Articles - Geoff Blades

Happy stupidly unrealistic new year!

“If I’ve learned anything from you it’s that New Year’s Resolutions are stupid!” my good mate Terry wrote me.

I agree with me 🙂 they can be stupid and also can be stupidly powerful when you’re setting “real” goals.

The difference comes back to this word “Resolution” and your level of resolve.

80% of Resolutions are quit by February 15 when you achieve everything with limitless resolve.

So let them make flakey Resolutions while you live limitless goals.

Limitless goals

If you are certain that you will achieve your goal then it’s never a goal.

That’s where many people are stuck in life avoiding any fear of failure never stretching for any goals.

Goals don’t have to be of the BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) variety but it is a lot more fun this way!

It’s good to be realistic about what’s possible and also good to ask yourself just how good can it get?

Like Jeff Bezos in 1994 watching the internet growing at 2,300% a year he wasn’t certain where it was headed but was convinced to make a bold bet.

Certainly it would have been a stretch goal just to get Amazon started and build a dominant online bookstore but Jeff Bezos had his sights set on a grander vision.

Grander vision

Having a grander vision is different to setting goals.

Because at the level of vision like Martin Luther King Jr. having a dream you’re never realistic in how you achieve your vision.

At the level of vision you open your mind to just what might be possible if you are willing to back your dream with limitless resolve.

Like Elon Musk on Christmas Eve 2008 with Tesla and SpaceX on the brink of bankruptcy with your goals lighting up your vision you always find a way to drive through.

All the time Elon Musk talks about how he wasn’t just fighting to keep his babies alive but for bringing to life his grander vision for our sustainable future as a multi-planetary species.

Your vision?

What is your vision for 2025 and for your life?

Right now how do you feel about where you’re at and what is possible for you?

Do you have a grand vision or BHAG or whatever you might call it for what you’re looking to achieve?

Have you defined goals that build to your vision?

Or have you been more focused on realistic goals?

Real good

Having any goals whatsoever already puts you waaaaay ahead of many people.

And even the most basic and realistic goals can achieve incredible things for you.

It’s like my client Marty who left his career to bet on himself and build his own firm.

He’s a realistic fellow, very diligent, excellent dotter of the i’s and crosser of the t’s, a precise, real detail-oriented CEO, which has enabled him to build a top notch company.

So when he spoke with me about his goals for 2025 it was no surprise that he had the numbers all laid out for what the business could realistically achieve.

“Draw a line”

I love precision.

So many things in life God is in the details as I prefer to say.

On the brain and mind control for instance you want to get down to every single line of code.

But when it comes to unleashing all of your potential and unlocking all that is possible you never want to start precise.

“Like Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream start with your Grandest Vision,” I said to Marty.

“And now draw a line across your page and beneath your realistic goals lay out your stretch goals,” I suggested to him.

Stretch

The basic way of looking at goals is that they are for what you want to achieve.

But goals are for who you want to forge yourself to be.

If a goal doesn’t stretch you to become a better version of you then, really, honestly, who cares, how lame!?

And I suggested to Marty that his stretch goals should reflect just how far he and his firm can stretch to grow and achieve in 2025.

He liked this and responded with lots of ways that he can stretch his potential beyond his realistic goals.

So I stretched again.

Unrealistic goals

One thing that I’ve had to figure out is who I choose to be in our world.

Because over decades of doing this work I’ve struggled to fit into any of the obvious moulds.

Like nearly everything that you see in this world of personal development is so basic and banal when to me the point of all this stretching is setting your sights stupidly unrealistic.

I’d never needed any of that basic stuff to leap from working at KFC to Goldman Sachs but what I really needed to know was how do you actually achieve what you truly want in life?

Even if it’s not possible, certainly if it’s not realistic, how do you unleash all of your potential and unlock all that is possible for you?

So I suggested to Marty that he draw another line across his page and lay out his unrealistic goals for 2025.

Stupidly unrealistic

One of the greatest things about doing video calls is that you can see people’s reactions.

Marty loved the idea of setting unrealistic goals but you could see the confused look on his face how this fits with his dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s.

Just talking through this for a few minutes you could see him getting excited and his brain starting to see new ways that unrealistic things could be realistic, and even possible.

“Exactly, I said to him,” he dislikes Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos so I reminded him of what was achieved because Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed.

Then I suggested that so long as he’s going this far he draw another line across his page and lay out his stupidly unrealistic goals for 2025.

Happy new year

The most wonderful thing about the new year is that you can start fresh.

Those things that you used to think or do can be different this new year including what you believe is possible for you.

I’m not here suggesting that stupidly unrealistic goals are right for you or are possible in every way.

But I’d say that relative to all those people who’ll soon be quitting their Resolutions you’re way better to back your stupidly unrealistic goals with limitless resolve.

Who knows, you may even achieve your happy stupidly unrealistic new year!

“You’ve got this”

I don’t know what “this” is for you.

But I do know that you’ve got this.

You know how I know?

Because you’ve gotta know that you’ve got this.

You’ve just gotta know.

Gotta know

You’ve just gotta know.

I don’t know how to say it any more directly than you’ve just gotta know that you’ve got this.

Whatever it is that you’re focused on doing.

Whatever it is that you’re looking to achieve.

Whoever it is that you’re dreaming to be.

You’ve just gotta know you are this.

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Take your shot

He missed.

One shot to make history and he missed his shot.

Now in all fairness he didn’t entirely miss as the supersonic 556 round tore through the top of president Trump’s ear and he’ll still go down in history as a terrible murderer.

But all that training and planning and borrowing Dad’s gun and buying the ladder and ammo and walking to the rally and taking his range finder through security and standing around measuring the shot and oh so cunningly outwitting the secret service and climbing up on the roof and crawling across in broad daylight rifle swinging around for everyone to see, all that to miss his shot.

As they say you miss 100% of the shots that you never take and you also miss plenty that you do.

Trump misses

Even Trump has had many misses, this perhaps his gravest.

In business. In life. In his influence. In losing the last election.

But one thing that you always see from this man is he gets back up and takes his shot over and over again.

Some missed shots you never stand back up like the terrible shooter knew the snipers wouldn’t miss.

Yet outside of worst cases nearly always you have the chance to stand again.

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Back yourself in

Hold onto your hat!

We’re already on a wild ride, aren’t we?

How are you doing with all these things going on in the world?

None of us can know where it’s headed but you do know one thing.

The world keeps moving forward and so must you.

You do this best when you back yourself in.

Back yourself

People spend their lives backing others but how many of us are backing ourselves?

It’s like all those people who spend hours a day and decades of their precious life backing a sports and political team but never back themselves in anything.

At the end of our lives we all know the cliche that you regret the things that you never did and you never need wait till the end to begin regretting.

That’s like so many of my friends who have blindly backed president Biden now trying to figure out who exactly they’re backing.

Biden has played an A+ game outwitting them all by backing himself in.

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Happy new best year ever

Hello there,

How are you doing?

I hope that you are doing as good as you can be.

Of course this hasn’t been the best of years in plenty of ways but I hope that this has been the best year it can be for you!?

At the start of this year I wrote about making this your best year ever and I can happily share with you that this has been the best year ever for me 🙂

It’s unfortunately been my second worst year on mission for humanity looking out at this world I love so much that [fill in your best description of what is going on!]

Jacking my back and living in quite some pain with limited mobility for the first half of this year wasn’t the best either.

Yet like from a caterpillar the chrysalis creates something beautifully new the worse can also bring out your best too.

No matter what’s going on, running your own brain you can make the best of every day, every year, if you choose.

Happy new best year ever

One and only

I cracked the code.

It was by far the most important evolution of my life.

But cracking the secret code to how you live your best life isn’t enough.

Just like any type of achieving, knowing the solution is as useless as knowing how to lose weight.

You must be living it.

Best life?

What would you say creates your best life?

Would you say that you are living your best life now?

I don’t necessarily mean right now, although as you keep reading you’ll see this is exactly what I mean, but for now more generally, would you say that you are living the life that you truly want?

Many people I know are because we are all into these topics we’re all doing our best every day for living our best lives.

But, I also know that’s not the norm in our society.

Especially now many people feel stuck in their jobs or businesses or lives or marriages or financial situation or addictions or habits or lack or media or unhappiness or just about every other thing that can trap you in life.

And you know what they all come back to?

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Why he is one of the best presidents

Right at the start of the interview she goes after him.

No pleasantries, her opening question is an attack.

Without hesitation she’s going for the wound.

And it’s not even politics.

This is business.

It’s all good, he’s a master at this.

“Stock lagging”

“When you look at the strategy set by Goldman Sachs,” the Bloomberg reporter opens this interview, “Help us understand Goldman’s stock has been lagging on a price to book basis from some of its rivals, what are investors not seeing?”

Not nuclear, but aggressive, right?

That’s her opening question to the President of Goldman Sachs, John Waldron.

Right out the gates she’s challenging him to explain their lagging performance.

Now, look what he does with it.

“Well, first of all it’s great to have you in our building, thanks for taking the time,” he begins, “Today was an important day for us, as you said it was our second investor day in our 23 or so years as a public company…”

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Are you “presenting” or compelling?

It was embarrassing.

Like the first time walking into the boxing gym, except I thought I was good at this.

How could I not be good at it?

I’d worked at Goldman Sachs for some eight years at this point.

Hundreds, thousands of meetings I had attended.

Books, decks, presentations, whatever you call it, I’d pulled together hundreds maybe thousands of these too.

We thought we knew exactly what we were doing.

But now this legendary business magnate was schooling us like juniors.

Don’t know

A most wonderful and also most scary concept in life is you don’t know what you don’t know.

For years maybe even your entire life you can be doing something a certain way thinking that you know what you’re doing.

And then one day, maybe when it’s too late to even correct, you learn that what you were doing was terribly wrong, or at least you could have been doing it much better.

It’s never your fault, you can only know what you know.

And unfortunately, like a terrible drunk dancer at a wedding thinking that they’re lighting up the floor, you may never know.

In a worst case there’s nobody to even point it out because they also don’t know what you don’t know.

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“But how do I decide?”

“Stay the course,” I said to her.

“But which one?” she desperately responded.

“Do I stay in my current job or make a move?”

“YES, exactly,” I replied.

“But, which one?” she repeated.

“Yes, you’ve got it now,” laughingly I said.

Which way?

Can you see what I was doing with her?

We were having a little fun playing with the binary answer that she thought she needed.

Like many of us at different points in our lives she felt at a crossroad.

At these seeming forks in the road we’re often pushed to make a binary, “exclusive or” choice of one thing vs. another, aren’t we?

A problem at these junctures is that it can be very hard to decide between this vs. that, can’t it?

That’s what I was playfully leading her brain through making this transition more fun.

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“Playing to win”

You know the quote that 90% of success is just showing up?

A client jokes that among successful people the number is closer to 100% 🙂

As he sees it, most successful people landed a successful job and then just kept showing up.

It’s a reason why it’s hard for him to find leaders.

“How many are TRULY focused on winning?” he asks.

Winning

He’s like this bold Aussie football coach who has been offending the locals.

In Australia, contrary to what people can think is the culture, you just don’t speak this way.

Even in the winningest world of sports you just kind of show up and play your game and see how you do at the end of the day.

Then you be real humble about the other team and how you gave it your best, and so on.

That’s how this coach has gotten offside with the yahoos.

He keeps talking about winning.

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Woke or awake?

Are you awake or asleep?

On the surface it’s a pretty straightforward question, isn’t it?

That’s because by the traditional definition of these words, it is straightforward.

Being asleep you’re unconscious, generally in bed.

Awake you’re consciously aware.

That’s different to the deeper definitions we’re talking about here.

“Awake?”

You may know that there’s a deep rabbit hole here?

In fact, perhaps this is the deepest rabbit hole that you can ever explore.

If you are on this path of evolving yourself and particularly have explored new-age or Eastern or spiritual or deeper esoteric teachings you might be using this word as we do.

Often you hear people on this path use this in a negative, judgmental way.

Because they are accumulating knowledge and are now more awake to how the human being is truly functioning (e.g. automatically), they label themselves in a more flattering way as having woke or being awake.

Others are labelled often pejoratively as being asleep, or called say “Sheeple.”

I suggest that you never want to judge anyone, especially when you know how easy it is to keep falling asleep.

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Raising your Highline

How happy would you say you are?

If you score yourself out of 10, what would you say?

Of course we all know that this thing called “happiness,” or I prefer to label “feeling good” bounces around for each of us each day, week, so on.

But, in general, where would you say you are out of 10?

And by “10,” btw, I mean, that’s your peak.

10 is as good as it can possibly get, it’s the absolute best feeling you’ve ever experienced.

This is your Highline.

Your Highline

The Highline is your peak.

It is the high watermark of sorts for being your absolute happiest.

Contrast, in our system of therapy and transformation, Rapid Sustained Transformation, RST, your Baseline is where you are on average right now, and your Lowline is your darkest pit.

So if you think about every moment of your life so far, looking back, can you identify your Highline?

Maybe it was just one moment?

Where for whatever reason you were feeling at your peak, such as a client who “smells the sunshine.”

Or one day?

Like your wedding day, or some other special day?

Perhaps you are hitting new Highline peaks a lot of the time?

Such as a day I refer to as my Top of the World, which was this one most magical day when I was living in the mountains of Vail, Colorado launching off a peak.

Whatever this moment is, or these moments are, really challenge yourself here to find these times.

So you can relive and raise them.

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Every ever

I stuck this image on my wall and thought I’d share it with you.

It’s a powerful quote from Jeff Bezos that we used in the program on Rocketing To The Top Like Musk and Bezos.

You’ll see what I mean by every ever—

Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures.

Every?

Ever?

Of course you never want to take these things entirely literally.

But there’s most certainly a powerful signal here, isn’t there?

What might this signal mean to you?

Secret is believing, or not

I have little clue how to achieve my Grandest Vision.

By all rational accounts there’s no way it can be done.

Unlikely I can achieve even a fraction of what I’d like to see in our world.

It’s all good.

I never let that belief stop me.

The best you can do is your best to keep bringing your dream to life.

Your dream?

How are you doing on your goals?

I don’t know if you use my System For Doing What You Want and have established your Grandest Vision?

You might know this “Grandest Vision” is the term that I use in my books and some of my programs, such as this on Rocketing To The Top Like Musk and Bezos.

It’s the best way that I’ve come to define your biggest, most lofty, grandest, but still achievable goal for your life that you are constantly moving towards.

It’s like Elon Musk colonizing Mars.

Or Jeff Bezos once setting out to build The Everything Store.

Lofty, for sure, but obviously doable.

How grand are you dreaming?

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Keep dreaming

Best year ever?

Happy new year.

How was it for you?

I hope you finished the year with a bang and are already rocketing into this year.

Is this how you’re feeling?

Of course none of us know what will happen in our world, and perhaps it won’t be that good.

Still, you can have your best year ever.

Best year ever?

What do you say?

How are you currently seeing this year playing out?

If you went deep into this “High Light Real,” I’m curious what it led you to see for last year and this year.

We’ve heard from many people how valuable it was.

And I hope it was valuable for you because I’m REALLY trying to convey that even in these bizarro times, you choose.

Every day of every year miserable media will program the worst of the world and focus attention on what’s wrong.

It’s all good, misery is their business and many people love the madness.

If you allow them to infiltrate and infect your brain, however, you’re likely focused on a worse year.

Or, just as easily as changing the channel, you can focus on your best year ever.

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“High Light Real”

So, how was it?

How was your 2022?

Out of 100, how would you say your year has been?

Of course not everything is perfect in our world and in any of our years, but how would you rate it among your best years?

Whether it’s among your best or not, how would it be to have a method to get the best from your year?

And use it to best set yourself up for next year?

Best movie ever

There’s lots of ways that you can best review your year and best prepare yourself for next year.

Over the years we’ve experimented with many methods, and this is the best that we keep returning to.

Ideally, every day you’re already focused on the details of what you’re doing to keep making things the best they can be.

And here we’re focused on doing something simple, fun, and incredibly effective for looking back on the best of your year.

Now, this isn’t to say that you never reflect on things that didn’t go best.

But if you do, you never want to dwell on that stuff, and ideally you want to see how you solved it, or otherwise powered through.

Because the point here isn’t watching every twist and turn.

You’re showing your brain the best of this year and giving it a map for making 2023 your best too.

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Just trying to say

Many of you loved last week’s article on The Simulation.

I love that you love it.

Because I love this topic more than just about everything.

It’s the most important topic in this world to me.

Where I really started all this work 22+ years ago and where it will dead end.

I want to know all, everything.

And I want to keep sharing.

But

I feel that last week I failed in well enough conveying my most important point.

This isn’t about The Simulation at all—

It’s about you and your best life.

What’s happening in your body and brain and what this means for EVERY single moment of your life.

This is the single most important discovery of my decades of work.

Perhaps to some people it sounds pathetic and a waste of your life to never stop going deeper on this subject.

Yet I perceive that nothing is more important to living your best life than your ‘will and skill’ to choose how you think, feel, take action.

It is the master key to living your best life as many seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years as you can.

Let alone to uplifting all of humanity.

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Musk’s math is misleading but he’s still right

Elon Musk might be the brightest human alive?

Certainly there are people out there who are more book smart.

But who on Earth is capable of dreaming and scheming on his scale and creating it too?

Relative to AI he appears merely human of course, but relative to say the titans who built America I’d say he’s right up there.

He’s a unique thinker with a deep curiosity and formidable intellect.

Still, his math is misleading.

Simulation?

Among Musk’s leading edge thinking is his assertion that we live in a simulation.

Apparently he is so convinced that he’s banned it from further jacuzzi conversation.

Musk rationalizes that there is one in billions of chances that we DO NOT live in a simulation.

Mathematically this means that the probability this reality you are experiencing is “real,” what Musk calls “base reality,” looks something like—

1 / 2,000,000,000 = 0000000001%

Pretty conclusive math, isn’t it?

And for a moment, just think about what this means.

Whereas since birth we’re all taught to take this “real-ity” oh so seriously, Musk sees this more like playing a game.

Still, his math is misleading.

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“Flywheeling” faster and faster

The holidays can feel like crashing through a tape at the end of a marathon.

Especially in these dysfunctional times it’s easy to feel like you’re ready to crash down and pass out.

If you’re feeling that, yearend is the time to cool the jets and recharge.

But if you’re feeling the fire, it’s also your best time to accelerate.

While others are slowing down you can distance yourself and start the new year with incredible velocity.

Especially if the world economy is slowing down.

Speed up your economy.

Economy of motion

A favorite quote I cite all the time is from famed basketball coach, John Wooden—

“Never mistake activity for achievement.”

This is a mistake that so many of us “busy-ness” professionals make all day every day, decade after decade.

Hours a day consuming media.

Frenetically running around doing things.

Having “great meetings.”

Feeling productive.

But with way too little production.

That’s a perfect method for burning out.

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