Articles - Page 20 of 36

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

Celebrity suicides tell us a lot.

Life is hard for many of us.

Irrespective of fame, fortune, and everything else, many of us struggle to make it through our days.

When you get inside people’s heads it’s shocking to learn how many of us are hurting deep down.

Don’t Wanna Be Alive

Famously, in his song about suicide prevention, 1800-273-8255, Logic sang:

I’ve been on the low
I been taking my time
I feel like I’m out of my mind
It feel like my life ain’t mine
(Who can relate? Woo!)

A lot of us can. His song made him famous because a lot of us can relate, and when celebrities suicide a lot more of us call the hotline.

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Pence. Trump. Water Bottle. Covert Influence

A buddy sent me this video of Trump and Pence.

He’s a liberal, and I despise politics, so hopefully I’ll avoid getting myself in trouble this time talking about Trump’s influence…

Sitting at a FEMA event, after Trump takes his water bottle off the table and puts it on the floor, Pence immediately follows.

The video went viral because the behavior seems strange, but at a deeper level there’s something very powerful to learn from it.

Most People Are Blind To Influence

In some ways I made a bad decision to write the book on how Trump was winning, but I also wanted to talk about a crucial topic that few others observed.

Just like nearly every single economist who failed to predict the most devastating recession in modern history, nearly every commentator who watched Trump win failed to see how.

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NLP’s Mind Reading Influence

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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How Learning To Shoot Like John Wick Transformed These People

Some time ago I decided that if our society wasn’t going to control guns, then I would learn some gun control of my own.

Watching a video of Keanu Reeves shooting 3 gun for his role in John Wick, I thought to myself, that’s exactly how I want to shoot.

So I sought out trainers—two Navy SEALs—and every month or so I run around the desert training to shoot like John Wick.

Now, I won’t pretend that I’m doing this because I ever expect to be in a gunfight—I do this because for nearly two decades I’ve sought out transformational experiences through learning fun skills.

If you think shooting is bad or immoral or wrong for whatever reason, I understand this stuff isn’t for everyone, even if every night we “entertain” ourselves with murder, and playing with toy guns is for most of our kids…

But if you think it would be an awesome experience learning to shoot with two SEALs over your shoulder, then I bet you’ll think it’s even more awesome what I did next.

I Invited My Friends

I’ve become somewhat open about the stuff I do.

For a decade I was too embarrassed to admit that, um… I’m into Eckhart Tolle, but these days I pretty much just share how it is.

That said, I still felt I was going a bit too far when I wrote about training Remote Viewing with one of the greatest men I know, psychic spy, Joe McMoneagle, but I was surprised by the response—

I want to do that. Let’s plan a group trip!

And that got me thinking…

What would it be like if I put together a group to have some of the experiences that have been so transforming for me?

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11 Ways Being A Wall Street VP Is Like Working At McDonald’s

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.”

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One Change To Help Stop Active Shooters

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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Where’s That North Korea Worry Now?

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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Do Principles Really Drive Ray Dalio’s Success?

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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Watch Tony Hawk Fail

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!

Report: Living Dalio’s Principles

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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Why We Resist Change And How To Change It

All the time people tell me how hard it can be to change.

It’s so true. Many of us strongly resist changing our brand of shampoo or toothpaste, let alone anything that truly matters in life.

Change can be hard to make because near everything we do is habitual, but there are also ways that we make change harder on ourselves… which are easy to change.

Ironically, in the world of personal development, one way is to stop making change so personal.

Who Is The “I?”

“I’m” just not any good at this?

“I’ve” always been this way.

“I” know that I need to change, and “I’m” really trying hard…

While it’s of course natural for us to conduct ourselves in first person, whenever we use a derivative of the pronoun “I,” we’ve made it personal, and this can make it infinitely harder to change.

Instead of simply changing a behavior—such as getting angry—or an attribute—such as our hair color—now it’s about us and how we’re a flawed little “I.”

And because that “I” inside each of us hates to be diminished, let alone told it is inferior in some way, when confronted it’s far more likely to get insecure, resistant, defensive than it is to embrace even its own desire to change.

See Yourself As A Doer

If you grab a kid by the collar and give them a “good talking to,” scolding them for their bad performance and rattling off all the ways that they can improve, how would you expect them to respond?

Most kids would get upset, or defensive, and even that subservient kid who dutifully does what you say will likely resent you over time.

A smart parent knows that approach fails, yet we often fail to see that it also fails with ourselves.

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For Sale: Banker Life Saving Program

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.

Why Bankers Lives Suck. And What To Do About It.

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.

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Two Ways To Blow Out That Fear

In last week’s newsletter I opened the door on fear, and this week I want to offer some ways to close it!

There I wrote about how fear holds us all back, and those people who get themselves to take action in the face of their fear.

While we all recognize the power in this, the real question is, how do we get ourselves and others beyond our fear?

The Simple Answer

We all already know how to get beyond our fears…

Simple. Do the thing that we feared, and we no longer fear it.

Once we climb those stairs and jump from the proverbial diving board, we’ll no longer be afraid to jump.

Most fears we diminish or extinguish this simple way.

Think about the timid salesperson from last week. By asking for the order over and over again, they get beyond the fear of asking for the order.

We all know this, which is why the simple answer mostly fails.

Our Fears Keep Us Stuck

Because we know that we can easily squash most fears just by taking action…

Rather than just doing it, we tend to avoid those things that we fear 🙂

Think of it this way.

We typically “try” to get ourselves and others beyond fear by saying stuff like You’ve just gotta do it.

If we can just lead with more conviction. Ask for that date. Or start to build momentum on that project, we know that we’ll move beyond our fear…

Yet, we already knew that!

And unless we’re suddenly more capable in taking that action, we’re more likely to avoid that thing we fear. (e.g. pretending we don’t really want it)

Just Get Motivated!

When the fear is high and we find ourselves or others stuck in taking action, we often reach for more motivation.

That’s like massaging a broken leg hoping to heal it. It doesn’t matter how strong your motivation is when fear is walking the talk.

Perhaps the best example is a fear that, despite our strongest biological motivations, has held every single one of us back.

Like a dog humping a leg we hardly need much motivation to pursue love and sex, yet who amongst us hasn’t been held back by fear?

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Timid Salespeople Have Skinny Kids

In all arenas of success there’s a small number of things that make the most difference.

If you get these things right, you massively move the needle in your favor, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Doing these “hard things” often requires overcoming debilitating fears, and training yourself to do things other people won’t do.

Going After It

There’s a young guy in London who I’ve been giving my time to.

He’s very good at getting me to help him, and other leaders too.

Coming out of college he earned himself a top job, and already in his business of wealth management he is producing way beyond those years ahead of him.

I suspect that’s because he influences others the way that he influenced me…

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The Time Of Our Lives

We all have those experiences in life that fundamentally change us, and I just had one of them.

In the last few weeks I’ve had the most magical adventure.

Even after being home for a week I’m still getting back into it, and I’m also trying my best not to…

It’s so easy for us to put our heads down and keep ploughing forward, when I’m holding onto where I’ve been.

Playing In Time

I’m very lucky that magical adventures are the norm for me, but this was special.

After a few days skiing in Vail I drove the car I keep out west to Las Vegas to meet up with my brother, which was an adventure in itself, but was only the beginning for us.

Because he lives in Australia, it’s been a decade since we’ve spent real time together, and just hanging out was special.

But what made our time even more special was what he had come here to do…

Leaving Las Vegas we headed to Virginia to train the mind.

Put Away Your Watch

Last time I was in Virginia I was training Remote Viewing. This time we were training altered states of consciousness and the out of body experience.

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Relive Your Best Times

Constantly I am reminded of the power of the mind and the importance of putting your mind in the “best” place.

It’s not just about getting your mind out of a “bad” place, but to make your life better and better.

Much, if not all, of what we think and feel is habitual, so the more we choose to focus on good things, the more habitually our mind elevates.

While we all know this intuitively, it helps to have reminders.

Back To The Future

Last week I was back in Vail, Colorado.

After living in the mountains for a few ski seasons I hadn’t been back for a couple of years, and last week I got to relive some of my best memories from Vail.

Some of them of course relate to skiing, but most of my great memories come back to the joy of living in the mountains. Waking up to the snow. Looking out on the mountain. Wandering through town. Eating at my favorite restaurants. Hanging with the locals. My time with friends who came to stay with me.

Just being in Vail these memories came flooding back to me and I realized that I want to keep reliving them.

A Daily Practice

If you’ve read my Limitless Mind book or these newsletters you’ve seen me talk about running mental movies.

In re-watching mental movies of the greatest times in your life, not only do you get a chance to keep reliving these times, but you can also use these movies to “pull” state.

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Another Mass Shooting. What Can You Do About It?

We’re all deeply impacted each time another person goes on a rampage hurting innocent people.

Although few of us are directly affected, we all feel for the victims and their families, and we want answers on how this could have happened again, and again.

Yet it does. And just like the wars, injustices, and human suffering that have forever plagued our species, awful things will keep happening.

The only choice each of us has is what we do about it.

Protect Yourself From Terror

I received many emails on this article I wrote after the terrorist ran down innocent people in a U-Haul close to my home.

That article is about choosing your thoughts to protect your mind from terror, and last week I got more questions about it.

A client said, “But I can’t just tune out these awful things, this really happened.” He’s right, and that’s not my point.

My point is that our brains are addicted to emotional spikes and we’re naturally drawn into such events, which means that we can find ourselves stuck fixating on the worst of the world.

But just because it happens in the world doesn’t mean that we have to turn it into our world.

There’s a fine line between being informed and caring for others, relative to getting our minds sucked into every detail of these situations and making them our “reality.”

What’s The Reality?

As I write this I’m looking into an apartment across the way seeing two little girls sitting around the kitchen table playing a game with their Dad.

Certainly, Dad knows about it, but his reality is that he’s sitting with his little girls. He could make that killer’s reality his, he could even put it on the TV for his little girls to see, or he can keep his mind on what is real in his life, and what he wants it to be.

Tragedies, natural or otherwise, orient our social consciousness towards one horrible event, stealing our attention away from the totality of our world.

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Feeling Undervalued? Do This

In life and in our work, it can be easy to lose our sense of value.

We look around at other people who are seemingly achieving more than us, “worth more,” or otherwise more valued, and we can get down on ourselves.

But when we look at situations differently, take control of our thoughts, and begin taking new actions, we quickly turn around those old ways of being.

This begins with seeing that only you are in control of how you value yourself, and influencing others to value you the same!

Common Problem In Our Careers

A world of hard-charging ambitious people, every year many people find themselves feeling undervalued.

Lots of things in our jobs, whether it be compensation, promotion, recognition, or otherwises can leave you feeling undervalued.

It’s not to say that it’s “never enough,” but that for the amount you put in, you deserve to expect a lot in return!

I had a meeting last week with a Wall Street investor who felt let down on his comp.

And to be honest, he was right, the head of his firm did let him down.

It’s not because he didn’t pay him what he “deserved” but because of the way he had handled the conversation.

Rather than sit with him and explain why the firm’s performance didn’t enable him to pay his team as he would have liked, the boss got angry and defensive.

That left him feeling undervalued, and in the wrong state of mind to drive more value in his career.

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I Was Wrong. This Isn’t Nike

I didn’t like the feeling I left from that newsletter last week.

In being so “right,” I was being so wrong.

I was disappointed that the two readers weren’t getting what they want and I failed to take responsibility.

Instead of pointing to the articles that I have put out to be helpful, I failed to see where my approach was letting them down.

Reflecting on this got me thinking radically different.

Dalio Helped

I read Ray Dalio’s book Principles last week, and it helped me dive deeper into some of these things.

His brutal honesty and good hearted intent, the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove, comes across well in his writing, which got me thinking more about mine.

But most of all what I got from Ray was a continuous drumming of the importance of radical truth.

Through this lens I saw in that newsletter I was putting their lack of action onto them, when I first must put it onto me.

I Failed

If someone I know hasn’t taken the right action, then I have failed to do what I can for them.

If people are reading these newsletters for years and still not doing them, then I’m obviously failing to reach the right people or failing to deliver people what they need.

I don’t write because being a self-help expert is cool… but to share ideas that are actually helpful to people, yet I failed to see where I wasn’t helping.

The same is true with the other emailer I wrote about.

If she’s taking the time to write and tell me that my work sucks, then it does for her…

It was wrong of me to make her wrong, when I should be asking what I can do more right.

I’m Not Nike

Instead of learning the lesson and really thinking about what I must do better to serve people, I responded like a Nike slogan…

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