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Geoff Blades

Career Advice: From KFC to Goldman Sachs

I went to McDonalds the other night.  I don’t remember the last time I did but it was likely also with my parents.  We were on Sunset, in West Hollywood.  Just like a child I stood next to my parents waiting on our Big Macs and my mother’s tailor-made cheeseburger – no pickles, no sauce.  While we waited I watched the crew go about their work.  And I thought about my work.

It reminded me of being a kid working part-time at KFC.  I worked there a number of years, cooking chicken and serving customers.  Truth be told, it was one of my most fun jobs.  I learned many of my career principles from my part-time jobs, and it was KFC that taught me some of my most important.  Standing at the counter with my parents, on my blackberry I started to type – My top 5 lessons from KFC to Goldman Sachs.

  • Always take the shift.  At KFC I always took the extra shift.  It gave me more money and it made me more reliable, which gave me more options.  At Goldman it was about shifts and deals.  Early in my career I always took the extra deal and worked the extra shift, the graveyard shift.
  • Be your best.  Lil’ Wayne says, “be good or be good at it.”  If you’re cooking chicken or working on Wall Street do it well.  Putting more in means getting more out.  This attitude will leak into every area of your life.
  • Clean as you go.  At KFC it took 14 minutes to deep fry chicken.  That mean’t you had 14 minutes to clean the kitchen before the chicken was cooked.  On Wall Street you don’t go back and do it later.  There’ll be something else to do later.
  • Multi-tasking.  In a kitchen you are doing many things at the same time.  It means being thoughtful about planning and sequencing of tasks and being focused enough to simultaneously do many things well.  This is multi-tasking; it’s a life skill.  Driving and typing on a blackberry is not; it’s a death skill.
  • Rotate jobs.  No mechanic wants to only be able to change a tire.  Rotating stations at KFC improved my experience and gave me more “career” options.  I did the same at Goldman – four jobs and offices in eight years.  It gave me more experience and options along the way and once I left.

 

Alien Invasion – When Aussies Visit America

When the Blades’ go on vacation, we go extraterrestrial. Yesterday we were standing on the edge of the best-preserved meteorite crater on Earth! and today we were in Roswell, New Mexico, the most famous alleged UFO crash site in the world.

Initially I was planning to write about deep impact and the probability of being killed by a major meteor, which is higher than being killed by a terrorist.

But then I thought I’d write about aliens, about Carl Jung’s skepticism, or the “truth” about Roswell, or about Stephen Hawkings’ warning.  Now I’m in Santa Fe, however, and having tasted a couple of Silver Coins at The Shed I figured I’d just write about the last frontier.  When the Blades’ on vacation we go extraterrestrial. Then we sip a margarita.

Turn Down, Turn Out The Lights.

Sustainability > Global Warming. Global Warming may be the equivalent of creationism science but sustainability needs no science.  It is obvious that sustainability of all our planet’s natural and biological resources is one of the greatest threats to survival of our species.

I’m no expert on energy conservation but it would seem we could do with more of it.  Making my way through a city at night I often lament the excessive use of lighting.  Take for instance your average office tower, which is lit from the ground up, from the top down the sides, and many of the empty floors in between. This is known as Light pollution.  

Light pollution is mis-directed or mis-used lighting.  While important as it relates to energy use and sustainability, today I’m reminded of it for a different reason, stargazing. In this regard, by polluting the sky with artificial lighting, light pollution reduces visibility of the night sky, limiting scientific astronomical observation and ruining the sport of stargazing.

I was introduced to it many years ago while stargazing at Bryce Canyon, and today I’m reminded of it as I wander the streets of Flagstaff, Arizona.  With more than fifty years committed to limiting Light pollution, Flagstaff is the world’s first International Dark-Sky City – in this town, even McDonalds, KFC, and Taco Bell shine less bright.  And the city is a whole lot more calm and natural for it.

Like many topics of sustainability the solution to Light pollution is very simple. Um, TURN DOWN AND TURN OUT THE LIGHTS!

Never Give In, Never Give In, Never, Never, Never

I often get asked about what really matters to success.  I say execution, getting it done.  But what matters to execution is the never say die attitude that gets things done.  When I’m looking to follow Rocky up the final set of steps, I often dig into my bag of quotes on persistence:

“Character consists of what you do on the  third and fourth tries.” – John Albert  Michener

“My greatest point is my persistence. I never give up in a match. However down I am, I fight until the last ball. My list of matches shows that I have turned a great many so-called irretrievable defeats into victories.” Bjorn Borg

“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never…” Winston Churchill

“Tie yourself to the mast my friend and the storm will end.” The Verve

“Within every adversity is the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” Napoleon Hill

“Show me a really great triumph that is not the reward of persistence.”  Orison Marden Swett

“Victory belongs to the most persevering” Napoleon Boneparte

“The Law of Averages will favor the man who persists”.  Robert Collier

“94% of all sales people quit after the fourth call.  But 60% of all sales are made after the fourth call.” Jack Canfield

The iPad Is For Kids – Avoid The Srail Effect

Because I read tonnes of books people keep asking me when I’m going to trade-in my Kindle for an iPad.  I am an Apple groupie but no serious reader will exchange their Kindle for an iPad.  There are at least three reasons why.

DISTRACTION:  Known as The Srail Effect, the iPad offers an unlimited supply of distraction.  When you read on the Kindle, however, you READ on the Kindle.  You don’t check your email, surf the web, open some application to figure out a word of the day, and so on.

EFFICIENCY:  We don’t just save time when we avoid The Srail Effect, we also massively increase our efficiency.  Brian Tracy in Eat That Frog notes, “it has been estimated that the tendency to start and stop a task, to pick it up, put it down and come back to it can increase the time necessary to complete the task by as much as 500%.”

CAN’T READ IN THE SUN:  The iPad has a backlit screen.  You can’t read a backlit screen in the sun.  And who doesn’t want to read in the sun?

Optimism Drives Prosperity. Happy Labor Day!

We are a nation known for optimism.  It’s easy to be optimistic when the world is your oyster but optimism matters more when we have cause to question it.  Labor Day is a day when we celebrate the efforts of the American worker and the prosperity those efforts have created.  Effort is a function of mindset and optimism as a mindset is a powerful driver of effort. At a time many Americans are becoming less optimistic, it’s important we recognize that it is optimism and effort that will continue to drive our prosperity.  These are some of my favorite quotes on optimism.  Happy Labor Day!

“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.” – JFK

“The key to success is delusional optimism. Some people call it resilience. You’re lying there bleeding on the ground and you basically have to say, ‘Maybe tomorrow will be better.'” – Melissa Rosenberg

“An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight…. The truly wise person is colorblind.” – Dr. Albert Schweitzer

“Optimism is true moral courage.” – Ernest Shackleton

“What we want is not blind optimism but flexible optimism—optimism with its eyes open. We must be able to use pessimism’s keen sense of reality when we need it, but without having to dwell in its dark shadows.”  – Martin Seligman

“We believe in having a positive and optimistic (but realistic) attitude about everything we do, because we realize that this inspires others to have the same attitude.” – Tony Hsieh

“If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.” – Oscar Wilde

“My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.” – Henry Rollins

“Optimism doesn’t wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.” Norman Cousins

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” – Helen Keller

“Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.” – William James

“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” – Colin Powell

Read: Way of The Peaceful Warrior

My friend Jon reads this book a couple of times a year. He can be a little obsessive about things but Way of The Peaceful Warrior is a book worth being obsessive about.  I’m not one for writing book reviews and I’d simply say that of the many personal development books I’ve read this is one my favorites. It’s a classic hero’s journey, a piquant fiction/non-fiction with a long list of principles for living a richer life. Here’s some of my favorite quotes:

  • “Life is not a private affair. A story and its lessons are only made useful if shared”
  • “Life requires more than knowledge; it requires intense feeling and constant energy. Life demands right action if knowledge is to come alive”
  • “If you remain blind to your weaknesses, you can’t correct them—nor can you play up your strength”
  • “There are no accidents, Danny. Everything is a lesson. Everything has a purpose, a purpose, a purpose”
  • “If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold onto it forever”
  • “Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for”
  • “There are no ordinary moments!”
  • “All these years I had been sustained by an illusion—happiness through victory—and now that illusion was burned to ashes. I was no happier, no more fulfilled, for all my achievements”
  • “Better to live until you die. I am a warrior; my way is action”
  • “Lao Tzu fell asleep and dreamt he was a butterfly. Upon awakening, he asked himself, “Am I a man who has just been dreaming that he was a butterfly, or a sleeping butterfly, now dreaming that he is a man?”

Careers: Education is Continuous Learning

“20%  of America’s millionaires never set foot in college and 21 of the 222 Americans listed as billionaires in 2003 never got their college diplomas.” Jack Canfield

There’s a renewed focus on improving the quality of our education system.  I believe it oughta be one of our nation’s most important focuses.  I also believe, however, that it’s crucial we each change the way we think about education.  I believe we’ve entered an era of personal development where success will become increasingly contingent on our ability to self-educate, where adapting to accelerating change will demand continuous learning.

Changing our approach to education requires questioning the current approach.  On that note, here’s some excerpts from a thought-provoking article by teacher and author Camille Paglia.

Vanishing of jobs will plague the rest of this decade and more…College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class…

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense…

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted…

Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children…

The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness…

Read, Relax into Trance

I’ve been slipping in and out of trance state all week.

Having finished ten days doing hypnosis and being hypnotized my body is eager for more trance.  Yes. I know it sounds weird, well, to anybody who’s never been in hypnotic trance.  Or at least anybody who didn’t think they’d been in trance.

A Natural State

We go into mild trance all the time.

Take this example of highway hypnosis, when we zone out driving along the road.

Or the many times we find ourselves just staring into the distance. Or sometimes while watching TV, relaxing into a trance-like state.  Or while reading, just letting the words fade out and staring calmly at the screen.

You see, it’s perfectly natural that we go into these trance states many times a day.

Easy To Practice

Because these are natural ways of being, it’s easy to practice this calm, relaxed way of being.

As we focus our attention on say a point on the screen or the stillness of our hands, we allow our bodies to relax.  As I relax, I often notice a calmness in my mind, like my thoughts slowing down.  As my thoughts slow down I begin to notice my breathing.  My heart rate slows, my breaths become shallower.   As I breathe more slowly, my body relaxes.  As my body relaxes, I breathe more slowly.  That’s right. It’s this easy to bring our minds to this place.

It’s a wonderful way of being, and also a powerful experience for evolving our minds.

Walk Your Path. Leave A Trail.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail – Emerson

Talking about HYPNOSIS has some of my friends questioning my sanity.  Yesterday a friend of mine asked if I really “believed in it.”  It led me to ponder how far off the beaten path I sometimes stray.  It led me to ponder the definition of “beaten.”  It led me to realize that there’s no such thing as A beaten path, just THE path that each of us beat.

Odd paths to some – hypnosis, healing, the Singularity, MMA, etc. – these paths I’ve experienced through my interests are THE paths of others.  I’ve learned more about myself from walking other’s paths than from most other experiences and the hundreds of self-help books I’ve read.  Training with pro fighters taught me about toughness, healing taught me about my minds, and learning hypnosis taught me reality, that there is no one.  Not all of us want to shift our reality, to walk other paths.  Here are some of the reasons I DO.

  • MIX IT UP:  There is no perspective without contrast.  I call this mix it up – hobbies, reading, people, travel, whatever.  Our definition of reality is experiential. Change experience, change reality
  • WHAT ARE WE LEARNING?:  We rarely learn just what we intended.  As Dale Carnegie once noted, “he didn’t teach people to speak, rather he taught them to conquer their fears and develop courage”
    • SEE THE MATRIX:  It’s easier to get the world as a whole when you’ve experienced more of the parts.  As Michael Singer writes in Untethered Soul, “Life is not something you get; you experience”
  • LEARN, SKILLS:  We are built to learn.  Learning new skills is one of our most engaging life experiences. It also equips us with new skills.  My friends laugh now but when the machines attack they will call me
  • PEOPLE, PLACES:  New interests expose us to different types of people and environments.  We learn and grow and adapting to different people and environments is an important life skill
  • BEING BAD:  It’s important to do new things, to get comfortable with having to learn from scratch, from being bad at something.  It builds character
  • YOUR PATH, THE TRAIL:  There is no path, only YOUR PATH.  But it’s not the path that matters.  It’s the trail

Mindset Drives Execution. More Than A Quote

“Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself.  You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows. There is no code of conduct to help beginners. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.” Sophia Loren, Actress

Investing: Watching the Market Is Like Counting Steps To The Bathroom

Other than enriching the managers and intermediaries most of what occurs on Wall Street is merely noise.  Few of us oughta care what the Dow does on a daily basis.  It’s the equivalent of caring about how many steps it takes to walk to the bathroom when all we oughta care about is whether we make it in time.

How Your Mind Works: Processing Power

Homunculus, a sensory map of your body. The homunculus looks rather strange because the representation of each area is related to the number of sensory neuronal connections, not the physical size of the area. 

IN PLAIN ENGLISH:  The size of his hands represent how much of our brain’s processing power is devoted to our hands.  That shouldn’t surprise anybody given the complexity of activities our hands are involved in.  And in case you didn’t notice, note how much processing power is devoted to, as my mum might say, the private parts.  That shouldn’t surprise anybody either.

Investing: We Don’t Invest. We Gamble.

“Most investors, both institutional and individual, will find that the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund that charges minimal fees.” Warren Buffett 

I recently quit Wall Street to help improve the investment industry.  I do this through promoting intelligent investing in the form of low-cost indexing – google it, literally.

Despite the emphasis Wall Street places on active investing strategies – stock picking, mutual funds, etc. – the arguments in favor of low-cost indexing have been made over and over and over.  In fact, the arguments are so simple, factual, and conclusive that they can be condensed into a handful of bullets:

  • Active investors fail:  Stock picking is a fool’s errand and few mutual funds beat the market.  Over the past 20 years, more than 80% of active investors FAILED to beat the market.
  • Asset allocation matters:  Active investors fail because gambling on the direction of the market (market timing) and stock picking (security selection) don’t work and don’t matter.  Instead asset allocation accounts for 90% of the variability in returns.
  • Distinguishing luck from skill:  At the very least it’s difficult to distinguish luck from skill – see Fama and French.  As Michael Lewis once wrote, “If millions of monkeys throw a bunch of darts at the Wall Street Journal, at least one monkey would pick a group of winning stocks.”
  • Indexing is not dismissive of active managers:  The market isn’t efficient and exceptional investors exist (e.g. Bruce  Berkowitz).  Unfortunately, it’s near impossible to systematically take advantage of inefficiency and to identify and bet on exceptional investors over the long-run (e.g. Bill Miller).
  • It’s not a “stock picker’s market”:  Poor U.S. index performance over the last decade doesn’t imply it’s a stock picker’s market – the index still beat almost all stock pickers.  Instead it implies that global asset allocation matters most.

Unfortunately, despite the conclusive arguments in their favor, index fund assets only account for around 5% of mutual fund assets.

As Charles Ellis writes, “leaving almost 95 percent of assets in the hands of wealth-destroying active managers.”  Why?  Because we don’t invest; we gamble.  Improving Wall Street and the investment industry means changing this.  It’s that simple.

**ADDENDUM: To my readers in the mutual fund and alternative asset industries. I am a student of investing and am enamored by truly exceptional investors. My views on investing are factual and targeted at the aggregate, not you or your fund in particular. Please stop sending me emails telling me how wrong I am and telling me how much alpha you create. It’s not about you. It’s about your industry.  I’m sure you are all above average.

Mindset Matters: Shut It Up

Getting what you want is easier when you focus on what matters.  While planning and execution are the essential practical steps that enable success at any goal, it is our mindset that determines our ability to plan and execute.  Mindset matters and cultivating a powerful mindset is a crucial enabler of success.

All people, and most certainly successful people, have noisy minds; you know, that inner voice that just never shuts up.  While it’s not possible (or desirable) to shut it up, it is simple to shut it out and to quit paying attention.  Here’s an easy solution, no meditation required.  Buy and read this short, elegant, and transformational book – The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer.

Here’s some of my favorite quotes:

  • “Your thoughts have far less impact on this world than you think”
  • “Come to know the one who watches the voice, and you will come to know one of the great mysteries of creation”
  • “Instead of being aware of your thoughts, you’re aware that you’re aware of your thought”
  • “We’re not really trying to be free of our stuff; were trying to justify keeping it”
  • “Your mind is always telling you that you have to change something outside in order to solve your inner problems…but…Your mind’s thoughts are disturbed by its fears”
  • “In time, you will come to realize that the center from which you watch disturbance cannot get disturbed”
  • “Life is not something you get; you experience. Life exists with or without you”

 

Hearing Everyone. Hearing No-one. Are You Getting It?

It’s noisy online.  How does anyone get heard on the web, Facebook, or Twitter?  Even with only 200 friends on Facebook I struggle to hear anyone.  And on Twitter, even my two friendly followers have hundreds of people they follow and thousands of people who follow them.

The Internet is like a crowded cocktail party.  From any spot in the room the chatter sounds like a stream of noise, yet up close you can tune in to a limitless number of conversations.  For this reason it’s hard to attract an online audience and even harder to keep their attention.

So, how do you do it?  I don’t know yet.  But I know others do.  And I know that success at any goal can be broken down into three steps – Define It, Get It, and Get It Done.  So, if Define It is the goal and Getting It Done is just doing it, what is Getting It?  Well, I define Getting It to be the activity of deconstructing any goal into the few factors that truly matter to success.  In the context of building an online audience, although Getting It Done is not, Getting It is simple:

  • Content:  People with little to say stand alone at cocktail parties and online.  Excellent content helps, but producing any appealing content matters most.  Writing is akin to manufacturing and a writer must produce.
  • Publishing:  It’s gotten harder and easier to publish.  The collapse of the traditional publishing industries – books and journalism – has made it harder and easier and self publishing has never been easier.  Writers must seek out traditional and self publishing and build online communities.
  • Promotion:  Whether it be traditional or online publishing, writing is a business of self-promotion – like success in many facets of life, it’s about getting your voice heard.  Hence, writers must become self-promoters, a la the shameless, noisy, and remarkable one-time author, Tim Ferris.

Now, think of your most important goal.  What really matters to success?  Are you Getting It? 

We Are The Lindsay Lohan Economy

Rumor is Lindsay is on the way from the big house to rehab.  I say good luck, Lindsay.  I also say it’s time America started to support her.  We owe her; for our benefit she has lived her life on our stage.  I’d challenge anybody to walk in her shoes, to live in her mind, and to live their life seeing the world through her eyes.  I wrote this to support Lindsay and to support America.  We’re all in this together.

**This is a format I call economic poetry.  But that’s my fancy name for bullet points**

  • WE ARE THE LINDSAY LOHAN ECONOMY.
  • WE’VE IGNORED OUR LONG-TERM PROBLEMS BY PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1999;
  • AND IT SEEMS WE ARE CONTENT AS LONG AS THE DJ KEEPS SPINNING.
  • WHILE THE MUSIC WAS PLAYING WE SPENT ON FRIVOLOUS CONSUMPTION
  • AND WHEN THE PARTY ENDED WE NAIVELY WONDERED WHAT WENT WRONG.
  • BY PARTYING HARD WE HAVE RISKED OUR LONG-TERM PROSPERITY,
  • BUT WHEN YOU’RE A STAR YOU CAN ALWAYS TURN IT AROUND.

 

First Impressions Count

 

First impressions count.  In the field of communications and influence they say we only get one chance.  Today, however, I’m writing about execution and a different type of impression, a physical impression – the result of an action.

In order to make any impression – to make a dent in the universe, as I lifted from Rework – we must take action.  However well we plan an action, it is for naught until we take it.

But because the first impression counts, it can be hard to take action.  Instead, it becomes easy to stall, delaying action while ever-planning the perfect first impression.  Unfortunately, often this prevents us from making any impression at all – to paraphrase Voltaire, the perfect becomes the enemy of the good.

And without a first impression, there can be no second, third, fourth, and so on.  In this context, the first impression counts because it builds the momentum required to achieve any goal.  As Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu noted, “a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

I’ve been researching a book for years and planning a blog for months.  In doing so, I’ve been talking my book, planning the steps, improving my writing, etc.  But when Napoleon Hill hit my inbox last week – Don’t wait. The time will never be just right – I realized I’d made the task too big and was stalling.  So, I dumbed it down and am stepping up to take action, to make a first impression.

Today 35 years ago and six weeks premature I made my first impression.  Today at least six weeks premature I’m making a different type of first impression.  In the field of communications and influence a first impression is only the first step to building rapport.  Visit again.  We’ll have more to discuss.

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