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Geoff Blades

Are You SEALFIT?

It’s not just about being in physical shape.

Being fit to be a Navy SEAL has far more to do with mental toughness than it does with being able to do a 500m run, 40 squats, 30 sit ups, 20 push ups, and 10 pull-ups over and over and over and over and over again.

Pick up former Navy SEAL Mark Divine’s book 8 Weeks to SEALFIT and WODs like that will quickly kick you into shape, but that’s not what it’s about.

Mental toughness. Spiritual practices. Embracing the suck. The willingness to keep going knowing you can do 20X what you think you can.

That’s what his book is about. That’s what being a SEAL is about. It is the grit and mental discipline to stay in the fight and do whatever it takes to keep going.

In his world that’s the difference between you and your buddy being carried out in a body bag.

In my world it’s the difference between the many living lives of not-so-quiet desperation and those who get what they want.

Everyone wants more success. Everyone wants to do what they want, but few people are willing to do what it takes.

I have worked with a CEO for five years. Every week we meet I push and prod him the same ways.

What hard things have you done this week?

How are you charging forward towards your goals?

Where have you been wimping out and not following through?

Where are you losing the mental game?

What skills are you working on?

What more can you do to get what you want?

It’s not touchy-feely rah-rah therapy. I’m not a shoulder to cry on. I’m not here to compassionately listen to how hard life can be.

I’m about increasing his capacity to do the hard things and become the man he is destined to be. I’m about helping him HTFU, obliterating boundaries, and driving him further into new discomfort zones.

He doesn’t strive this way because it is necessary to building a thriving business. He does it because he loves becoming the best he can be.

He may not be able to kill a man with a tomahawk, but every day he kills it in business because he conditions himself the same way.

Is The Sky Falling?

“If the game is up, do I want to keep doing this?” a former colleague said to me.

People on Wall Street can be so dramatic. An overdue market correction and not only is the sky falling but even the battle-hardened are collapsing under its weight.

“Will the market tank? Are we headed for another crash?” Desperately asking these unanswerable questions wasn’t helping him, but I knew what would.

“It’s not a matter of where the market is headed. It’s a matter of—Why are you there?”

“Bubbles burst, running bulls tire, and if you are there to make bank then you might need to adjust your expectations. Who knows, we might be headed back to 2008 levels and it might take you a decade longer than you imagined.”

His sigh could have melted the smiles of a billion children.

When I was based in Menlo Park in 2000 many people thought tech was dead FOREVER. It took years for the Nasdaq to recover yet the heartbeat of technology was always pounding.

“Are you saying I should be going into tech then?” my friend asked.

“No. No. That’s the opposite of what I’m saying.”

I didn’t leave tech and move to fixed income because I perceived that was a better bubble to float. I left tech because I was focused on a bigger question.

I wasn’t focused on whether I could make more money here or there in any given year. I was asking the only question that matters—What do I want my life to be?

What do I want to do every day? Who do I want to be surrounded by? What topics do I want dominating my thinking?

These questions transcend whether the market is up or down. They transcend whether your bonus is cut in half or doubled.

When you get to the end of your life, do you think your 2016 bonus will matter? All that matters is—Have you lived the life you dreamed?

“But what is that?” my old friend said to me. “What life do I dream to live? What truly matters to me?”

“Exactly, now you’re asking great questions.”

How Big Is Your Ice Cube?

My mate said to me—”In their careers many people are either on a melting ice cube or a drifting iceberg.”

Those on an ice cube know they need to make a change, but those on an iceberg can still live with the illusion that they have time on their hands.

They know their career is adrift and that sooner or later they’ll have nowhere left to stand, but they will keep floating as long as they can.

This is one of the reasons I began this work back in 2000.

I looked at the career of investment banking and I didn’t like what I saw.

At Goldman in Sydney I worked with true masters of the universe—BSDs, pre-IPO partners. Not the modern-types, but five Ferraris in the garage type of guys.

I thought, now that’s a career on Wall Street!

But sitting in Menlo Park in 2000 with comp slashed in half and half the office fired around me, I began to see the career differently.

At the time I wouldn’t have said that the investment banking ship had sailed, but over the years I did my work that was how it appeared to me.

I saw the same at Carlyle. All those poor devils running themselves ragged doing generic deals hoping to be like the founders, DBD, but knowing they never will be.

I saw I could work till I was sixty and have a pretty interesting and lucrative career, but I didn’t love the job enough to find that appealing.

When you’ve invested decades in your career only to realize it’s not all it was meant to be, what do you?

​On an ice cube you are forced to move. But on a drifting iceberg, like a boiling frog, you can hang around and slowly melt away.

As my mate said, “Neither of them is particularly appealing, especially as a budding master of the universe.”

“So, what do you do?”

The Secret To Being Miserable

“Flying sucks,” my buddy said to me.

The day before he missed his flight and he was still ruing over it.

Arriving at Newark an hour early for a 6:50am launch, he was shocked to discover a 2+ hour line for security.

“Even though I was flying first class, there was no priority security line and no one would help me,” he whined.

Then when he got on the next flight, which was already going to make him late for his first west coast meeting, “fucking United” ran out of the meal of his choice and he had to settle for “something worse than corn flakes.”

“Screw that,” he fumed at the hostess and again to me in recounting the story.

Although I had stopped listening at “flying sucks” he continued to tell me how decades ago flying was a “luxurious experience where you could literally get a carved roast dinner sitting in the back of the bus.”

Finally, running out of fresh manure he reiterated, “Flying sucks.”

Tuning back in I asked him, “How’s that working out for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re still flying aren’t you? So how is getting pissed working out for you?”

Happiness researcher Barry Schwartz says, “The secret to happiness is low expectations.”

Hence, the secret to misery is to maintain unrealistically high expectations and then constantly look for the ways they are failing to be met.

So I asked my buddy, why not update your expectations?

Instead of romanticizing how flying might have been decades ago, why not instead expect flying to be as painful as it has been for the last 15 years?

“Or perhaps even better,” I said to him, “expect every flight to be 10X worse than the experience you had this week, and then every time it is better you will be pleasantly surprised.”

Either way, the secret to being miserable is it is your choice.

CHANGE: 3 Questions To Just Do IT

Sitting on the deck overlooking the Pacific I wonder why I ever left.

In the seven years I lived here I rarely came down to the beach, but my life was different then. I was different then.

Driving through Brentwood on Tuesday I saw a graffiti sign that said, “You can change the world.”

An hour later walking past La Scala in Beverly Hills, a man passed me in a t-shirt that read, “Everyone wants to change the world, but no one wants to change.”

Both statements are of course true enough, and it is only those of us who are willing to change that are able to effect change for others.

Back when I lived here I couldn’t just chill at the beach.

I wasn’t built that way.

Go, go, go was coded into me when I punched out of the womb six weeks early and it wasn’t until recently I learned how to run the slow, slow, slow program.

And even though I spent most of my adult life confused about where I was headed, like a soldier training SERE, I knew to keep moving.

Even when I blew out of LA with twin-turbos screaming towards the mountains of Vail Colorado I had no idea where I would go when the snow melted.

I didn’t know if I would come back to Cali or keep moving east, but I did know one thing—I would be changing.

One of my teachers likes to say, “All we are is change.”

And the irony of personal change is that although us humans are changing all day every day of our lives, it is often hard to make the changes we want to make.

There is of course only one way to do it—do as Nike says and Just Do It.

Here’s how.

Look at you and your life and identify just one thing that you would like to change. Now ask yourself these three questions:

1. How have you been held back by not having made this change?

2. If you had made this change already, how would you already be benefiting?

3. What is just one thing you can do today to either make this change, or make a smaller change that naturally leads to this changing over time?

Now, just do it.

Are You Driving Business or Busyness?

A few months ago, a new investment banking client tried to tell me about some “great meetings” he had.

I laughed, and then I told him why.

At Goldman one of my bosses used to say, “Don’t tell me about your sweaty handshakes. Tell me when you bring home the bacon.”

He wasn’t kidding!

He could obviously see that a great meeting was a crucial step to driving revenues, but he didn’t care.

Don’t bark. Bite.

“If you had some great meetings, then show me how said great meetings are getting you more of what you want,” I asked my client.

Thomas Edison said, “Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration.”

I encouraged him to see that we have a limited number of productive hours each day, and you must be focused on shifting your time to its highest value use.

It might be true that he had some great meetings, but how much business was in that busyness?

“Less than 1% at best,” he said.

This is common in my experience working with even the best executives—most can cut out 1-2 hours of low-value activities every day. Seriously!

But many don’t because, truth is, it is easier to just do what is in front of you than to constantly step back and ask yourself—What is the highest value use of my time?

With my client we went deep into his client list and began building a simple but thorough spreadsheet to amp up his intelligence for driving business.

Every day he comes back to this spreadsheet and every week we go through name-by-name designing specific strategies for hypnotizing his clients.

As you know, the most successful people aren’t those who work the hardest. They are masters of doing the hard things that drive the most value.

Why Many Rich and Famous Will Never Be Happy

Recently I saw this quote from Mark Cuban—“Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it all away from you.”

Back in the day I would have vigorously agreed, but not today.

While his quote might powerfully resonate in sport, like Andy Grove’s notion of business paranoia it is hardly a fulfilling way to live your life.

Paradox of Success

A couple of weeks ago over dinner with a Silicon Valley hitter, we got talking about the relationship between success and happiness.

He observed that although the big name Silicon Valley players seem to have it all, when you spend time with some of them, seeing them running ragged chasing the next bouncing ball, you wonder, where is the joyfulness?

This I call the paradox of success—The more success you achieve, the more success you require to feel fulfilled.

Not to dump this complex subject on you right here, but the paradox is that the success-driven brain isn’t programmed for happiness.

It is programmed to believe that when it achieves success—which is impossible because success can always be defined as “more”—happiness will follow.

But it doesn’t. The brain and happiness don’t work that way. Hence why Robin Williams hung himself from a door and many successful people have more dollars than smiles.

People identified to their “success program” will never be happy because like the “oxygen program” that demands constant breathing, the success program’s desire for more, more, more can never be satisfied.

Not to rain on the world’s consumer parade, but this is why us humans will keep getting more wealthy and less happy.

Take Time Away From It

My success program has served me exceptionally well, but the morning after my dinner flying out to Vail I decided to check it with the luggage at the plane door.

I resolved: No writing. No reading. Minimal emails, client calls, and ranting like Geoff Blades.

It wasn’t easy for me. I love my work and in many ways doing my work is doing what I want (and indeed even experimenting with not working is working), but in taking time off I returned to New York with fresh realizations.

I used to brag that on a weekend trip to Cabo while sitting by the pool I read half a dozen books, but today I would just be hanging with my girl in the sun.

A suicide bomber working for 72 virgins and a maniacal Silicon Valley player might be driven by different goals, but neither of them is living today.

Do yourself a favor this summer. Check your success program and find the time to kick back and smell the sunshine!

P.S. You can read here more mindset articles.

Was Einstein a Confident Knitter?

The President & COO of a bank asked me—”How do we teach our senior bankers to be more confident with CEOs?”

I suggested a five-step process that begins by asking a different question:

1. Are you confident you can tie your shoes? Was Einstein a confident knitter? No one is confident in all contexts and no one lacks confidence. They only lack confidence in a certain context. For instance, someone might be 100% confident challenging the ideas of a four-year old, but feel less confident with a CEO. The fast track to unstoppable confidence is to train your brain to see them the same.

2. Fear and lacking confidence are different. Most of what people call lacking confidence is their hidden way of saying, “Mommy, I’m scared.” You might be the best natural born hitter in the world, but if you are terrified to stand at the plate, you won’t get up and play. To solve the confidence, solve the fear.

3. The answer is always preparation. Any fear or lack of confidence in any context is solved with preparation. It’s rational to lack confidence with a CEO when you are unprepared and risk looking silly. A Navy SEAL wouldn’t feel confident jumping HALO if he hadn’t done the prep. The less confident you are, the more you want to prepare, including physical and mental rehearsal.

4. Repetition, repetition. Competence builds confidence. You don’t get confident by looking at yourself in the mirror and telling yourself you are. You develop confidence when you know you are competent, which comes through one thing—proving it so through successful reference experiences. When you pull the chute at 2,000 feet and you safely land on the ground, that reference experience is the bedrock of confidence.

5. Keep doing it. All that matters to building confidence is to keep doing it. Get people who lack competence and confidence to be willing to keep taking action. Over time they build up the reference experiences that prove to them they are confident.

And guess what?

They are confident not because someone spent years trying to teach them to be confident, but because through their actions they have made it so.

Which Foreman Is Manufacturing Your Thoughts?

In The Magic of Thinking Big, David Schwartz writes, “Your mind is a thought factory. It’s a busy factory, producing countless thoughts in one day.”

He goes on to write that production in your thought factory is the responsibility of two foremen—Mr. Triumph who manufactures positive thoughts and Mr. Defeat who is of course married to Debbie Downer.

“Both Mr. Triumph and Mr. Defeat are intensely obedient,” Schwartz writes, “All you need do to signal either foreman is to give the slightest mental beck and call.”

He goes on to say, to see how these two foremen are working for you every day tell yourself, “‘Today is a lousy day.’ This signals Mr. Defeat into action, and he manufactures some facts to prove you are right.”

“But tell yourself, ‘today is a fine day,'” Schwartz continues, “and Mr. Triumph is signaled forward to act. He tells you, ‘This is a wonderful day.'”

Your Mind Is A Muscle

As you know from reading these newsletters, your mind is a muscle which grows stronger according to how you use it, and Schwartz’s foremen are the same way.

As he puts it, “If Mr. Defeat is given more work to do, he adds personnel and takes up more space in your mind,” and he will ultimately take over your entire thought factory.

“The only wise thing to do,” counsels Schwartz, “is fire Mr. Defeat.”

He only stands in the way of doing what you want, so why do you want him messing around in your thought factory?

Instead, as Schwartz advises, “Use Mr. Triumph 100 percent of the time. When any thought enters your mind, ask Mr. Triumph to go to work for you. He’ll show you how you can succeed.”

How?

To put this idea into practice, take out a piece of paper or a sticky note or anything else you will read every day, and write my First Rule of Mind Control—

I ONLY THINK ABOUT WHAT I WANT!

Do What You Love And Success Will Follow…WRONG

You often hear the phrase, “Do what you love and success will follow.”

Wrong!

It isn’t that in doing what you love that success somehow magically follows.

It is, when you are doing what you love, you love doing what it takes to create success.

No explorer ever struck land simply by loving exploring.

No athlete makes it to the Olympic Games by merely loving their sport.

No dreamer has built an empire simply by loving their idea.

No marriage survives on love alone.

Love is merely the rocket fuel that keeps you going.

But, it goes beyond that too.

When you love what you do, you don’t need success to follow.

Every day success is coming with you.

"I Apologize, It Is Obviously My Fault"

A few years ago I was sitting at dinner when the fellow next to me, who had sucked down a few too many cocktails, got in my face about my work.

He told me it was clearly all rubbish and that I was “a snake oil salesman.”

I tried to keep my cool, and for about ten minutes I laughed it off, but then I blew it.

Long Fuse, Short Reach

I have a long fuse, but a vicious temper, and like Bruce Banner, you nor I want to see that.

Luckily, it didn’t get too bad. No punches were thrown, and he got to stumble out on his own two feet. But I learned I must do better.

About a year later I was at dinner with a banking buddy when the guy sitting alone at the table next to us injected himself in our conversation.

Hearing us discuss how my friend goes from MD to being a master of the universe, he offered his well-considered opinion that I was full of it.

I kept my cool. I didn’t react. Like starving a fire of oxygen we gave him nothing to argue with and he soon flamed out.

I knew I did a decent job when he asked for my business card, but when I told him I was all out of cards for douchebags I knew I could do better.

Make People Right

The other night at dinner the woman at the table next to us got in my face about how that “Tony Robbins stuff is a bunch of crap,” and this time I did even better.

I apologized profusely. I told her, “I apologize, it is obviously my fault.”

For about a minute I told her how right she was. How much I appreciated her speaking up. I told her it was my fault for rambling on, and I apologized for offending her.

I didn’t do this sarcastically or tongue in cheek. Inside my mind I made her 100% right and I wanted her to feel that way.

She began smiling and we had a nice conversation in which she decided she was going to read The Power of Positive Thinking.

That felt good to me. Not because she came around to my way of thinking, but because I was able to put aside my smallness and get to the right outcome.

Whether you are right or wrong, if you can get beyond yourself and help someone else feel good, you are wrong not to make them right.

The Best Investment Of All Time

What if I told you that I had an investment that was guaranteed to return you thousands, if not many millions times your money?

Would you be interested?

How about if I added that there’s nothing unique about this strategy and more than 70 million people have already benefited from this investment?

What about if you knew that this asset was built over 25 years by the richest men in America. The likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison not only poured their time into this, but they also contributed the best ideas that had build their own empires.

What if I told you that you can invest in this asset for less than one dollar and it will surely be the smartest investment you have ever made?

Are you interested?

Now, I will say, this investment will require you to do something that few people are willing to do.

Still interested?

Then, buy Think and Grow Rich for $0.99 cents.

Read it at least a dozen times and commit to put the ideas to work, including every day doing the exercises.

By far, the best investment of all time is investing in the money-making machine that is you!

Missing Purpose

Missing purpose many of us feel lost.

Like a keen sense of style some of us have it, but many others spend their lives desperately searching for their purpose.

Why am I here?

What is the purpose of my life? What is my passion?

How do I find it?

These types of questions haunt many of us. And while the answers can be foggy, one thing is most certainly clear.

They are dumb questions!

They are useless questions!

They are questions that keep people stuck, versus questions that keep us moving forward.

As British comedian, Eddie Izzard, in his documentary, Believe, says:

If the purpose of life is to live it then, which I think it is, we’re here. You can go all about what’s it all about, and get lost in a circular argument. Instead get it, grab it, put positivity into it.

The problem with questions of purpose and passion, and indeed the question that haunted me for so long—What Do I Want?— is, like a mission statement, they require a grand answer.

And when we set up the questions seeking some life-altering answer, it’s easy to dismiss any smaller answer that doesn’t fit the bill.

Point out to someone who thinks they lack purpose that they have five purposeful things to do this week and they will tell you, “That’s not what I mean.”

They are looking past what’s purposeful to find some over-arching purpose.

But, is there one? Should there be one?

What is purpose for my cat? To live a life of sitting on the sofa? To be the best she can be at playing with her angry birds toy? To be an explorer of new hiding places?

Is her life not worth living because she lacks a grand purpose?

Or is it just us humans who often fail to live a worthwhile life because we are missing purpose? 

"Am I Thinking BIG Enough?"

At the end of our meeting today, sitting catty corner at the bar, my client said to me, “I have just one more question for you.”

“Hit me,” I said.

He paused for a moment, his face muscles tightened and he got a serious look in his eye, then he said, “Am I thinking big enough?”

Without hesitation, I blurted, “NO.”

Watching his non-verbals I could see he was jolted, but he was pleased to get the answer he wanted.

We both knew that if he’s asking the question, then the answer is “no.”

You know when you are thinking big. You question when you are thinking small.

In starting Amazon, Jeff Bezos never failed the test of thinking small.

He started small with one product, selling books, but he was never thinking small.

Michelangelo said, “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

I have met many men and women who have achieved great success, but few who feel they have gone as far as they can go. As my old trainer used to say, “If you’re not puking in the corner, you can stand up and fight.”

Last night another client told me, “I want people to write books about me. I want them to say, ‘I don’t know how he did it, but what he did is unbelievable.'”

He has no idea what we’ll cook up, but he has the taste of BIG.

I can get behind that. Every day of the week I get behind that.

Today I spoke with a fellow who told me that he was planning to get on the phone and beg me to take him on as a client.

It is true that based on the conversation I expected to have that even begging like Oliver Twist he would have failed, but as soon as he told me he was thinking big and has a mission to be a force for good, I was in.

‘Nuff said.

These are the people I want in my life. They are already playing big, but they want to see how far they can take it.

With that attitude it doesn’t matter how far you get.

As Norman Vincent Peale said, “Shoot for the moon because even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

I've Been Playing Small

Yesterday, on the phone with a best-selling author I realized I’ve been playing small.

I have six-figure private clients. I’m writing prolifically. Creating a library of audio content. My first book is done, and I just signed a deal for the second.

I’ve made enormous progress and I have incredible momentum, yet relative to my mission I’ve still been playing small.

Some years ago when I was getting started at this, when I was far less skilled at doing hard things, I would have found that realization disheartening.

But today it is only invigorating. At every point in time I’ve done the best I can, and it’s proof I’m ready for my next leap.

My friend and business partner, Adam Checchi, often says. “To get good at things you must be willing to be bad.”

To learn anything new you must begin from the, well, beginning. And you must be willing to persist long enough at being bad to get good.

There is no other path, if you are dedicated to doing hard things.

In his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, leading founder and venture capitalist, Ben Horowitz writes, “That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.”

The hardest thing about blazing your own trail isn’t persisting at putting one foot in front of the other. Like a novice climber, it is having no idea where to place your foot.

You must set aside your false sense of self, admit you lack answers, and seek out experts who can guide you. But that will only ever get you a fraction of the way.

No one can tell you what to do, and certainly no one is going to do it for you. Instead, you must be willing to keep taking actions, and doing hard things.

To some people this is the definition of hell, and unlike Churchill they are unwilling to keep going, but when you build yourself into a person who thrives on doing hard things, you can’t live any other way.

Playing small is better than not playing at all, yet to play big you must call yourself out on playing small and kick up the bar over and over again.

Are You The 10% Not Wasting Your Potential?

As I prepare to launch-launch my book, I’ve been stepping back and thinking deeply about why I wrote The Guide in the first place.

Why did I step back from my own career? And why does this work matter so much to me that I left Wall Street to do something that has been back-breaking?

I come back to two answers.

First, this isn’t what we signed up for.

Those of us who did everything right.

Some of us decades ago, in school, put our heads down and started working hard. We got top grades, went to top schools, got top jobs, and then what?

Well, many of us worked harder…and harder…and harder…and harder still.

But, how many of us have careers that are working hard for us?

When this work began for me, in Menlo Park in 2000, in the aftermath of the Internet bubble bursting and half of my office being fired, I wondered, is this what it is meant to be?

Is this what I have worked so hard to achieve?

Am I living the career and life of my dreams?

How many of my brothers and sisters are? Not just on Wall Street, but all of us who’ve done the right things, and worked our tails off. How many of us are living the lives we dream?

That’s the first thing I stand for. The second is somewhat contradictory.

Few of us are living the lives of our dreams because we have done too little to earn it.

We live with the illusion that if we put our heads down and work hard, that is sufficient.

It is not. It is insufficient.

Working hard doesn’t work for you because working hard is insufficient.

Few of us smart, hard-working people will ever live the lives of our dreams because we are operating at a fraction of our potential.

Most people are bored to death because they can do their job with half their brain tied up thinking about what they’d rather be doing.

Sure, they work long hours, but how much of their potential does their job require?

What hard things must they do? How often are they pushing beyond their limits? How often are they stretched to the point of failure? How many of them are reading and learning and growing, just to keep up?

Nearly everyone is running themselves ragged working around the clock, but most of them are monkeying around.

My bet is 90% of some of the smartest, hardest working people are operating at less than 50% of their potential.

That’s not because most of us are lazy, but because we’re living a lie.

Get good grades. Get a good job. Work hard. Ride off into the sunset. That’s the message that is drummed into us from an early age.

But you only need to look at nearly everyone in our society to know that is an illusion—and even if you make the money, a mostly unhappy one at that!

Instead, the story I wrote, the story I live, what I stand for is different:

Set lofty goals. Stretch your potential. Learn. Grow. Challenge yourself. Do hard things. Become everything you can be.

Going after it this way, not only do you work less hours and have more success, but you no longer need to build the life of your dreams. Every day you are living it!!

What Don't We Learn From Centuries of Failure?

I’ve been trying to avoid writing about Greece.

I mean, really, what can one say?

Shocking! Just shocking.

A country that has been in default for half of its 183 years of independence. In default? No way! Shocking!

The only thing that is shocking is that anyone is shocked by it.

In this world where nearly every nation is drowning in debt and at best can only drive growth through more debt (and war, of course) who is surprised that Greece is out of business?

I mean, if us work-yourself-to-death Americans have borrowed more money than we can ever repay, what hope do the hardly-working-at-all Greeks have?

And, look, of course it’s not their fault.

Whoever dreamed up the entire notion of the Euro would have failed introductory macro-economics where I went to school.

But, as usual, it is always the same people who bear the brunt of the pain.

To the billionaire hedge fund managers who are “betting” for or against Greece, it’s all just a game.

Spin the wheel again guys, let’s gamble someone else’s money and watch the bouncing ball.

And the politicians. Austerity doesn’t climb the gilded steps. Maybe they’ll be forced to downgrade to a G550.

But what about the ordinary citizens? Who is looking out for them?

Who cares about the people who suffer from all this mess, while the empty talking heads deliberate how far the Dow might fall.

It might seem like a game now, but history shows, soaked with generations of debt, it’s just a matter of time before we are the bouncing ball.

How Simple Can This Be?

Let’s get back to basics.

In the last few months our community has exploded and I want to give you a quick recap of what we are about.

One thing—How do you get what you want?

As you read these newsletters, you will see the same themes recurring over and over again.

Having spent a decade reading thousands of books and transforming my own career and life, I left Wall Street to share a simpler and better way.

You shouldn’t have to read thousands of books to get what you want, and, in fact, in my world, you only need to be willing to do four things:

1. Focus on what you want

The dirty secret of getting what you want is that you don’t need to know what you want. Instead, you just need to get serious about the step you are now taking that is moving you in the right direction.

If you are in a career, that might be positioning yourself for your next promotion. If you are looking to leave you might focus on creating just one more option. If you are building a business, stop thinking about how you can sell to dumb money for $19 billion, and simply focus on—What is the next step that keeps you moving in the right direction?

And get serious. Have definite purpose. Commit yourself to getting what you want.

2. Build a system for getting it

Forget about the millions of junk ideas, junk books, junk tweets, junk blogs, junk podcasts, and junk everything else. Instead, step back, and develop for yourself a serious process, a plan, a system, that is designed to take you from where you are today to where you want to be.

If you are building a business, forget about how other people think you build a business. Make it your mission to figure out: How do you build your business? What matters to winning? What steps must come together? How do you make it happen?

3. Build yourself into the person who can do it

In 1894, Orison Swett Marden wrote, “While many are surprised in their lack of success, few appear to attribute this to the fact that they are doing little to pursue growth.”

Look, let’s call a zombie a zombie. Most people are going nowhere in life because they are unwilling to grow. They are not reading. They are not training their skills. Most of them are the walking dead; they are barely even living.

To get what you want, you must build yourself into the person who can get it. You must look yourself in the mirror and ask, To get what I want, who must I become? 

Then you must do it! If you want to get strong in the gym, you don’t think you want it. You don’t develop a plan to get strong. You hit the gym and lift; you develop strength through taking action.

Become, as Daft Punk says: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

4. Build skills

There is a simple formula for all success—Build wicked skills.

If you are Webb Simpson, ranked 39 on the PGA Tour, you only have one path to success: Get better at golf. Build your mental skills. Improve your game.

No matter what your goal. Whether it be a better career, a better life, a better body, a better whatever, build badass skills and you will get what you want! ​

Have a Kit Kat. You Will Surely Win!

If you have been to Japan you might know that in the land of the rising sun, Kit Kat reigns supreme.

With a plethora of seemingly odd flavors such as wasabi and green tea, Kit Kat is the King of Candy in Japan.

Why? How did this come to be?

You Will Surely Win

Well, it’s not just for its bright red packaging and tasty goodness.

The name Kit Kat is similar to a classic Japanese phrase, “Kitto Katsu,” which roughly translates into, “You will surely win.”

So in Japan, when you pick up a Kit Kat, it is more than a treat. Like a wedding band, it is a symbol with much deeper meaning.

In my world, we refer to such symbols as “anchors.”

The Power of Anchors

Like those that hold a ship steadfast at sea, an anchor keeps you tethered to something of special meaning.

If you were to visit my place in New York, you would see it filled with anchors.

On my hallway wall, a decal of a quote by French poet, Anatole France—”To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”

Taking up half the wall in my kitchen, a quote by Canadian educator, Claude Bissell—​“Risk more than others think is safe. Care more than others think is wise. Dream more than others think is practical. Expect more than others think is possible.”

In my office I am surrounded by enormous Yin Yang and Ohm decals, as well as Buddha, Ganesh, cats, dragons, and other symbols that lend me their power!

On my desk, benches, and tables you will see my coins stacked up; the anchor I give to my clients to reinforce our work together.

No matter what they are headed into or going through, by picking up my coin they are reminded that, as the decal in my study says, “The anchor holds in spite of the storm.”

Surround yourself with powerful anchors—You will surely win!

✕