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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: 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 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.

No BS: Why there’s no aliens in your inbox

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No B.S Friday: I’m not surprised aliens aren’t reaching out to me.

You know me. I like to ponder the big questions.

Like will football ever be the same now that Messi has left Barcelona, and who could possibly stop Paris Saint-Germain now?

(Nobody).

The other question I've been thinking about lately is where are all the aliens?

This is the Ferme paradox. It's the idea that our Sun and our planet are relatively old in the scheme of the universe.

There have been millions and millions of suns for millions and millions of years and it's likely that at least a few of them would have created life and that some of those lifeforms would have figured out interstellar travel.

And they should've done that along long time ago. Long enough them to drop by earth and say hello.

The Ferme paradox is the idea that the universe should be full of aliens but it seems to be empty.

So I've got an idea about this.

And it's kind of just a numbers game. So of all the sun's out there, only some of them have planets of those planets only some of them are capable of sustaining life.

Of those planets, maybe only a small percentage would actually find that magic catalyst – that Starseed – that sets the whole caravan is evolutionary life in motion.

It keeps going. Of the life forms that emerge, only a small percentage would be cooperative.

I read somewhere the other day that only 3% of the species on earth could be called cooperative. It's primates, ants and bees and not much else. And even then I don't know if you say that most herd species were really cooperative.

I mean cows aren't getting together and pooling their resources to solve shared problems.

There's no chance in my mind that there’s an evolutionary line that runs through cows and somehow ends up with a species that conquers the universe.

Anyway, I think it's fair to say that that achieving the capability to transcend planetary limits probably requires cooperation – and complex cooperation at that. No lone wolf is going to do it.

But as I said, only a small percentage of species are cooperative.

But if any species that rises to the top of the food chain – that becomes the planet’s dominant species – it has probably done that in a way that has neutralised the threat coming from any other species.

Like, I'm imagining a species of super-bees. I'd imagine that once the super species of bees have taken over a planet, they just lock it in and keep doing their thing. The evolution of life sort of ends at that point.

They’d be dominant, harmonious, and happy.

So what I think you need, is a species that can become the dominant species on the planet while still having a capacity for war and competition within itself.

It's this competition that drives technological advancement. It's this competition that would create the curiosity and the hunger to explore space.

So not only do we have to find a cooperative species, we have to find a cooperative species that is capable of holding a dynamic competitive tension within itself.

Not only that, this species has to be able to play the war games of dynamic internal competition, without consuming all of the planets available resources, Or making the planet uninhabitable for itself.

This is the gate at which humanity currently stands. We have to find a way to put our internal competition on hold for long enough to give our precious little planet room to breathe.

And so I think when you look at all the ducks you have to get themselves in a row, I have to think it's not surprising that there are very few (if any) species with curiosity and the capacity for interstellar travel.

And I don't really know what to do with that, other than to reflect that life in general and humanity in particular might be even more miraculous than we think.

Wonder of wonders.

JG.

No BS: Why we self-sabotage

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No B.S Friday: There’s a good reason why we’re afraid of success.

Why do we sabotage ourselves?

It’s funny isn’t it? Why do we do it? Why do we trip ourselves up just as we’re about to cross the finish line? Why do we become an enemy of our own success?

Why would we do that? It doesn’t make sense.

But we do. We do it all the time.

I’ve got a theory. And look this is a blog not a psychology text book, so don’t mark me down for incompleteness, but I reckon it’s definitely part of the puzzle.

And the best way I can describe it is to think of a builder building a house. That builder refuses to move on to doing the plumbing, because plumbing doesn’t involve hammers and he really loves hammers.

In fact, he thinks he’s a hammer.

Ok, maybe that’s not as crystal clear as it seemed in my head, but let me break it down.

Often, we fixate on certain challenges in life – finding the right place to live, finding the right career, finding the right romantic partners, whatever.

We tell ourselves that once we ‘tick these boxes’ we’ll be happy. We convince ourselves that happiness lies on the other side of ‘achieving something’.

To achieve that something we develop a whole bunch of tools and strategies. We can call this the ego – the ego is the part of the mind devoted to identifying and solving problems, and taking charge of the tools and strategies at our disposal.

And so the ego is out there doing it’s thing, and then one day, we come very close to ‘ticking one of our boxes’.

We find a job that seems too good to be true. We find a partner who puts a big tick in our box. We find the perfect house.

At this moment, it seems to me, the ego gets very alarmed.

Because once you land that perfect whatever, one of two things will happen.

Either that thing will be the perfect thing to make you perfectly happy, and you will be sorted – you just don’t need the ego any more. You’ve got no more work for it to do.

Or, you will land that perfect thing, and then realise that it doesn’t actually make you as happy as you thought it was going to. Endless happiness remains elusive. Life goes on. New reasons to be sad and dissatisfied quickly emerge.

And at that point, you realise that your ego has wasted your life chasing after a mirage. You realise that your ego has no power to make you happy – that happiness comes from within, from having a right and loving relationship with yourself.

Either way, at this moment, the ego knows that it’s facing an existential threat. There’s a very good chance that once you achieve this ‘thing’, you will realise that your ego is actually just getting in the way.

So what can it do?

I mean, it can’t let you achieve the thing, right. That potentially means death.

The only option?

Sabotage.

The only option here is to sabotage your success, so you keep on believing that the key to happiness is achieving the thing, and that the ego is the right man for the job for navigating you towards the thing.

Maybe it’s like the army general who is afraid of peace. They devote their whole lives to winning peace, while knowing that if peace actually came, they’d be out of a job.

I think it’s like this.

So watch this – watch for those times where you seem to be on the brink of everything you thought you ever wanted, and all you want to do is run.

That’s not you. That’s your ego clinging on for dear life.

Don’t lose sight of the job, just to hang on to your tools.

Just breathe through it, and allow it to unfold.

JG.

No BS: Why forwards feels like backwards

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No B.S Friday: If it feels like you’re going backwards, you might be making progress

“Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.”

This is something that I only got recently.

I always heard this and thought “yeah, yeah, that’s probably true… for other people. I’m just going to cruise from one level of awesome to the next.”

But the other day I got it.

And I got it because I went the physio.

I went to the physio to get my shoulder looked at. As you know, I hit the gym pretty regularly. I like the energy it gives me, and I like to keep myself looking like a Greek god (the god of eating and drinking.)

But my shoulder was starting to tweak out a bit, and I think all the time I was spending at the computer probably wasn’t helping.

Anyway, I won’t go into the details of the bio-mechanics (because there’s no way I remember), but my physio spent some time on my shoulder and loosened a bunch of stuff up.

And what I noticed was that my shoulder was feeling better. So that was great. But then my neck was feeling really sore. And under my arm pit. And across my chest.

I’d seemed to have replaced a single chronic pain with a whole bunch of minor ones.

So I went back to the physio and was like, “hey, what’s going on here?”

And they said, “Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better.”

And I’m like, “Oh don’t give me that. What do you mean?”

It turns out that what was happening is that I was using my shoulder in a particular way to protect other parts of my body.

So because my neck was tight, my shoulder was moving in a way that didn’t make my neck worse. And because my chest was tight, my shoulder was moving in a way that protected that.

Eventually, that funny way of moving started to create pain in my shoulder.

But what that meant was that when we got the shoulder moving freely again, it was no longer protecting my neck and my chest.

And without the protection of my shoulder, I now became very conscious of the pain in my neck and chest.

It felt like a new pain, but it was actually just an older, legacy pain being unsurfaced.

And so now I have more work to do.

And at this point I got it. This is why sometimes it feels like you’re going backwards when you’re going forward.

We build many different rigidities into our life to ‘protect’ pain points.

So maybe feeling poor is painful, so we cover that up with a resentment of rich people and an unfair capitalist system.

Maybe we felt shame about our creative urges, and so we cover that up with a hyper-macho commitment to being ‘business-like’.

Maybe we were rejected in love, and so we cover that up with an over-the-top righteous commitment to dead-end marriages, with an expectation that marriage should be dull and boring.

Whatever it is, at some point those protective measures don’t serve our broader life goals. They are protecting particular pain points, but they are holding us back from living a rich and happy life.

And so we need to ‘unwind’ them.

But when we unwind them, the old pains resurface, and now we’ve got to deal with them.

And so there comes a stage where all we’ve got to show for our work is a new set of pain – a new cluster of blockages – and a cluster of blockages that feels deeper and harder to shift than the original set, because they are.

And this is why sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.

So stick with it.

Keep going, and eventually everything will be moving in harmony again. That point exists.

Just got to push through it.

JG.

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!

No B.S. FRIDAY: Don’t leave a beautiful corpse…

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Are you tip-toeing at the moment ?

If so, I have some advice for you.

You are not here to leave beautiful corpses.

I broke my arm once when I was a boy.

My uncle said that the only people who’ve never broken a bone, are cowards (He was tough old Greek).

If you’re too scared to climb trees, jump off sheds, pull tricks with your bike or get into a bit of biffo, you might be lucky. You might get through childhood without breaking anything.

But do you want to spend the best years of your life wrapped up in cotton wool?

I don’t know if I’d recommend everyone taking life advice from that particular uncle, but on this occasion, his words stuck with me.

Life is risky. That’s kind of what makes it exciting.

And you can maybe get away without taking any knocks – maybe you can leave a lovely corpse in your coffin that doesn’t have any scars – but the only way to do that is to live a small life.

It’s to live your life wrapped up in cotton wool, not taking any gambles, any chances. Not risking anything.

But that is smaller than your life would naturally be, and it’s smaller than the life you should be living.

We’re not here to create beautiful corpses.

We’re here to live bold and beautiful lives – to create epic stories and take ourselves on wonderful adventures. Start businesses, fall in love, grow empires, eat risky foods from street-side vendors in Asia.

And we’re here to break bones, break hearts, go bankrupt three times and then leave an ugly corpse with the life completely squeezed out of it.

Agreed ?

This is what you are here to do.

So go out and break something.

You’ll thank me for it.

Go for it.