Month: January 2018

How many of us are still sticking with our New Year’s resolutions?

How many of us are fighting through the dip?

How many of us are keeping our promises?

If you have fallen short, what are you going to do now?

One month down, eleven more to go.

Hurry.

So what?

Authority is an illusion.

You don’t need a bigger badge to care.

If it is going to help someone take a giant leap or do something they never thought they could do, then why not?

One great misconception about authority: We think that more authority means more control, that you can make more decisions. In reality, most people in positions of authority spend their time making decisions that are popular rather than important.

[That SOP that doesn’t make any sense to anyone in the office, why are you still doing it? Did someone create this procedure to make things better or to keep the boss happy?]

It is wrongly called entitlement, cupidity and materialism. We often clothe it in the equal distribution of resources. But really, fairness is about receiving a turn. An opportunity to have a seat at the table, a chance to show our best work.

One of the greatest economic experiments over the last century is the industrial economy. It created an unprecedented increase in the standard of living for the masses.

Except, since the 1960’s, we have seen the middle class fading. The rich are getting richer while the poor remain the same. Yesterday’s middle class wage doesn’t buy the same life today.

The eight richest people in the world (all men) have as much money as the poorest half of the world. The richest one percent captured 82 percent of wealth created last year while poorest half of the world got nothing.

What does this mean? What does this money buy?

Our souls.

Riddled in debt, this rising generation is looking for answers to be free of this trap. The choice: Take a higher paying job that doesn’t align with your values to live a better standard of living or scrape by doing what you love.

This changes things. The game, the promise that was set before us doesn’t work anymore. But once you see the system is fixed, collectively we can work together to fix it.

(Subsequently, I think this is why Millennials are hoping the Crypto market will work more than anything–a chance to start over.)

It’s easy to charge the credit card, rather than wait to make a purchase with cash. It’s easy to binge watch another show on Netflix. It’s easy to play on our phones, tablets, computers to surf the web and to lose ourselves in click bait. It’s easy to incessantly check our social media feeds.

Of course, it’s easy–that’s why everyone does it.

What’s difficult is to be the one who cares more or to help someone who needs to be helped. What’s difficult is to make something that needs to be made and to ship your work in the world. What’s difficult is committing to a practice like blogging every day or going to the gym.

Habits are not accidental. If you are not intentional, habits will form themselves.

What important work was put off today because you were too busy checking your email?

Day trading is a distraction.

Instead of doing important work–the kind of work that brings meaning to our lives and the change we seek to make in the world–we fill it with incessantly checking prices. We spend our time talking about walls, whales and predicting the unpredictable.

Instead of HODLing to something that we have no control over, let’s create, initiate, do the work we are most afraid of that is going to get your lambo on the moon.

Except, it wont be a lambo on the moon, it will be something better because it’s real.

Don’t be a leaf in the wind blowing whichever direction the wind takes you–this is another form of hiding.

Important decisions can’t be made trying to please everyone, just someone.

What if there is no such thing as a dumb person? Or someone who is lazy? Or entitled?

Labels first had to be imagined.

They are not real which means they can be changed.

We don’t have to fit everyone into the mental boxes we have set up.

There are two tactics:

The first is to alter, modify, replace how we see the world.

And the second is used as a form of hiding.

The former can be a tool to help us get unstuck, get out of our own way, make a situation better, help us combat Resistance. We can use it to help us push through the dip and to level up–to do something we have never done before.

The latter is a tactic we use to cement ourselves in the positions we take–our biases and prejudices. We change the subject when we can’t argue on fact or evidence. We ridicule and exclude others as a form of hiding. We don’t want the shame of being wrong. (People like us do things like this.) Worse, we don’t want to change our minds because that is not how we were brought up to see the world.

Narratives are all invented. If we picked up one that isn’t working, we can put it down and try another.

Schooling is good at dumbing down the masses, making us compliant cogs in a machine, teaching us to color in the lines and to consume. All the while, trapping a whole generation in insane debt.

Education, on the other hand, stems from curiosity and wonder. Real education is about leading and leaping, taking chances, testing, measuring, receiving feedback and changing our minds, learning how to see, creating tension, understanding that something might not work, shipping, adding value to others so that we can add value to ourselves….

You may be surprised to discover that students know less after four years of college. (The more elite the school, the worse it gets.) The bottom line is education doesn’t take place in the classroom. School is a lousy substitute for what life can teach us.

Life becomes childish when we let it fall into a routine.

Not the kind of childish behavior of wonder and amazement but of obedience, compliance and banal.

We have agency, we have a choice whether we accept it or not.