Articles - Geoff Blades

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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Keep pretending

Hi there,

How you doin?

I’m wondering how you’re feeling about all this going on in the world?

Do you think that we’re headed into a tougher time?

Or will we perhaps keep moving in at least a good-enough-ish direction?

What I’m really curious to hear about if you want to share is how you’re thinking about your path forward from here?

From where?

Hmm, how would you describe where we’re at?

I’d say that we’re still mostly in the denial phase.

Or perhaps we’re somewhere between denial and more contagious panic?

Where people are starting to recognize that the things we’ve been doing to prop up the fake economy have us teetering on stilts.

We all get that what fake goes up must fake come down so plenty of people are expecting the next stilt to drop.

I’d say that’s being negative when you’re better off to keep pretending that our economy and society are on the up and up.

SO much I want for this that I happily keep deluding myself into seeing it.

But how can one not see that the things we’re doing are dragging us all down divisively tearing us apart?

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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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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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“If we took a holiday”

Everybody spread the word

We’re gonna have a celebration

All across the world

In every nation

It’s time for the good times

Forget about the bad times, oh yeah

One day to come together to release the pressure

We need a holiday

If we took a holiday

Took some time to celebrate (come on let’s celebrate)

Just one day out of life (holiday)

It would be

It would be so nice

You can turn this world around

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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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Maverick’s Inbound

“Thank Full”

I wish I had this human tech decades ago.

It would have made my life experience so much better.

In so many ways I’ve lived such a blessed life, and we all have so much to be thankful for, but there were plenty of years where it didn’t feel enough this way.

All those years I was ferreting away thinking that this or that needed to change so you can feel how you want.

Even studying the best teachings was never enough until I built the tools for actually getting yourself thinking and feeling your best, at will.

Irrespective of conditions

A teaching that greatly impacted me is the notion of happiness irrespective of conditions.

Back when I began reading about it some 20+ years ago when I started going deep into the mind, it resonated powerfully.

Because before this my life was about “getting there.”

What I now refer to as the Getting There Program, that’s the thing in our brains that has you believing this FALSE cause and effect—

You must first get what you want to feel how you want.

There are good reasons why the brain is set up this way—namely, survival—and also why our society is set up this way—namely, consumption and control—but this keeps many people thinking and feeling worse than they could.

And it’s also simple, factual, and immediately provable that no matter what is happening or not happening in your life, you choose how you think and feel.

While this fact is too much of a stretch for many people, it’s also what Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl concluded in the worst hell of Nazi concentration camps in World War II.

As he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

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Why this matters so much

Have you wondered why someone with so little can be so happy?

While someone with so much can feel so poor?

Why one person can be content with what they have?

While many others achieving more, more, more will never be fulfilled?

What’s going on here?

Two lives

It might be obvious to you.

But it wasn’t always obvious to me and it’s not always obvious in our society and in our own brain.

The life that you see outside of you is ENTIRELY different to what you experience inside.

While you expect that a “better” life out there causes you to feel better inside, ultimately they are independent variables.

Hence why someone can have a heavenly life but be living an internal hell, and vice-versa.

They might as well be two different lives.

It’s like dreaming at night.

What is happening outside of your sleeping body is ENTIRELY different to what you are experiencing inside.

In our school of transformation, RST, we distinguish these as your External Life and your Internal Life Experience.

So even if a person has a fabulous External Life, like Kanye West they can have a terribly sad Internal Life Experience.

This is the cause of ALL problems in our world.

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