Geoff, Author at Geoff Blades

Make Big Hard Decisions Easily, or At Least Easier

His problem wasn’t unique.

Each of my Do What You Want books I open by telling a story about two business leaders, Gary Cohn and Jeff Bezos, at similar crossroads.

Bezos was at DE Shaw, wondering do I leave this great job to build the everything store. Cohn had been sitting as president of Goldman Sachs with his eye on the CEO seat, thinking about how to ascend or make a move.

The executive sitting next to me on the plane was in the same bind.

From the ground level he’s climbed his way to the near top of a towering company, where he sits an arms-length from the corner office.

Unclear of how long it will be before the CEO retires, and facing plenty of internal competition for the top job, constantly he’s asking himself…

Do I Stay Or Do I Go?

For most of the flight we were busy being anti-social on a plane, but as the flight attendants began preparing the cabin to land at Newark, we started talking.

“So, what do you do?” he asked.

“I do what I want” is my playful answer, but wanting to avoid all that I dodged his question, “I’m a consultant. How about you?”

Like most top executives, unsatisfied with my evasive answer he went deeper, “What type of consulting?”

“Our consulting firm is focused on systematic winning in your business, but my work is far more personal, working with leaders in getting what they want.”

“I’m a leader, I want to get what I want,” he half-joked, “I wonder if you’ve had any experience with this type of problem I’m facing…”

Game On…

Often when people present problems to me they’ve spent so much time wrapping themselves around the axle that they think their problem is super complicated and unique.

Vista Equity Partners crushes it because they figured out that the types of companies they buy can be optimized the same way, and our problems are much the same.

Sitting back and taking a big sigh, he told me how much he loved his job, how his career had been a rocket ship, but, now, he found himself stuck at a crossroad…

Like an actor taking a gulp of air before delivering his big line, slowing his voice and looking me deep in the eyes, he said, “I just don’t know if I should stay in my job or leave to start this new venture…”

Within 15 seconds I could see exactly where he was stuck.

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Happy Fake Facebook Birthday!

Last weekend was my fake Facebook birthday so I took a trip to celebrate.

Each year I forget my fake birthday until a couple days before I start receiving texts, and then I feel a little guilty.

For obvious reasons I gave a fake ID to Facebook, not knowing that for years to come I’d be stealing fake birthday wishes from the community.

I used to tell people “no, no, it’s only my fake Facebook birthday,” but I saw it robbed them of birthday joy so I learned to just say thank you.

This year I took it a step further and celebrated too 🙂

Fake, Real, Reality…

One of my Level 4 Tools is called the Present Dashboard.

Part of the tool is looking out through your eyes at your life like you’re looking through the windshield of a car.

This helps you be in the driver’s seat of your brain, giving you more choice on what you pay attention to, and how it makes you think and feel.

You can imagine looking out through the windshield at a traffic-filled overcast day, or you can see the sun shining brightly on a road of your dreams.

Your “real” day might seem hard, but looking through your windshield you might choose to experience it more joyfully.

A challenging workout you might see like fun play. A tough meeting you might imagine going smoothly, and choose to brighten up and feel cheery no matter how it goes.

The Present Dashboard teaches your brain the difference between reality and what we make “real.”

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In Pursuit Of Magic

As I go deeper in the mind I find it increasingly hard to talk about.

For instance, writing about remote viewing is odd enough, let alone what it actually implies for our reality.

It’s easy to dismiss what we don’t understand, and just allowing yourself to think there might be something to remote viewing opens the door to how on earth it could be possible. If we are able to access information from the so-called future and pass it back to ourselves today, then what does this say about our reality?

That’s the problem on topics of the mind.

When you open the door, the whole damn tide floods in.

Meditation Is A Gentle Ride

When you get into meditation you learn that our awareness extends beyond the meat and two veg.

With meditation you can easily explore consciousness by getting your feet a little wet, but sometimes you’re forced to dive all the way in.

That’s what happened to Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor when the left hemisphere of her brain blew out and she got flushed through the other door.

I write about her all the time because in her TED Talk she provides a rapid glimpse into what enlightened humans describe as the true nature of reality.

To the left hemisphere of the brain the world is solid and rational, yet to the right it’s an energy soup.

Do We Live In A Simulation?

Elon Musk apparently thinks the chances are 1 in billions that we aren’t in a simulation.

I like where he’s coming from, but I’m not so confident that us humans can even comprehend let alone describe what this reality is.

Like trying to explain to my cat where I’m going for lunch, or even what is outside our home in New York, some things aren’t possible for us animals to understand.

We are barely a rung below the monkeys swinging from the trees, our conscious faculties are built to operate in a linear, time-based reality, and you literally must be out of “that mind” to experience reality differently.

Buddhists. Catholics. Muslims. Jews. Greeks. Egyptians. Indians. Conspiracy. Ancients. Hermetics. Philosophers. Trippers. Transcendentalists. Most lately, Science.

Like the Catholic Heaven and Soul, they all describe some form of reality beyond WYSIWYG.

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Rapidly Learn Anything This Summer

People often talk about learning being an advantage in the future, yet when hasn’t this been true?

The caveman that first learned to avoid the lion survived longer, and still today rapidly adapting is the key to thriving.

The faster we learn in school, the better grades we get, the better opportunities that are available to us.

In the workplace those who quickly learn the rules of the game and keep learning the fastest are most likely to accelerate.

It’s also true in our hobbies and sports. The faster we learn, the more fun we have, the more likely we are to keep playing.

Do You Know Why Reading Is So Boring?

Because nobody ever teaches us to read fast enough, our brains get bored.

It’s a Ferrari designed to suck in a massive amount of information, yet because we’ve never been trained to read beyond a fifth-grade level most of us read like driving Miss Daisy.

When you understand why, it’s no surprise that on average we read at the same rate we speak, some 250 words a minute.

The cause is subvocalizing, which means instead of taking in information with our eyes as you do in say reading a traffic sign, we repeat the words eveeeeerrr soooo sloooowly in our heads.

If I had trained Evelyn Wood in high school, I would have bought myself thousands of hours of wasted study and repetition, and the first secret to learning fast is to train yourself to more rapidly input information.

But, that’s just for starters, because we learn little from reading.

Reading Isn’t Learning

Sadly, even few smart highly successful people are continuously learning, and even many who pretend to be are merely listening to podcasts or reading books.

Often when I suggest to people great books like How To Win Friends and Influence People, they tell me something like, “Yep, I read that.”

I then ask questions like: How specifically are you using it? What is your process for reviewing what you learned? If you were tested on it, would you get a passing grade?

When I first began this journey, how we learn seemed pretty obvious.

Of course we know how we learn. We’re learning all of our lives, but I soon realized that us adults are conditioned to be terrible learners.

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Shocking Video Of De Niro Supporting Trump

At the recent Tony Awards Robert De Niro used his star power to promote Trump.

While he did it by giving a big fuck you to the president, he might as well have recorded a Superbowl commercial for Trump.

De Niro got himself an extra 15 hours of fame, but like so many of us on the left he’s helping buy the guy another four years.

Propaganda Everywhere…

But few people get how it really works.

The most basic ingredient of Trump’s winning campaign was…

ATTENTION

Negative attention is still attention, and what Trump most needed to win.

The TWO BILLION dollars in free promotion that the mostly left-selling media handed Trump got him elected, and even top promoters like De Niro still fail to see it.

While many on the left of course believe that the liberal media is “on their side” and trying to stop Trump, they fail to understand that the media is on their own side.

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I Feel So Sorry For Warren Buffett

“So, what, I buy another car, or house, or plane, then what?” He asked me.

“That’s exactly my point,” I responded.

“It’s lame isn’t it…”

Boooooring…

Still too often I hear seemingly ambitious types talking like rap stars about the G650 that they so desperately wish to own.

Of course few will ever make “yacht money,” and some who do will end up just as unfulfilled as the others.

I’m never surprised when I hear about another billionaire who’s all messed up, with their drink or trophies or insecurities or stupid money being thrown around on this or that.

When you can buy whatever you want, where’s the excitement in getting that new thing?

In the dripping in oil rich Arab countries where you’re “bored” into money you see the extreme desperation of the rich.

Prominent license plates cost more than the custom Ferraris and Lambos they’re pasted on—this sad man paid $14.3mm for his #1 license plate—because bored people “spend” their lives playing status games.

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To Become Your Greatest, Get An Anvil

For years I sought better ways to characterize the pursuit of success.

I could see that, ultimately, success is the pursuit of development, that it’s not only (or perhaps at all) about what we “achieve” but much more about who we become.

A real goal is one that is bigger than us and requires growing if we are to succeed.

If you’re not strong enough to pick up a heavy load, then you either leave the heavy lifting to someone else, or you choose to get stronger.

We fail to grow if we’re not stretched, and to forge ourselves into our greatest, we need a goal that forces growth.

I call this an anvil.

Forging Steel

To forge steel you heat it up with a flame, and bash it against an anvil.

Of course nobody asks the steel if this is a pleasant experience, but one would like to believe that it’s worth it to be forged into what you’re destined to be.

Success can feel much the same.

Our society likes to celebrate those who have achieved, but we seldom like to go too deep into what it took for that hero to become this way.

Watching Elon Musk in the world, does anyone think it looks like a laugh a minute?

Sure, plenty of people would love to be a billionaire, but how many would step into the heat and beat themselves against the anvils of SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, SolarCity, and all else that man does?

(I don’t know how he does it without Geoff Blades yet on his side… struggling is how :). Let’s take it to another level, Elon!)

Many of us dream of achieving great things. We dream of becoming great men and women. But we shy away from the anvil because we want an easier way.

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Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

Celebrity suicides tell us a lot.

Life is hard for many of us.

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

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

Don’t Wanna Be Alive

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

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

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

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Pence. Trump. Water Bottle. Covert Influence

A buddy sent me this video of Trump and Pence.

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

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

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

Most People Are Blind To Influence

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

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

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NLP’s Mind Reading Influence

All the time we wish we could get more insight into what people are thinking, and here a little knowledge can go a long way.

An example from NLP is how to decode other people’s non-verbal cues.

Think of it this way, right before you say yes or no, you do something with your body. Maybe your face scrunches on no, or on yes you’re already nodding.

With a little bit of practice, you can easily read minds by reading these cues!

Become Fake Psychic

You don’t need to be an expert at this like the FBI’s Joe Navarro who can interpret a micro gesture on someone’s cheek, but it can be easy and helpful to know if people are agreeing with what you’re saying.

Imagine sitting in a negotiation, and before they say anything, just by reading their cues, you know whether they’re in agreement with you.

Top negotiators I know do this unconsciously in “reading the room,” and others do this more deliberately.

This is how some of the fake psychics work.

It’s an art and a science called cold reading where you do something like…

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How Learning To Shoot Like John Wick Transformed These People

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Invited My Friends

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

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

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

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

And that got me thinking…

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

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

I borrowed that headline from a Bloomberg article on an ex-Barclays trader who is on trial for rigging the Euribor market.

Supposedly as a strategy to downplay his seniority and hence his guilt, he compared being a vice president at Barclays as “equivalent to the guy that serves you in McDonald’s.”

By making comments like, “As ridiculous as it sounds, a coffee boy at Barclays gets paid 400,000 pounds a year” he proved his wanker banker status, but he was also speaking some truth.

“Vice president is not what everyone thinks it is,” he stated. “It is junior.”

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One Change To Help Stop Active Shooters

Stop making them famous.

How?

Stop disclosing their name—Call them busted person X

Stop broadcasting their face—How does it help anyone knowing what they looked like?

Stop telling their stories—Killing innocent people shouldn’t be a six-part mini-series like celebrating the work of Jeffrey Dahmer.

Stop spreading their fear—Terrorists’ terror spreads because we spread it.

Stop glorifying their violence—Our “entertainment” complex is the greatest promoter of violence (TV, movies, games, sports) on the planet because we demand it.

Stop tuning in—There’s a difference between being “informed” about another lunatic vs. rolling around like a pig in their murder like you’re watching CSI.

Fame-Obsessed World

We live in a fame-obsessed world and sick minds will do just about anything to break the Internet.

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Where’s That North Korea Worry Now?

Writing this article earlier in the week, I thought I was so insightful highlighting the amount of worry that was wasted on North Korea.

Then, Drudge, with his sirens blaring and massive headline—NKorea Threatens To Cancel Trump Summit—reminded me that we can still find plenty to fear.

At first I thought, crap my article is outdated, but then I realized, actually, it’s even more timely.

We can allow our emotions to be whipped around by things that we can’t control—e.g. the worst people in our world, stock market, nearly everything else—or we can…

Choose Our Thoughts

In nearly 20 years of researching these topics, there’s one crucial lesson that most stands out—

We are what we think.

Literally, what we think about is our ENTIRE experience of reality.

If you’re a football fan and spend all day every day immersed in football, this becomes your life.

If you’re an investor who spends every waking moment thinking about opportunities in the market, the market is your reality.

And if you’re tuned into fearful news all day every day, your life is full of fear and worry.

Guard Your Mind

Around the time ding dong North Korea was doing his little public display of disaffection, my client told me about a weekend retreat he attended with a group of business leaders.

Over dinners and lunches they spent hours talking about the situation, indulging the fears, debating what to do…

None of them could do anything.

They knew nothing beyond what the media had told them. They aren’t in any way involved in military or government or any group that solves such problems, yet they spent their weekend infecting each other with fear.

While it’s important to be informed of some of what’s happening in our world, it’s equally important to be informed about how our world is using us and our attention.

It’s not just that we live in a world of propaganda—which is so dominant that presidential elections are, literally, won off of it—but because, especially in this case, it’s obvious there is plenty of theatrics going on.

Over time the so-called experts and propagandists gave us many intelligent-sounding explanations of the threat from North Korea, but I’m yet to hear an intelligent explanation of how it was resolved!

How did two mortal enemies who’ve been spewing hatred and K-pop across the DMZ for decades get to this WWE gesture?

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Do Principles Really Drive Ray Dalio’s Success?

After reading our report on Living Dalio’s Principles a client put a good question to me.

Is it possible that we give too much credit to Dalio’s principles because we’re biased by his success?

Yes, absolutely.

It’s entirely possible that while Ray asserts principles as the cause of his success, the radical truth is that we have no way of actually measuring their causality.

How could we?

Surely there are people out there with great principles and terrible results and those with great results and terrible principles. Heck, for all we know there is an alternate reality in which Ray Dalio is even more successful without having even thought about a principle.

That’s the hard thing about “modeling” success. We can’t know what drives it.

Returns on Luck

Some people tell stories of how they got lucky and won the lottery, whereas others say they deliberately picked the winning numbers.

A way you might assess their skill is to have them replicate their success—which Dalio has done for years—but even then you might still struggle to distinguish skill from luck.

All success is similarly squishy to model.

Is Tom Brady’s success the product of his rigorous TB12 Method, or would he have crushed it anyways? Who knows?

What about Michael Schumacher? For decades he raced at 300 km/h, yet he was permanently disabled in a skiing accident. Was he under-skilled or out of luck?

Did Mark Cuban get lucky because he sold Yahoo! stock at the right time? Is Zuckerberg a genius or was he lucky he wasn’t born in 1885? Was Myspace just less lucky?

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Watch Tony Hawk Fail

I saw James Altucher write about interviewing Tony Hawk so I went and watched this video.

It’s only a couple of minutes long, and it’s worth watching to see this guy just fails and fails and fails until he pulls it off!

Report: Living Dalio’s Principles

Since I first read the pdf version of Principles, I’ve been fascinated by the way Ray Dalio thinks.

It’s true that his billionaire success is what drew me into his thinking, but it’s the rigor of Ray’s ideas that really hooked me.

Although I spend my life exploring ideas, I’m intensely practical. I’m not interested in philosophy or kicking around ideas for the sake of it, but in ideas that you can use.

And that’s what I see from Ray.

He’s deep, deep, deep on the topics he knows, but ultimately he’s focused on identifying the best ideas so he can rigorously put them to work.

More Than Principles

While I find Ray’s principles incredibly fascinating, what I most enjoyed in reading Ray’s recently released book, Principles, was his story at the front.

Some time ago I remember seeing Ray quoted about failure, and thought to myself, With all of his success, what could he possibly know about failure?

It turns out, quite a lot.

In fact, the way Ray tells his story, it was failure that led him to develop his principles-based approach to begin with, so he could avoid making the same mistakes.

Writing with great humility, throughout the book Ray calls himself things like a “dumb shit,” and suggests that the success he’s created has less to do with him, and more to do with his principles.

While there’s certainly some modesty in that, perhaps the greatest learning from Ray’s book is seeing that it’s not so much his principles that have driven his success, but the discipline and focus that Ray dedicates to living this way.

How Do You Live It?

In reading Ray’s book I began to think more deeply about how, specifically, we each might develop and use our own principles.

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Why We Resist Change And How To Change It

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

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

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

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

Who Is The “I?”

“I’m” just not any good at this?

“I’ve” always been this way.

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

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

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

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

See Yourself As A Doer

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

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

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

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For Sale: Banker Life Saving Program

This article I wrote last week on why bankers lives suck really struck a chord.

Speaking to many people on Wall Street it’s clear that there is a serious problem that banks are seemingly looking to solve.

This one article drove more traffic to our websites than anything else I have written this year.

If I were an internet marketer I would exploit it by writing about the same topic over and over again, but that’s lame to me and I won’t be writing about this again.

That said, I would be a terrible advocate for the amazing stuff we build at BLK if I didn’t say that we would love to partner with a big bank in building this program.

It’s sad to say it this way, and this isn’t some emotional marketing, but…

In the last handful of years this program we have built for transforming how you win in banking may have, literally, saved analyst lives.

I know that’s heavy, but no kid should die from a fucking desk job, and it’s up to us adults to solve the problem.

And there’s more…

On the lighter side, the bank that we build this program with will find all of their employees will get happier, better, more loyal, and in every way love their job and their life more.

AND, YOU WILL ALL MAKE TONS MORE MONEY.

If you want to save banker lives and win more, please reach out, we’d love to chat.

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

Investment banking is hardly known for its cushy lifestyle, but every now and then we’re reminded of just how bad it can be.

Earlier this week a buddy forwarded me this email message from a staffer at Moelis.

I don’t know whether it’s legit or not (I’m told it is), but irrespective it’s hardly a unique message in investment banking.

Long story short, the staffer (who is responsible for assigning bankers to projects) sent an email to his team after walking the floor at 2am, and noticing how many seats were empty.

As he supposedly wrote—

Given that new staffings continue to flow in and you are all very near capacity, the only way I can think of to differentiate among you is to see who is in the office in the wee hours of the morning.

Ouch!

Can you imagine that?

You’re working your ass off 7 days a week in a grueling job, and now you’re being judged on how busy you are based on whether you’re in the office at 2am?

I can. I lived that life, and I also did a year in the job of staffer.

While it’s easy to beat up on the staffer for his lack of managerial skills (and judgement in sending that email), I can attest that it was perhaps the hardest job I did in banking, where you’re constantly pulled and pushed in every direction.

It’s demand and supply, baby!

As the staffer, you have a limited pool of resources to assign to projects, and unlimited mouths to feed.

In my experience it was the rare senior banker who would step back and really think carefully about the work that needed to be done (blast from the past shout out to George Lee, Mike Wishart and Kevin Quinn), and whether it was worth having someone sit up all night and do it.

Generally, that’s not because senior bankers perceive working like a medical resident as a rite of passage, or they don’t care about their team, but because they also have mouths to feed.

Clients. Bosses. Shareholders. Enormous, enormous pressure to perform.

As Lloyd Blankfein once put it, the culture of insecurity runs all the way to the top in banking, and while senior bankers might want to help their juniors have a more balanced life, most of all they want to deliver their best for their clients.

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