Geoff, Author at Geoff Blades - Page 22 of 36

Too Old Not To Settle

There are many complexities and constraints when it comes to creating the lives we truly want.

In different ways it has been said—you can have everything you want, just not all at the same time. And, indeed, throughout our lives we are forced to choose, to sequence our “wants” according to what makes sense for our circumstances.

Coming out of school with a bunch of debt, it’s harder to venture out on your own. With a young family and mouths to feed, it’s harder to take risk. With the runway of a great career, it’s harder, and often wiser, to work that track for the “right” amount of time.

If we do it right, and we’re lucky to live long enough, by “simply” making the right choices at each point in time, we can create our most magical lives.

Yet, it can be very hard to keep our eye on the prize.

Why You Feel Stuck—And 6 Tools How To Push Through

Focus Tools

How many of you have goals that you can’t seem to get yourself to focus on?

They might be professional, personal, getting things done around the home. You know that you “want” to do them, but you just can’t consistently get yourself to take action.

I know that’s a problem for many of us because I know few people who it isn’t a problem for, and because many of you keep telling me it’s a problem.

This weekend I did a call with a member of our community.

Some time ago he’d reached out to me about his grandest vision for his career and life, and although he’s too junior to be a client, I jumped on the phone and gave him some pointers.

He’s moving, he’s making good progress on his goal, but some days when he sits down eager to get things done, he finds himself stuck.

He knows the things he wants to get done, but, well, he can’t get himself to do them.

Mike Tyson’s Daily Routine Was Simple, Predictable, And Unstoppable

In his latest book, Iron Ambition: My life with Cus D’Amato, Mike Tyson lays out what it took to become a champ.

Inside, Tyson details his relationship with his trainer and what took him from a punk kid in Brooklyn involved in petty crime to 7 years later becoming the youngest heavyweight champ.

How did he do it?

Simply. There was no secret bullet, no expensive course he took that “catapulted him to reach his full potential.”

He became the best in the world by building a daily training routine with a simple set of tools—tools you can use to become a champ in your own life.

Tyson’s Daily Routine Uses Tools You Already Have

Cus D’Amato, Tyson’s trainer, gave Tyson a “secret sauce” of mental training anyone can practice:

Affirmations
Hypnosis
Visualization

It's Not Just You: Why So Many of Us Cannot Feel Fulfilled

A trap many of us Do What You Wanters fall into is that we spend too much time obsessing over that thing we want, and too little time indulging in what we already have.

We certainly will spend our lives dreaming of and charging after a rosier future, but we also want to be smelling the roses around us.

Rushing to get out the door every morning, one of my clients realized he’d been waking up fixating on what he wanted to get done today, but missing out on that precious little time he gets with his boys.

He travels and works late, so he misses them most nights. This 15 minutes in the morning is all he really gets during the week, and now he’s fixating on enjoying it.

As Epicurus put it, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

The Complete Guide To Winning Daily Routines

You hear a lot about the importance of daily routines, but how many of us actually use them?

I know many professionals trying to compete at the top of their game, and honestly, many teachers who promote the importance of daily routines, who fail to use them. That’s because, as I did for years, we often look at routines completely wrong.

In the same way that many people see exercise as hard and grueling and something to be avoided, we often think of building winning routines as requiring a lot of “hard work.” In fact, the opposite is true.

Top daily routines aren’t about grinding it out against a stop watch, squeezing every ounce of productivity from your day, but getting yourself focused and in the right state of mind to get done those things that truly matter to you.

Like the rituals a top athlete follows ahead of a competition, daily routines are the key to top performance, but they’re also about something far more important—feeling happier and more energized every day.

None of us want to be lazing around in bed tired hitting snooze, do we? Of course not. We all love the idea of bouncing out of bed excited to dive into our day, right?

Similarly, none of us want to be sitting at our desk stressed, worried, whining about all the things we “have to” get done. We want to be clear on what matters, focused on doing it, and feel great looking back at the end of the day having gotten it done.

In this guide I’m sharing with you my ultimate daily routines, a system for your day, broken down into three phases:

Pre-Productive Phase
Productive Phase
Post-Productive Phase

Why I Don’t Charge For Coaching

What most people call “coaching,” I do for free.

Sitting with someone and spewing advice is a service people charge for, but it’s not particularly valuable. It might get someone to feel better about their day and life, but it’s unlikely to lead to transformational results.

To get transformational results, you have to take the best knowledge and build systems of continuous improvement that you work and re-work every day until you get what you want.

Results are valuable, and they are the only thing I can imagine charging people for.

Do You Want Advice, Or Results?

A concern I have when I write each and every one of these newsletters is that I’m leading you into the same trap that I found myself in.

Spending more than 10 years of my life reading thousands of books on personal development, I learned a lot, but, honestly, I mostly just filled my head with redundant knowledge.

That knowledge is incredibly interesting to me, but knowledge by itself is next to useless. Just like that piece of meat between your, um, ears, it’s what you do with it that counts.

I’ve read many amazing books that gave me amazing knowledge. I’ve sat with top executive coaches—who charge six and seven figures per client—who have also shared ridiculously good knowledge with me, but on its own, it all fails to get the job done.

3 Life Lessons I Learned While "Wasting Time"

One of the tenets of my life, and the thing that has allowed me to keep creating the most amazing life I can imagine, is that I prioritize learning above everything else.

To that end, I feel very grateful to the people who have written the thousands of books that have helped me keep growing, and to the world-class mentors and teachers who have groomed me.

Yet, when people ask me about the most transformational experiences of my life, about where I learned the most, I rarely give them the answer they expect. I learned a lot at Goldman Sachs. I learned a lot at the Carlyle Group. I learned a lot training with world-renowned experts, but where did I learn the most important lessons of my life?

When I was wasting time.

“Wasting time” is a phrase people use with a negative connotation, but for me at least, wasting time means doing something I want to do, even if I can’t explain why.

I want to learn to sing, but can’t figure out why? Well, better go spend some time learning. My brain has a reason for it, and I know if I do what “I’m told,” I’ll get something I need out of it.

Living that way is odd for a lot of people. When they were kids it was easy, but as adults, they’re out of the habit of doing things that they can’t directly connect to “making progress,” and they criticize themselves for wanting things that aren’t obviously beneficial to them in “serious” ways.

But life is too important to take seriously, and when you venture into these other areas you learn things that often surprise you. Here’s the three most important life lessons I learned by wasting time.

1. I Learned To Embarrass Myself By Singing

We live in a pathetically cynical society. When I first decided to learn to sing, it wasn’t because of some deep ambition. I didn’t want to be Beyonce. I just thought singing sounded fun.

How To Avoid Sacrificing Your Life For A Job

20 years of life wasted.

That’s what I thought when I saw this article talking about big law firms culling partners.

Working as an investment banker you get to see the “worst” of what it’s like to be a lawyer, at least a securities lawyer, and boy, you’d have to really love the law to do that job.

Now, of course many of them do, but others who I’ve met over the years are in the legal profession for the same reason many people are in “top” jobs:

At some point in time, they thought being a lawyer was a top job.

They’re right, it was.

So too was being an investment banker, private equity partner, hedge fund manager, consultant, etc. but today nearly every profession is under significant threat.

As the article states, “Being made partner at a big law firm used to be seen as a brass ring of prestige, wealth and security. But it turns out that it is not so secure after all.”

Just like many “good jobs” of the past, being a lawyer isn’t so good anymore. And with more supply than demand for legal services, the prediction is that all law firms are going to be slimming down.

When the jobs of auto workers and grocery store checkout clerks go away, we’re not surprised, but when top jobs become less attractive, it creates far bigger problems for one main reason.

9 Pieces of Life Advice People Love To Misinterpret

As many of you know, I never dreamed of becoming a, um, “self-help expert.”

When I began this work back in 2000, sitting at Goldman Sachs dreaming of the life I truly wanted, I had no idea where reading a bunch of self-help books would lead me.

Hat down, glasses on, the day I sheepishly crept into the self-help section of the bookstore hoping not to be seen, thinking, “who the fuck needs this stuff?” I was pretty desperate.

My head down work hard approach had gotten me a long way, but now asking myself the question that had come to dominate my life—What Do I Want?—I’d shown up here with the other losers looking for answers…

Hidden amongst the trillions of tons of earth on this planet we have uncovered only enough gold to fill two Olympic sized swimming pools.

To find the gold you must throw out a lot of ore, and life advice is the same. Here are 9 of the most common misinterpretations of legitimate life advice.

How To Say No To Wasting Time

Many of us struggle to effectively manage our time. With an inundation of emails, phone calls, and meeting requests, we must keep finding ways to protect our time for what matters most.

That often requires becoming better at saying “No.”

This can be hard to do. We all have a fear of missing out, of saying no to an opportunity that might just change our lives. Maybe this lunch is where we hear the idea that comes to define our career. Maybe this connection will be a lifelong friend.

If you let that thinking rule your actions, you are bound for failure.

How To Ask For Anything

Whatever you want in life, you’re going to have to ask for it. It doesn’t matter if you desire to excel in your career or to live on the beach—I’ve done both—you’re going to need other people’s help.

A problem many of us face is that we think of every ask as a unique event. Asking for a raise is different to asking for a date is different to asking for a sale. As a result, we focus on developing situation-specific strategies that might work for one thing, but seldom make us better at asking for everything.

Getting someone to do what you want is influence, and influence is a fundamental skill we all need. You don’t need 20 “influence hacks.” To become an expert at asking for what you want, you need a reliable system that you use over and over again in every situation.

Commencement Speech Worth Reading!

Most commencement speeches are worse than most self-help books, filled with useless platitudes that benefit no-one.

This is different.

Each of us can massively change the world, but only if we are willing to do what it takes…

_______________

The following are the remarks by Naval Adm. William H. McRaven, ninth commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, at the University-wide Commencement at The University of Texas at Austin on May 17:

President Powers, Provost Fenves, Deans, members of the faculty, family and friends and most importantly, the class of 2014. Congratulations on your achievement.

It’s been almost 37 years to the day that I graduated from UT. I remember a lot of things about that day. I remember I had throbbing headache from a party the night before. I remember I had a serious girlfriend, whom I later married — that’s important to remember by the way — and I remember that I was getting commissioned in the Navy that day.

But of all the things I remember, I don’t have a clue who the commencement speaker was that evening, and I certainly don’t remember anything they said. So, acknowledging that fact, if I can’t make this commencement speech memorable, I will at least try to make it short.

3 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Chasing "Easy Passive Income!"

When you work in the personal development space, you run across a lot of charlatans. It’s not hard to understand why. If you’re looking for advice on how to improve yourself, you’re saying you’re willing to trust someone.

It’s a sad reality, but there will always be vultures out there looking to scam anyone who makes the mistake of trusting them.

One of the most common scams these people advertise is the promise of “passive income.” I don’t put passive income in quotations because I don’t believe in making your money work for you—I “retired” from Goldman Sachs at 29, I understand investing. I put it in quotations because most passive income schemes are scammy nonsense designed to prey on insecurity and ambition.

I get it, money is important, and having more of it is nearly always a good thing. But what is it specifically about passive income schemes that is so attractive? If you’re interested in making your money work for you, there’s the whole world of finance and investing for that, so why the fascination with the “side hustle” and building “passive income streams?”

It’s because passive income schemes aren’t speaking to your desire for greater wealth, they’re targeting a different part of you entirely. To really understand this, ask yourself these three questions.

How To Take Control of Your Thoughts

I spent most of my career stressed and frustrated, thinking ahead to the day when I could quit my job and feel “free.”

Well, when I quit my job, it didn’t work that way.

Jumping from the bonfire into the forest fire, doing what I wanted was way harder than anything I had ever done on Wall Street, and my mind simply wasn’t up for the task.

I wanted to write a book. In my head, it sounded easy, almost a bit indulgent. It turned out to be the hardest thing I’d ever done.

For days, weeks, months, and eventually years, my stress and frustration went far beyond my ability to manage it.

Those were by far the hardest years of my life. Unwilling to let the overwhelming task beat me, I “forced” my mind to find a way through.

For the first time in my life, I was feeling “unhappy,” “depressed,” “anxious,” “fearful.”

Taking Control Of Your Thoughts

I simply wanted to feel amazing every day.

Already thinking I was an “expert” on getting what you want, I realized that I was missing a big piece of the puzzle.

How do you keep taking powerful actions when your mind isn’t up for the task? How do you train yourself to feel great when those things around you (e.g. your life) keep dragging you back down?

So many of us are victims to our minds. The thoughts in our heads constantly turning, few of us feel how we want to feel each day. Tired, we use our daily upper, caffeine. Stressed, we bring ourselves back down with alcohol. Unable to stop that damn machine at night, we put out the lights with sleeping aids.

This is the best our society teaches us to do, but we can do better.

The fact is, you can take control of your mind and thoughts. It’s not easy. In fact it’s damn hard.

It’s taken me years of daily practice, and I’m still far from perfect at it. But having gone deeper on the mind than is “reasonable” (e.g. hours a day of training) I’ve found enough of the map that I can see the rest of the territory.

How To Learn A New Skill—And Actually Master It

A lack of necessary skills is almost always the gap between idea and execution.

You’ve surely experienced the frustration that happens when you see an opportunity in your life, but lack the knowledge to act on it. We all have. You know you deserve to make more money, but you don’t know how to negotiate. You have a genius idea for a business, but you don’t know how to sell.

If you’ve ever tried to research and learn a new skill, you’ve run into two schools of thought:

The 10,000 hour rule. This is the old school belief that to master a skill, you need to dedicate 10,000 hours to learning and perfecting it.

The “Just Enough” method. This is particularly popular with online coaches. The idea is that you don’t have to be an expert, you have to learn “just enough” to be functional.

Both these schools have their merits, but neither are a complete solution.

If you try to gain 10,000 hours of negotiating experience before asking them to show you the money, you’ll be a decade older with nothing to show for it.

If you learn just enough to negotiate a slight raise now, you might get what you’re looking for in the short-term, but at every level you’ll still fail to earn what you’re worth.

I teach my clients a system for building skills that enables them to rapidly—within days or weeks —reach a high level of competence (relying on the 80/20 Principle), while at the same time taking the daily actions that build to mastery over time.

How do you get enough skill to be dangerous and get what you want now, and keep becoming more dangerous over time?

Career Planning: The Complete Guide

Do you have a career plan?

I’m sorry, that was a loaded question. Most people think they have a career plan, and according to everything they’ve been told their entire life, they do.

The problem is we’ve been lied to. As a child, you were taught two things:

How to set a big goal for your life. You wanted to be POTUS, CEO, a star, or a fireman (obviously, the coolest choice.)
How to do the work you’re assigned. In school, you learned how to be on time. How to complete assignments. How to follow instructions. You learned that the path forward in life is to do the work you are given until the person in charge says, “Okay, you can move forward now.”

As a result, most of us plan our careers the entirely wrong way. We set a big goal for our life, and then show up to work every day and grind. The path forward to us is, “Work harder and I’ll get there.”

That’s not a plan. That’s a dream.

Dreams are great. You need something to aim for, and you should never sell yourself short by aiming small. But when you wake up from dreaming big, you need a plan to get there.

Over more than a decade of research I created a five-step system, The System For Doing What You Want, that is designed to get you from where you are in your career and life today, to wherever you want to be.

How To Focus On What Really Matters—And Stop Wasting Time

“What do you want most in life?“

Anytime a client tells me they want to “focus on what really matters in life” and “stop wasting so much time,” I ask them that question. If they can’t tell me what they want in the distant future, they can at least tell me what they want right now.

While they’re usually prepared for the first question, they’re almost never ready for my follow up:

“Then why don’t you act like it?”

52 Books To Change Your Life In 1 Year

Postscript—

I’ve thought many times about taking this article down. It’s true that I like these books, and reading was indeed a very important part of my process of transfomation, yet…

One thing I learned from nearly two decades of reading is that pouring through books is of little value to you, relative to taking the best books and mastering them.

For instance, in speaking with someone about communications, I suggested, rather than reading a bunch of pretty good books, go deep into mastering Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People.

Sure, there’s lots of great books out there on this topic, but in the end it’s not what you’ve read that counts, but specifically, how good are you at putting this knowledge to work?

So, I keep this article here, but strongly suggest that rather than kindof knowing 52 books this year, master a small number that truly drive transformational learnings and results for you.

Here’s five from this list I find truly transforming—

Eat That Frog

The Magic Of Thinking Big

Man’s Search For Meaning

Influence

Flow

And, btw, 3 of my all time favorites aren’t even listed here, coz they’re more like bibles than to read this year—

Dale Carnegie’s book above, and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and Outwitting The Devil.

Also, I have to tout my own book, Do What You Want.

It is the one book I wish someone had handed me before I spent years of my life reading all those books.

I won’t claim it’s better than some of these great books, but it by far would have been the most valuable book for me.

__________________________

I started this new phase of my life by reading. Years before I quit Goldman Sachs, stepping back from my career and asking, What Do I Want? I had no clue where to go for answers.
So I just started reading books on self-help, personal development and everything else that I thought would help me figure out my life. Like Forrest Gump, one day I started reading, and I never stopped. All the time people ask me what I’m searching for in all these books, and I tell them quite simply I’m searching for the same thing that you are.

Hence, if I were to recommend one simple practice to people who are serious about getting what they want, it’d be this: Grow and learn. Read at least one book a week.

I know to some people that sounds like a lot, but I also know that if most people stack up the amount of time that they spend reading junk (e.g. basically all “disposable” information online or in the news), they’d find tons of time to consume knowledge that will transform their life.

For those of you who are looking to keep growing, I’ve put together this course of 52 books for you to read over the next year—one book a week—that will transform you and your life.

Week 1

Eat That Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

Brian Tracy’s classic is one of the best books on getting things done. Goal setting, initiative, focus, and follow through—it covers it all. It’s the perfect choice to get the ball rolling in week 1.

Is Passion Enough?

“Follow your passion.”

I don’t know how many self-help junkies I’ve heard say that, as if it was a deep, actionable insight that escaped most people.

The problem I have with people who say “Follow your passion” isn’t that it’s bad advice (it is) or that it’s skin-deep pseudo-philosophy (it’s also that). My problem with people who tell others that all they need to do is follow their passion is that they hurt people.

Passion is a wonderful, critical component to success and a fulfilling life. But a component on its own is useless, and passion by itself is simply not enough.

Prescribing “follow your passion” as a complete life philosophy is like teaching a young person to drive by saying “push the gas.”

The 1 Thing No One Wants To Admit About Success

What is success to you? Money? “Freedom”?

Doing something meaningful? What is that?

There’s lots of reasons to chase success, but there’s one they don’t talk about.

We live in a culture where we build cults of personality around our most successful people. We put their inspirational quotes on our walls. We share “motivational” memes on Facebook. We watch Rocky montages every morning.

Well, some of us…

Rocky

The point is, we’re very comfortable fetishizing the hard work that goes into success. We know it doesn’t come easy. We know success is a grind. We love the distraction of the hustle.

But there’s one aspect of success that we all know, somewhere deep inside, that we don’t say out loud:

We all know success is empty.