea. Nobody does.

Seriously, right now, it feels like anything could happen.

The way things are going, I’m expecting an AI-apocalypse any day now.

All we can do is show up. Just find a way to make change our natural habitat.

And roll with it the best we can.

I’ve got a couple more blogs for you next week, but this is my sign off for the year.

Thanks for sticking it out this year. It was a wild ride.

And I’m sure 2022 is going to be no different.

But let’s just lean into the change, lean into the chaos, and carve it up the best we can.

Let’s choose to be friends to the new.

Because the new year is coming whether we like it or not.

JG.

No BS: Are people waking up?

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No B.S Friday: Some illusions, nice illusions, are no longer tenable.

I kinda wonder if the challenge of our times is shed our illusions.

And maybe that’s just the nature of growing up. At some point you have to let go of the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny, and come to grips with a world on the other side of those illusions.

And they’re nice illusions. And they’re illusions that serve a purpose. They help us believe the maybe the world is a magical place, full of magical beings who want to give us money and chocolate.

That’s a nice thing to believe, right?

But at some point, the weight of evidence stacks up, and we just can’t hold on to those illusions any longer.

There comes a tipping point. And it’s often well after the point where any clear-eyed evaluation of the facts would lead you to a new understanding of reality.

But we hang on to our illusions.

Because they serve a purpose. Either they form part of our understanding of the world, and they inform the way we navigate it.

Or it just feels better to believe things are a certain way. We like to think about ourselves or the world in that way. It just feels better.

Like, what 4-year old wouldn’t want to believe that there’s a magical rabbit with an infinite supply of chocolate?

And so I feel like more and more of us are coming face to face with our illusions. We are understanding ourselves in a new way. And we are understanding the world in a new way.

And perhaps that’s to be expected. The internet age has made information super-abundant. Society has become super-saturated with info.

The evidence on the other side of our illusions just stacks up higher and higher.

But, the realities we find ourselves waking up into are often difficult to accept.

For example, I know for a lot of people, they never really thought all that much about the government before Covid came along. Politics was just something you had to endure every 4-years or so, as all the placards went up and parties fought it out to see who got the right to collect your bins.

But now, the government is in your face. It has to be. There’s a pandemic. Tough choices had to be made.

Some of those choices were the right ones. Some weren’t. But there was no escaping it.

If you were living under the illusions that politics didn’t touch you, that illusion is now busted.

And now there’s a more challenging reality to face – the idea that politicians – a bunch of regular, flawed individuals, who are themselves under the influence of all sorts of interest groups – are making decisions that impact you in a massive way.

That was always true, but many people lived with the comfortable illusion that they were above politics. That it didn’t touch them.

Sorry to burst your bubble, bud.

But I see this happening everywhere. People are seeing the world in a new way. They are seeing themselves in a new way.

And what we’ve got is a nation full of drug-addicts going on detox.

I like what the journalist Chris Hedges says:

“The nature of illusion is that it’s designed to make you feel good. About yourself, about your country, about where you’re going – in that sense it functions like a drug. Those who question that illusion are challenged not so much for the veracity of what they say, but for puncturing those feelings.”

Yep. People are angry that the world they thought existed, just actually doesn’t.

And they’re angry at the people waking them up.

But my hope, I guess, is that on the other side of this we have all shed some illusions, and that we begin to live with more clarity and more consciousness.

But we’ve probably got a bumpy ride between here and there.

JG.

No BS: My secret antidote to overwhelm

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No B.S Friday: Overwhelm is about control, and the lack of it.

I know a lot of people feel a lot of overwhelm right now.

It’s perfectly natural. It’s a very common experience.

The real danger though is that overwhelm can totally derail our drive. We hit periods where it all feels too much, and we just quit.

That’s a shame.

So we need to be able to deal with overwhelm. We all do. From Elon Musk to Bezos to Bozo the clown. Whoever. Whatever you do in life, you’re going to hit periods of overwhelm.

But lets define the problem.

I reckon the feeling of overwhelm is really just another way of saying that you don’t feel like you have control of your time. You’re not in charge. The demands of life are conspiring to throw you this way and that.

And so number one when we’re fighting the feeling of overwhelm is to become the masters of our own time.

One of the keys here is focus. I like to organise my time in blocks. When I’m on, I’m on. When I’m working on one project, whether its accounts, or design plans, or whatever, I give that one thing my full focus.

I don’t take calls. I don’t check emails. I don’t see how many “likes” my pictures of breakfast are getting.

I stay focused.

That also means getting out of reactive mode. It means not checking each message or email as it comes in. It means not taking phone calls if we’re in the middle of something. It means making a plan to give some energy and focus to one thing, and sticking to it.

Resist the temptation.

If you take control of your schedule, you’ll stop feeling like a victim. Overwhelmed is another word for powerless.

And so I set my own schedule and do my best to stick to it. I can’t hit it every hour of every day. Stuff happens, I know that. But when it does, it’s my choice to respond or not.

I’m also a big believer in the idea of “plan tomorrow, today”.

Don’t scramble through to the end of the day and then try and figure out what the heck that was all about on the bus ride home.

Block out some time to take stock of where you’re at, and plan your next day.

It is a real joy to begin the day (the morning hours are some of my most productive hours) with a clear plan and direction. What’s more, you’re not carrying all that stuff around in your head over night. That means you’ll sleep and rest better, and have more energy to hit the day tomorrow.

But at the end of the day, the antidote to overwhelm is control. Take control of your time and you schedule, and it will go a long way to reduce the sense of overwhelm and stress in your life.

JG.

No BS: How sweet old people got that way

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No B.S Friday: More radical responsibility – this time about holding on to your sweetness.

If it’s one thing I’ve come to understand, it’s that life makes you bitter.

And it’s not that life is bad like that. I’m not having a grump. It’s ok. I’ve had my coffee. You can talk to me.

No, it’s not that life is wrong and bad and terrible.

It’s just that we are just born so darn cute and innocent.

We come into the world beautifully naive.

For most of us, we enter a universe where we are completely doted on and where we have every need attended to. We don’t even wipe our own bottoms.

And as we get a little bigger, we find ourselves with minimal responsibilities and oodles of leisure time to just stare at bugs or whatever.

And as we become teenagers, everything in our life confirms that we are the complete centre of the universe, and the love that we feel for that cute boy is the most epic love ever experienced by anyone in the universe.

So blissful.

But it’s an artificial reality. It’s a fantasy concocted for us by our loving parents and a consumer-culture obsessed with youth.

But then one by one, the walls of that fantasy begin to crumble, and we begin to face up to reality.

Being an adult involves responsibility. There’s no avoiding it. We have to get jobs and pay bills. We have to wipe our own bottoms.

And we begin to realise that we might not be young forever. Grey hairs come. We get flabby where there never used to be flab. We realise that we are being shuffled aside to make way for the next generation of young and effortlessly beautiful.

With that comes the realisation of death. It moves from an abstract idea to something we genuinely have to come to terms with, as gnarly as the idea is.

And as our gaze lifts from our entitled teen-age belly-buttons, we realise that there’s a whole world out there, and that there are entire nations of suffering and injustice.

And one day, we find that we are no longer living in a fantasy. We are living in the real world. And the real world is brutal and cruel and we are getting fat and going bald.

And with this, come bitterness.

And look, I just don’t blame anyone who’s been on this journey for becoming bitter. It’s the most natural thing in the world. We naturally become bitter and disappointed and prone to yelling at kids who walk on our lawn.

But we don’t have to let it happen.

We can choose to remain sweet.

And that doesn’t mean clinging to the fantasy, the way some people seem to cling to the dream of being young forever.

No, it involves seeing the world for all it’s cruelty and transfats, and remaining sweet in the midst of it all.

It’s a decision to anchor yourself in gratitude.

It’s a decision to grieve fully and savour every scrap of beauty that comes your way.

It’s a decision to love everyone around you for all their faults. It’s a decision to love yourself for all your faults.

If you can do this, you can hang on to your sweetness.

And if you can do this, then you win life. You’re a winner. A happy and sweet golden oldie.

To me, this sweetness is the definition of success.

JG.

No BS: How to weaponize stress

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No B.S Friday: Some people don’t just handle stress… they feed off it.

These are still pretty intense times. Covid seems to be coming under control just as we’re clocking how serious the climate crisis is…

… and as the Chinese property sector goes belly up, potentially taking down the whole financial system.

It’s easy to get frozen with fear.

But have you ever stopped and thought about how odd the “rabbit in the headlights” effect is?

Something is coming at you. Something scary. You’re response? Freeze.

Humans, like rabbits, can become “frozen with fear.”

That’s odd isn’t it? I think God had his B-team of DNA developers on that one. Of all the survival strategies available to you, if something scary is coming your way, being completely still seems to be your lowest-odds play.

Turns out though that it’s not so much a strategy, as a glitch. You kind of just crash. You freeze up like a computer.

We can kind of think about this like flooding an engine. Maybe only my older readers will get this one. I don’t think it’s possible to flood modern cars these days.

As a refresher for you kids out there, ‘flooding’ happens when you fill the system with too much fuel before it’s up and firing. You drown the engine. There’s too much fuel for the ignition systems to handle.

You can have too much of a good thing.

Same story with stress and fear.

Both of these are a fuel – a source of energy.

If you’ve ever had a near-accident in a car you’ll know what I’m talking about. Think about the adrenalin rush that followed. Your body becomes electric. You’re fully alive. Energy is coursing through your veins.

If it wasn’t for the fact that you’d just come face to face with your own mortality, it would actually be a beautiful and exhilarating experience. You could bottle it and sell it.

(oh wait, there’s coffee.)

But as I said, there can be too much of a good thing. Too much fear locks you up. The energy jams. You turn to stone. Blue screen of death.

There’s a great book called “The hour between dog and wolf.” It was written by this guy who used to work on a trading floor of a big investment bank.

It was a high-stress workplace. People were taking big gambles with big sums of money.

The thing that interested this guy though was how different people handled it. Some were flattened by it. It took a huge toll on their body. Some developed asthma. Some developed chronic fatigue. It was like they’d been hit by a truck.

Others though thrived with stress. They lived with it and they loved it. Stress was just another part of the game and the game was fun.

This guy’s idea is that the difference between road-kill and the game players was all about how they responded to stress.

The game players took the energy of stress and turned it into action. They did something with it. They were louder, bigger presences in the office. The exercised a lot, often getting into extreme sports. They enjoyed living on the edge.

The road-kill on the other hand were always fighting their stress. They were trying to keep up calm appearances, not let anyone know that the stress was getting to them. They refused to accept the game that they had found themselves in.

And the final stages of a road-kills death spiral was often the same – a total inability to make any decisions.

So this is the question I am asking everyone right now: if the current global situation is making you feel stress, what are you doing about it?

Are you using that stress to fire up your day? Are you turning it into motivation to put in the hard yards and bring your A-game?

Or are you sitting on it, smothering it, trying to pretend that it doesn’t faze you? Hoping it will just be alright?

We’ve all got to find a productive way to deal with stress – to turn fear in to fire. I wish I could tell you that there was a path to serious wealth that didn’t involve risk. But there isn’t.

If you want to play a game where the outcomes are influenced to some degree by what goes on in China or Europe, then you need to be ok with risk. There’s no way around it.

So Relax.

Nothing is under control.

JG

No BS: What to do with your ‘best’ hours

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No B.S Friday: This is some killer advice my mentor once gave me.

Spend the best hours of your day on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

This is something one of my mentors told me once and I have found it to be a really useful rule to live by.

Life is busy. I don't need to tell you that. It's hectic.

And life is full of challenges – full of problems.

And by the time something comes onto our radar as a problem it has usually become urgent.

Most people give very little thought to the problems that they are facing 5 to 10 years down the road. Most of our problems are in the here and now.

The reverse is true for our opportunities. It is incredibly unlikely that today will present you with an opportunity that will totally transform your life.

Most opportunities have runways that are at least 12 to 24 months long, if not more.

I mean, if you decided today that you wanted to make your fortune as a property investor, it would take a month or two to get your skilled up, a month or 2 to get your market ready, and then maybe one or two deals over 6 to 12 months to get you into a position where you would be able to capitalise on a truly life changing opportunity.

We are not miracle workers here. You have to be able to lift your gaze a little.

But most people don't. Most people aren't looking ahead to the opportunities that could possibly be on the horizon. Most people spend most of their productive lives bogged down in the weeds – battling with one urgent problem after another.

And if it's one thing I know about life, it's that no sooner have you knocked one problem on the head, than another one appears to take its place.

It is very easy to spend your whole life playing whack-a-mole mole with an endless series of seemingly urgent problems.

It's no way to live.

No, there is a responsibility here and a discipline here.

And that's to make sure that at least some of your productive day is going towards the opportunities that are going to set you up for life.

And I know this takes courage. you have to be able to let your problems run a little more than would normally feel comfortable – to give them a little less attention than you otherwise would.

But you have to have a little faith. You have to be able to trust that whatever disasters might emerge from unattended problems will be nothing in comparison to the tragedy that is a life of squandered opportunities.

There's nothing worse than this.

So make some time today. Make some time for the biggest opportunity in your life right now.

And do it every day.

Your future self will thank you for it.

JG.

No BS: An angry letter from the universe

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No B.S Friday: Stop asking the wine to make you happy.

Look, I don’t know how to say this. But I’ve got a message from the universe for you.

“Please stop calling.”

How do I say it? The universe is just getting a bit tired of your humbug.

And to be honest, you have been a bit needy lately.

You ask a lot.

I mean, I know, you have needs. That’s totally fine. We all do. Nothing wrong with that.

But you don’t have to put it all on the universe.

It’s not really fair.

So just stop it.

Stop asking the world to do things for you.

Stop asking your wine or your smoke to relax you.

Stop asking your holidays and those exotic beaches to rejuvenate you.

Stop asking the lotto to make you rich.

Stop asking your wife to turn you own and make you feel sensual.

Stop asking your kids to fill your heart with joy and give your life meaning.

The world just doesn’t want the responsibility. Have you seen what’s going on? It’s got enough of its plate already.

These are your needs so they are your responsibility.

If you want anything in this life, you have to make it happen yourself.

And so how does Uncle Jon’s Doctrine of Radical Responsibility work when it comes to happiness and intangible things like this?

How can I explain it? Maybe think of your inner life like a garden. You wouldn’t just ignore the garden and then complain that there’s no apple trees and no tomatoes growing there.

If you want apples you need to plant an apple tree. If you want veggies you need to pull weeds and water regularly.

You need to take responsibility for the garden as a whole.

And that’s something that I think most people just don’t get.

They’re waiting for lovely experiences to come along and make them happy. But the truth is that you can’t make a mind happy unless it has been carefully primed for happiness.

(I won’t go into the specifics of mental gardening here. I’ve covered it before. But it’s things like a Stoic acceptance of fate and a discipline of gratitude. Stuff like that.)

My point is, we put it all on the external world and all on things that happen ‘out there’.

We want things to come along and just give us the things and the experiences we want, while doing none of the work ourselves.

(It’d be so nice, wouldn’t it? But sorry, darling, that’s just not how it works.)

If we want anything in life, we have to take responsibility for it ourselves.

And that means there’s no one to ever blame but ourselves.

So take responsibility. Stop putting on the universe.

It’s tired of your sh:t.

JG.

No BS: Old bastards show us what we’re really capable of

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No B.S Friday: Maybe they don’t make ‘em like that anymore, or maybe we’re just not trying.

I have a mate of mine who lives in a nice apartment community up in Cairns. It’s a bunch of stylish, low maintenance unit towers. For that reason, they’re pretty popular with retirees and people in the twilight years of life.

He’s also on the body corporate. He was telling me the other day that the biggest problem they have is how to keep the old fellahs out of the garden.

The community is low maintenance by design. Someone comes to clean the pool. Someone does the gardens. Someone mows the lawns. The gardener puts the bins out when he arrives and puts them away at the end of the day.

By design, there isn’t much to do.

This drives the old blokes crazy.

Most of them have come off the land – off one of the sugar farms that surround Cairns, or off the rich agricultural land in the Atherton Tablelands.

And they’ve spent the full working lives, from 17 to 70, 7 days a week, sun-up to sun-down, working the land. Working hard.

They literally don’t know how to stop.

Suddenly they go from managing several thousand hectares, to a few square metres. They don’t know what to do with themselves.

Their energy and work ethic needs an outlet. And so they try get involved with the garden. They want to put the bins out. The roller gate is a little squeaky so they get out the tools to have a tinker.

So then the body corporate gets complaints from the gardeners because someone’s been messing with their program.

So body corporate puts up a sign that says: “Please do not help with the garden.”

Most body corporates should be so lucky. A lot of body corporates end up with signs like, “Please do not urinate in the car park.”

But the poor old farmers go crazy. They’re cooped up in the apartment with nothing to do. Crosswords and day-time tv only fill so much of the day. And they

want to be doing something. They want to be productive. They’ve barely wasted an hour of daylight their whole lives. They just don’t know how.

And it’s a cruel irony. They’ve probably spent their whole lives dreaming about moving to the coast and putting their feet up. Now that they finally have the freedom to do that, the dream is sour. They just can’t enjoy it.

And they get a bit depressed.

You gotta feel sorry for them. I admire these tough old bastards. A tough life made them tough. They weren’t given an easy run of things and they rose to the challenge.

And I find that inspiring. When I feel like things are getting tough, I sit back in my large leather chair, take a sip of my ¾ skinny latte, and imagine I’m out in 40 degree heat or 40 inch rain trying to wipe the crap off an angry sheep’s bum.

A little bit of perspective goes a long way.

The other thing I remember is that hard-work is a skill, and skills can be learnt. I’ve seen this with my own journey. I often hit points where I think I’m past full-capacity. Like if I keep this pace up I’m going to blow a gasket or something.

But after a while, the hard yards become your new normal. You surprise yourself at what you’re actually capable of.

In time, you’re able to knock over a week’s worth of work before morning tea time.

Never underestimate what humans are capable of. Never underestimate what you yourself are capable of.

Life is long. You can get a lot done.

But at some point, you’ve got to give yourself permission to take a break.

JG.

No BS: I wasn’t my best self this week

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No B.S Friday: It’s hard to be this awesome all the time.

I’ve been a bit of a scratchy old dog lately.

I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe I’m a bit under the weather. Maybe it’s just the relentless grind of lockdowns.

Whatever it is, I’ve been an unpleasant place to be.

(Yes I meant that. Back off grammar nazis.)

I mean, it’s not its usual laugh a minute fun being me. It usually is. I enjoy being me. I’m kind of hilarious. And kind of awesome.

I’m having a good time over here.

But lately, I’ve been a bit bitter. A bit scratchy.

Not so much on the outside mind you. I’m sure most people wouldn’t notice. I still know how to perform the usual social courtesies. I tip my hat to the ladies. I help old ladies across the street and into their dumpsters.

But inside of me – in my thoughts – I’m a bit scratchy.

For me it manifests as a sort of judgyness. Like, I saw a couple pushing a cheap pram along the road the other day, and I caught myself going “Pffft. Trailer trash.”

It was a horrible thing to think. And totally judgemental. I didn’t know those people at all. And they weren’t doing me any harm. I had absolutely no reason to lob a judgy bomb at them.

And I guess I caught myself because this isn’t a normal thought pattern for me. My thoughts don’t normally go to judgy places. They don’t normally go to other people at all.

So I tried to pull myself up by boot-straps. “C’mon Jon. Don’t be so judgmental. You’re better than that. You only judge others when you judge yourself, so practice a little self love so you can love others.”

Have we talked about this before? How judgement of others emerges out of the judgement we have of ourselves. Judgment is a projectile weapon. I’m sure we’ve talked about it.

But yeah, the theory goes that if you want to be more generous and loving with others, start by being more generous and loving with yourself.

But this kind of self talk didn’t work.

Why?

Because I was just tired.

When the organism gets tired it gets defensive. It knows it doesn’t have the energy to fend off a sabre-toothed tiger, and so it starts trying to anticipate threats and fend them off before they get too close.

The organism gets scratchy.

And the only reason why I’m mentally lashing out at people in my head is because my organism feels tired and it’s feeling defensive.

So all the self-love affirmations in the world wouldn’t have made a lick of difference because at the end of the day, I’d still be tired.

So this is my little reminder for the week.

Don’t try to solve for judgement and self-love without starting with energy and a feeling of abundance.

That’s the first step.

And just don’t be too hard on yourself if you’re not the most wonderful version of yourself you can be when you’re tired and run down.

It’s ok.

We’re all just doing the best we can.

Even those wonky-arse pram numnuts.

JG.

No BS: How school trains you to lose

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

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

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

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

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

And this is what saved me.

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

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

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

Think about the grading system.

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

But the system is rigged.

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

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

Loser.

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

50 shades of loser.

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

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

She was devastated. She burst into tears.

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

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

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

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

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

… money.

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

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

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

Something the school system never gives you, by design.

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

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

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

JG.