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Geoff Blades

How Did Trump Win?

Right after the credit bubble burst in 2008, shocked, people scrambled desperately for answers.

Turning to the economists, nearly all of whom failed to predict the deepest recession in decades, they asked, “What will happen next?”

Having seen the obvious writing on the enormous wall of debt shadowing the world, and positioned myself perfectly in a distressed debt investing job, I found it terribly amusing.

If the world’s “smartest” economists couldn’t even see the credit crisis coming, then, how would they have any clue about where we are now headed?

Obama And Trump Won The Same Way

I won’t even turn on the TV or Internet to watch the mostly useless talking heads endlessly debate how “this could have happened.”

Nearly all of them had absolutely no clue before, so, why on earth would they see it any more clearly today?

They won’t. You can already see them blaming Wikileaks, or whatnot.

They will cry in their lattes, but most of them will never get how Trump pulled this off, because they never bothered to ask how Barack Obama did it.

Mesmerized by his nice sounding words, and slow, melodic voice, buying into the meme of the messiah, they simply failed to see they were being influenced.

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How To Admit Your Great Job Isn't Your Dream Job

What’s the difference between a good life and a good job?

It might seem like a silly question. To a lot of people, having a good job is a big part of having a good life. But to the millions of people with good jobs who are still unhappy, the distinction is critically important.

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Trump Vs. Clinton: How Propaganda Becomes Fact

I am often reminded of the difference between how we like to think the world works, and how it really works.

Years ago when we were doing some work for a public pension fund I learned that in some government jobs there’s a standard racket.

Pensions are set off their final year income, so it’s standard to jack up your overtime in your final year before retirement, so you not only earn more that year, but every year for the rest of your life.

To those who do it, it’s just part of the racket, it’s normal. It’s still wrong.

When you hear stuff like that you think, ugh, it just sucks that otherwise ethical people accept that as truth.

What is Truth?

There’s a lot of that in this election.

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How To Deal With Anxiety – And Use It To Your Advantage

Everyone deals with anxiety—to one degree or another.

Some of us squash it down, some of us develop coping strategies, but nonetheless all of us know that gnawing feeling in the pit of our stomachs.  That sense that things could go wrong.

It’s exhausting. It takes away from the quality of your work, and more importantly, the quality of your life. You wake up on days you should be excited with a sense of dread, and it wears at you.

But anxiety doesn’t need to be your foe. In fact, you can use the same mechanisms that cause anxiety to drive you towards what you want. The brain functions that cause anxiety are incredibly powerful, you just have to know how to use them.

I train my clients not on how to cope with anxiety, but on how to use it to get what they want.

It all starts with understanding where anxiety comes from.

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4 Must-Read Books For Anyone Who Wants To Win

One of the fundamental steps to my system for getting what you want is that you must be committed to learning new skills. You can learn skills in a lot of different ways, but you will most commonly develop them by reading.

With this in mind, I’d like to issue a little challenge to those of you working to get what you want in you life:

I’ve put together a very short autumn reading list of books that teach skills anyone can benefit from. Read them all by the end of this autumn, and see what happens.

You can spend your fall watching football, eating pumpkin spice everything, and getting more or less nowhere, or you can challenge yourself to read these books and develop real skills.

If you do complete this reading list, I guarantee you’ll see the benefits, quickly, just in time for bonuses.

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How To Quit Your Job Without Leaving Your Company

Land That Crazy Job

A lot of people are unhappy in their jobs. In fact, 2.8 million Americans quit their jobs every month.

I’ve written extensively about how you should quit your job, and for many people, that advice is all they need. There is, however, one situation where that advice does not suffice.

Some people are at the perfect company, but in the wrong job.

Walking away from one company and into another is a tricky path to chart, but transferring within the same company can also be like navigating a minefield.

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Die first. It's easier that way.

All the time people tell me that they wish they had enough time to focus on what they truly want.

Most the time, I call bullshit.

We all know that there’s no such thing as “having the time” to do anything.

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Don’t Read This Book 100 Times!

Just a quick note.

An entrepreneur I met told me that he had the goal to read Think and Grow Rich 100 times in the next year.

Now, that’s my favorite book, and I certainly recommend everyone read it over and over again, but I also suggest that you do much more than just read it.

In school you might be well rewarded for being able to regurgitate what someone else thinks, but in life, it’s not what you think that matters.

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How To Quit Your Job (And Still Win)

You’re going to quit at least one job in your life, probably several. In fact, 2.8 million Americans quit their jobs every month. You know what’s heartbreaking about that statistic?

Virtually none of those 2.8 million people know how to quit their job and still win.

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Simply the BEST affirmation…

As I wrote about in this article, if you aren’t doing them already, I highly suggest exploring using affirmations for top performance.

No matter what you do, there is simply no substitute for constantly reinforcing in your mind the ideas that lead you to feel how you want to feel, and take the actions that you want to take.

While the pro move is to build tailor-made affirmations into your daily practices, a good quote, conversation, or even song, can produce the same benefits.

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Why My Greatest Achievement As A Goldman Sachs VP Was Quitting

6 AM meant it was time to check voicemails. 11 PM meant it was time to check voicemails again. Every second in between reserved for cranking and putting out the many fires guaranteed to crop up that day.

That was my life as a Goldman Sachs VP, and despite what you might assume, I didn’t hate it.

I didn’t get there by accident. I’d worked that hard since my first job at KFC to get where I thought I should want to be, and by all accounts I was crushing my goals.

Except they weren’t my goals. Despite my success, despite the deep friendships I’d made at Goldman, I could never shake the sense that I was living someone else’s idea of success.

At a certain point, it was time to leave.

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Recovering from Mindblowing

I’m still recovering from attending Deepak Chopra’s Sages & Scientists symposium in Beverly Hills last weekend.

People keep asking me how it was, and I say, it was fascinating, yet on the inside I’m still piecing it together.

Over some 20 hours we covered the gamut of science of the cosmos and quantum, to topics of consciousness.

From as big as this infinite ever-expanding universe that is made mostly of invisible matter.

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3 Things That Hold Many of Us Back

Inside we all have a vision for our lives and who we dream to be.

For some of us this is an extension of our current path, but for many of us, going after what we truly want requires a deliberate shift, which can be hard to do.

Not only must we find the fuel to drive ourselves forward, but often we too must remove those things that hold us back.

If you try to drive your car while the handbrake is still tightly gripping the wheels, you’ll hardly get anywhere, and going after what you truly want is much the same way.

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Finish 2016 STRONG

It’s the business end of the season, how do you plan to play?

A new client said to me, “Post labor day is when I really hit my stride for the year.”

I laughed, but he was serious.

He went on to say that, the beginning of the year he comes out of the gates hard, he takes a breather in the summer, but like a 400 meter runner rounding the last bend, it is now that he finds his best.

In New York you feel this energy, almost like the city itself is winding up to close out the year strong.

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Avoid Dying with Regrets

My buddy said to me, “When my mom died, there was only one thing that haunted her.”

It wasn’t the cancer that had ravaged her body. It wasn’t leaving this world.

It was regret. She had been a great mother. A great wife. Had lived a wonderful life, yet, on her death bed, she regretted those things that she didn’t do.

At the time they seemed like the right trade-offs, but looking back, she wished that she had pushed a little harder to do some more things just for herself.

Plenty of research studies of people late in life confirm this common regret, and there are tons of cliches and quotes on this topic, like Mark Twain’s:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

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Ever Tried Affirmations for Top Performance?

Personally, I don’t see anything odd about affirmations, but I know other people do.

Perhaps it’s something about talking to yourself, or trying to convince yourself of something, but we are always doing this anyways. 

For instance, yesterday in a meeting, my host kept saying, “I’m risk averse.”

It’s true, he is risk averse, and by continuing to say it, he keeps reminding himself of that wild and ferocious bear some call “risk.”  

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Best mental hack to be happier :)

We all want ways to feel better and better every day, and this is best.

The verifiable truth is that the way we feel is not dependent on what is happening in our lives, but how we choose to use our bodies and minds.

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Need a Shot of Mojo?

One of my advisors has an interesting take on where she thinks many professionals are stuck.

She says, particularly in the drag race that is New York, many hard charging men and women have had the mojo beaten out of them.

Whereas most of us started our careers feeling unstoppable, somewhere in our twenties and thirties, after sustaining inevitable setbacks, many of us feel like we’ve lost a step.

And while it can sometimes feel like that mojo got left behind with Austin Powers, like a well-driven Aston Martin that has taken a few dings over the years, often we only need a little touch-up.

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Humanity’s Biggest Fraud

Do you sometimes look out at the world and wonder, how did it come to be this way? 

Do you look at the way we work and think, who is winning at this?

In the blockbuster book, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, offers some answers. And many of them aren’t what you might have thought. 

For starters, many of us think that human evolution looks like a straight line in which we graduated from swinging from trees to punching keys, but the origin of our species is far less clear. 

How Did We Evolve?

The fact is, at different points in time, a number of species of “sapiens” coexisted (ala Lord of The Rings), with all but homo sapiens dying out.

Nobody knows why, nor how seemingly overnight the human brain made an enormous leap in size and cognitive ability (a huge problem for all evolutionary theory).

Relative to dinosaurs that roamed the earth for 165 million years, over merely a couple hundred thousand years our species has evolved, and while evolution has greatly benefitted our species, it hasn’t always been good for us individuals. 

An example Harari covers is the Agricultural Revolution which he refers to as history’s biggest fraud.

Whereas the story many of us have come to believe is that humans evolved from hunter gatherers into a more advanced agricultural society, the truth is the opposite.

As he put it, “The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.”

From here Harari goes on to suggest that a similar fraud today impacts the way we work. 

Evolving The Way We Work

He writes, “How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn enough money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five?”

Answering his own question, he writes, “But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and the sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad.” 

Referencing devolving back to our origins he asks, “What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.”

It doesn’t need to be this way. 

We can all do what we want, but only when we stop monkeying around!

✕