Last weekend was my fake Facebook birthday so I took a trip to celebrate.

Each year I forget my fake birthday until a couple days before I start receiving texts, and then I feel a little guilty.

For obvious reasons I gave a fake ID to Facebook, not knowing that for years to come I’d be stealing fake birthday wishes from the community.

I used to tell people “no, no, it’s only my fake Facebook birthday,” but I saw it robbed them of birthday joy so I learned to just say thank you.

This year I took it a step further and celebrated too 🙂

Fake, Real, Reality…

One of my Level 4 Tools is called the Present Dashboard.

Part of the tool is looking out through your eyes at your life like you’re looking through the windshield of a car.

This helps you be in the driver’s seat of your brain, giving you more choice on what you pay attention to, and how it makes you think and feel.

You can imagine looking out through the windshield at a traffic-filled overcast day, or you can see the sun shining brightly on a road of your dreams.

Your “real” day might seem hard, but looking through your windshield you might choose to experience it more joyfully.

A challenging workout you might see like fun play. A tough meeting you might imagine going smoothly, and choose to brighten up and feel cheery no matter how it goes.

The Present Dashboard teaches your brain the difference between reality and what we make “real.”

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As I go deeper in the mind I find it increasingly hard to talk about.

For instance, writing about remote viewing is odd enough, let alone what it actually implies for our reality.

It’s easy to dismiss what we don’t understand, and just allowing yourself to think there might be something to remote viewing opens the door to how on earth it could be possible. If we are able to access information from the so-called future and pass it back to ourselves today, then what does this say about our reality?

That’s the problem on topics of the mind.

When you open the door, the whole damn tide floods in.

Meditation Is A Gentle Ride

When you get into meditation you learn that our awareness extends beyond the meat and two veg.

With meditation you can easily explore consciousness by getting your feet a little wet, but sometimes you’re forced to dive all the way in.

That’s what happened to Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor when the left hemisphere of her brain blew out and she got flushed through the other door.

I write about her all the time because in her TED Talk she provides a rapid glimpse into what enlightened humans describe as the true nature of reality.

To the left hemisphere of the brain the world is solid and rational, yet to the right it’s an energy soup.

Do We Live In A Simulation?

Elon Musk apparently thinks the chances are 1 in billions that we aren’t in a simulation.

I like where he’s coming from, but I’m not so confident that us humans can even comprehend let alone describe what this reality is.

Like trying to explain to my cat where I’m going for lunch, or even what is outside our home in New York, some things aren’t possible for us animals to understand.

We are barely a rung below the monkeys swinging from the trees, our conscious faculties are built to operate in a linear, time-based reality, and you literally must be out of “that mind” to experience reality differently.

Buddhists. Catholics. Muslims. Jews. Greeks. Egyptians. Indians. Conspiracy. Ancients. Hermetics. Philosophers. Trippers. Transcendentalists. Most lately, Science.

Like the Catholic Heaven and Soul, they all describe some form of reality beyond WYSIWYG.

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At the recent Tony Awards Robert De Niro used his star power to promote Trump.

While he did it by giving a big fuck you to the president, he might as well have recorded a Superbowl commercial for Trump.

De Niro got himself an extra 15 hours of fame, but like so many of us on the left he’s helping buy the guy another four years.

Propaganda Everywhere…

But few people get how it really works.

The most basic ingredient of Trump’s winning campaign was…

ATTENTION

Negative attention is still attention, and what Trump most needed to win.

The TWO BILLION dollars in free promotion that the mostly left-selling media handed Trump got him elected, and even top promoters like De Niro still fail to see it.

While many on the left of course believe that the liberal media is “on their side” and trying to stop Trump, they fail to understand that the media is on their own side.

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All the time we wish we could get more insight into what people are thinking, and here a little knowledge can go a long way.

An example from NLP is how to decode other people’s non-verbal cues.

Think of it this way, right before you say yes or no, you do something with your body. Maybe your face scrunches on no, or on yes you’re already nodding.

With a little bit of practice, you can easily read minds by reading these cues!

Become Fake Psychic

You don’t need to be an expert at this like the FBI’s Joe Navarro who can interpret a micro gesture on someone’s cheek, but it can be easy and helpful to know if people are agreeing with what you’re saying.

Imagine sitting in a negotiation, and before they say anything, just by reading their cues, you know whether they’re in agreement with you.

Top negotiators I know do this unconsciously in “reading the room,” and others do this more deliberately.

This is how some of the fake psychics work.

It’s an art and a science called cold reading where you do something like…

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I borrowed that headline from a Bloomberg article on an ex-Barclays trader who is on trial for rigging the Euribor market.

Supposedly as a strategy to downplay his seniority and hence his guilt, he compared being a vice president at Barclays as “equivalent to the guy that serves you in McDonald’s.”

By making comments like, “As ridiculous as it sounds, a coffee boy at Barclays gets paid 400,000 pounds a year” he proved his wanker banker status, but he was also speaking some truth.

“Vice president is not what everyone thinks it is,” he stated. “It is junior.”

Of Course He’s Right

I once had to give testimony for a transaction that got messed up amongst the two founders.

Sitting in a windowless office of the opposing law firm, I remember being grilled for some 15 minutes on what being a vice president at Goldman Sachs actually means.

The lawyers couldn’t get it into their heads that while there is one Vice President of the United States, that, in fact, there are many, many vice presidents in investment banking.

And while vice president sounds like an elevated title, and indeed it is in the corporate world, everyone on Wall Street knows that, while the vice president title might not be “junior,” it’s often not senior.

Often with layers of bosses above you, it’s the go-between level, a bar that is reasonably low to reach, but one that can be extremely difficult to ascend.

Just Like McDonald’s…

At McDonald’s there are lots of burger flippers and customer service representatives but there are fewer managers, and even fewer owners.

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Stop making them famous.

How?

Stop disclosing their name—Call them busted person X

Stop broadcasting their face—How does it help anyone knowing what they looked like?

Stop telling their stories—Killing innocent people shouldn’t be a six-part mini-series like celebrating the work of Jeffrey Dahmer.

Stop spreading their fear—Terrorists’ terror spreads because we spread it.

Stop glorifying their violence—Our “entertainment” complex is the greatest promoter of violence (TV, movies, games, sports) on the planet because we demand it.

Stop tuning in—There’s a difference between being “informed” about another lunatic vs. rolling around like a pig in their murder like you’re watching CSI.

Fame-Obsessed World

We live in a fame-obsessed world and sick minds will do just about anything to break the Internet.

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Writing this article earlier in the week, I thought I was so insightful highlighting the amount of worry that was wasted on North Korea.

Then, Drudge, with his sirens blaring and massive headline—NKorea Threatens To Cancel Trump Summit—reminded me that we can still find plenty to fear.

At first I thought, crap my article is outdated, but then I realized, actually, it’s even more timely.

We can allow our emotions to be whipped around by things that we can’t control—e.g. the worst people in our world, stock market, nearly everything else—or we can…

Choose Our Thoughts

In nearly 20 years of researching these topics, there’s one crucial lesson that most stands out—

We are what we think.

Literally, what we think about is our ENTIRE experience of reality.

If you’re a football fan and spend all day every day immersed in football, this becomes your life.

If you’re an investor who spends every waking moment thinking about opportunities in the market, the market is your reality.

And if you’re tuned into fearful news all day every day, your life is full of fear and worry.

Guard Your Mind

Around the time ding dong North Korea was doing his little public display of disaffection, my client told me about a weekend retreat he attended with a group of business leaders.

Over dinners and lunches they spent hours talking about the situation, indulging the fears, debating what to do…

None of them could do anything.

They knew nothing beyond what the media had told them. They aren’t in any way involved in military or government or any group that solves such problems, yet they spent their weekend infecting each other with fear.

While it’s important to be informed of some of what’s happening in our world, it’s equally important to be informed about how our world is using us and our attention.

It’s not just that we live in a world of propaganda—which is so dominant that presidential elections are, literally, won off of it—but because, especially in this case, it’s obvious there is plenty of theatrics going on.

Over time the so-called experts and propagandists gave us many intelligent-sounding explanations of the threat from North Korea, but I’m yet to hear an intelligent explanation of how it was resolved!

How did two mortal enemies who’ve been spewing hatred and K-pop across the DMZ for decades get to this WWE gesture?

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After reading our report on Living Dalio’s Principles a client put a good question to me.

Is it possible that we give too much credit to Dalio’s principles because we’re biased by his success?

Yes, absolutely.

It’s entirely possible that while Ray asserts principles as the cause of his success, the radical truth is that we have no way of actually measuring their causality.

How could we?

Surely there are people out there with great principles and terrible results and those with great results and terrible principles. Heck, for all we know there is an alternate reality in which Ray Dalio is even more successful without having even thought about a principle.

That’s the hard thing about “modeling” success. We can’t know what drives it.

Returns on Luck

Some people tell stories of how they got lucky and won the lottery, whereas others say they deliberately picked the winning numbers.

A way you might assess their skill is to have them replicate their success—which Dalio has done for years—but even then you might still struggle to distinguish skill from luck.

All success is similarly squishy to model.

Is Tom Brady’s success the product of his rigorous TB12 Method, or would he have crushed it anyways? Who knows?

What about Michael Schumacher? For decades he raced at 300 km/h, yet he was permanently disabled in a skiing accident. Was he under-skilled or out of luck?

Did Mark Cuban get lucky because he sold Yahoo! stock at the right time? Is Zuckerberg a genius or was he lucky he wasn’t born in 1885? Was Myspace just less lucky?

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I saw James Altucher write about interviewing Tony Hawk so I went and watched this video.

It’s only a couple of minutes long, and it’s worth watching to see this guy just fails and fails and fails until he pulls it off!

Since I first read the pdf version of Principles, I’ve been fascinated by the way Ray Dalio thinks.

It’s true that his billionaire success is what drew me into his thinking, but it’s the rigor of Ray’s ideas that really hooked me.

Although I spend my life exploring ideas, I’m intensely practical. I’m not interested in philosophy or kicking around ideas for the sake of it, but in ideas that you can use.

And that’s what I see from Ray.

He’s deep, deep, deep on the topics he knows, but ultimately he’s focused on identifying the best ideas so he can rigorously put them to work.

More Than Principles

While I find Ray’s principles incredibly fascinating, what I most enjoyed in reading Ray’s recently released book, Principles, was his story at the front.

Some time ago I remember seeing Ray quoted about failure, and thought to myself, With all of his success, what could he possibly know about failure?

It turns out, quite a lot.

In fact, the way Ray tells his story, it was failure that led him to develop his principles-based approach to begin with, so he could avoid making the same mistakes.

Writing with great humility, throughout the book Ray calls himself things like a “dumb shit,” and suggests that the success he’s created has less to do with him, and more to do with his principles.

While there’s certainly some modesty in that, perhaps the greatest learning from Ray’s book is seeing that it’s not so much his principles that have driven his success, but the discipline and focus that Ray dedicates to living this way.

How Do You Live It?

In reading Ray’s book I began to think more deeply about how, specifically, we each might develop and use our own principles.

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This article I wrote last week on why bankers lives suck really struck a chord.

Speaking to many people on Wall Street it’s clear that there is a serious problem that banks are seemingly looking to solve.

This one article drove more traffic to our websites than anything else I have written this year.

If I were an internet marketer I would exploit it by writing about the same topic over and over again, but that’s lame to me and I won’t be writing about this again.

That said, I would be a terrible advocate for the amazing stuff we build at BLK if I didn’t say that we would love to partner with a big bank in building this program.

It’s sad to say it this way, and this isn’t some emotional marketing, but…

In the last handful of years this program we have built for transforming how you win in banking may have, literally, saved analyst lives.

I know that’s heavy, but no kid should die from a fucking desk job, and it’s up to us adults to solve the problem.

And there’s more…

On the lighter side, the bank that we build this program with will find all of their employees will get happier, better, more loyal, and in every way love their job and their life more.

AND, YOU WILL ALL MAKE TONS MORE MONEY.

If you want to save banker lives and win more, please reach out, we’d love to chat.

Investment banking is hardly known for its cushy lifestyle, but every now and then we’re reminded of just how bad it can be.

Earlier this week a buddy forwarded me this email message from a staffer at Moelis.

I don’t know whether it’s legit or not (I’m told it is), but irrespective it’s hardly a unique message in investment banking.

Long story short, the staffer (who is responsible for assigning bankers to projects) sent an email to his team after walking the floor at 2am, and noticing how many seats were empty.

As he supposedly wrote—

Given that new staffings continue to flow in and you are all very near capacity, the only way I can think of to differentiate among you is to see who is in the office in the wee hours of the morning.

Ouch!

Can you imagine that?

You’re working your ass off 7 days a week in a grueling job, and now you’re being judged on how busy you are based on whether you’re in the office at 2am?

I can. I lived that life, and I also did a year in the job of staffer.

While it’s easy to beat up on the staffer for his lack of managerial skills (and judgement in sending that email), I can attest that it was perhaps the hardest job I did in banking, where you’re constantly pulled and pushed in every direction.

It’s demand and supply, baby!

As the staffer, you have a limited pool of resources to assign to projects, and unlimited mouths to feed.

In my experience it was the rare senior banker who would step back and really think carefully about the work that needed to be done (blast from the past shout out to George Lee, Mike Wishart and Kevin Quinn), and whether it was worth having someone sit up all night and do it.

Generally, that’s not because senior bankers perceive working like a medical resident as a rite of passage, or they don’t care about their team, but because they also have mouths to feed.

Clients. Bosses. Shareholders. Enormous, enormous pressure to perform.

As Lloyd Blankfein once put it, the culture of insecurity runs all the way to the top in banking, and while senior bankers might want to help their juniors have a more balanced life, most of all they want to deliver their best for their clients.

The 100 Hour Workweek

Fact is, the 100 workweek is part of the game.

As the last credit crisis dangerously reminded us, banks are highly cyclical businesses that boom and bust with the cycle.

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