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Geoff Blades

Why You Should Never Quit Goldman Sachs

After this article I wrote about quitting Goldman Sachs took off, I got a lot of attention.

Former colleagues and others wrote me wanting to know more, yet there was also some confusion about what I stand for.

My message has never been, and never will be: Quit your top job on Wall Street.

Too many faux experts preach mantras like:

  • “Escape the 9-5”
  • “Join the gig economy”
  • “Achieve financial independence”

The only mantra I use is this:

“Live the life YOU truly want”

Do you see the difference? I’m into how you create your dream life. People who follow the faux experts are into creating an easy life.

Top performers don’t want an easy life. They want to challenge themselves to win, and take it as far as they can go.

If you want to rise to the top of your industry, then quitting a top job is the last thing you should do.

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How Being Mission-Focused Makes You Recession-Proof

Everyone has an opinion on surviving a recession. You remember all those terrible news spots and articles in 2008:

  • “Everyone should own a liquor store, downturns never affect them!”
  • “You should work in healthcare. Even broke people get sick!”
  • “Just start a dropshipping company and sell fake purses. It always works!”

And underlying all that advice is one thing:

Happiness in your career and life is irrelevant, just so long as you feel a little safer financially.

If that’s how you feel about your life, then there’s no reason for you to read ahead. Happily  stagnate forever. If you want to live a life where you are constantly moving forward, where you are always bettering yourself and moving towards what you truly want, then read on.

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Row Row Row Your Boat

I came across this cool idea from Dr. Wayne Dyer.

For too many of us, life feels like a “struggle,” where have to keep “pushing,” just to keep “making” things happen.

For many years I fell into that trap, and I spent even more years building and doing the mental practices to break out of it.

Yesterday, I heard Wayne Dyer’s solution to this problem, to simply remember that nursery rhyme you drilled as a kid.

Paraphrasing from his tape series, “Real Magic:”

  1. “Row, row, row YOUR boat: Notice that it doesn’t say your spouse’s boat, or your kid’s boat, or your neighbor’s boat… it says, YOUR boat
  2. GENTLY: Keep rowing every day, but do it easily, don’t struggle
  3. DOWN the stream: It doesn’t say, swim against the stream. It stresses that the right direction is down the stream, in the flow of the current. 
  4. MERRILY, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily: You choose how you approach every aspect of your life.
  5. Life is but a DREAM: Or a nightmare…You choose. 

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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