Geoff, Author at Geoff Blades - Page 23 of 37

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.

Sorry To Tell You—Your Life Coach Is Useless

It’s a question I get all the time:

“Should I work with a coach?”

And every time, I give the same answer:

“Which one?”

The Ultimate Guide To Using Role Models

High performers learn from other high performers. If you want to manifest a change in your life or achieve a certain goal, the best thing you can do is study people who have already done it.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with many hundreds of highly successful people.

Yet I’ve found that there are small things that distinguish the most successful few. One of those is role models.

Some Great Carnegie Principles for Leading

I keep on my desk a summary of Dale Carnegie’s principles from his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

In his book he has some 30 simple principles you can easily use that he boils down to short statements like, “Give honest and sincere appreciation.”

I keep them as a reminder for myself and sometimes I work through them with my clients, such as today.

My client is having a difficult situation with one of her senior managers.

The manager has clearly made some mistakes, my client could have managed her better, but at this point my client wants to get the relationship back on the road.

After talking about it for a little bit, we went into each of Carnegie’s principles for being a leader.

It was a hugely constructive way for us to resolve this, and I thought some of you might benefit from reminding yourself of these principles too:

Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
Let the other person save face.
Praise every improvement.
Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
Make the other person happy about doing what you suggest.

Why Being "Crazy" Is The Only Way To Evolve

Those of you who have been around here for a while and know how I roll, know that part of my life is exploring how deep the rabbit hole goes.

It’s “crazy” to tell a “normal” person that you do meditation and hypnosis a couple of hours a day because you perceive that world to be deeper than this one, but that’s the truth of how I live.

I’m not into wasting time reading the news or Facebook or some other crap that people waste their time on.

I avoid their programming. I’m into programming that makes my life better.

And I know that those of you who are serious about evolving beyond this monkey brain and body that we find ourselves shoved into feel the same.

So, I invite you to a game I’ve been playing with myself for a couple of months.

Doing Great Things Isn’t Always Great

I saw this chart on LinkedIn, so I decided to rip it off and put it here.

Although it’s small, I hope you can get the notion.

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I’ve personally experienced this journey a number of times, and many of my friends and clients have too.

They say it takes decades to become an overnight success, and this shows you how it happens.

The 1% Aren’t Winning, But These 5 Entrepreneurs Are

The 1% aren’t winning. I say it over and over again in my work, but it’s a tough pill for most people to swallow.

Intellectually, we can understand that money is not the same as happiness. But on some basic level we are all taught to equate financial success with life success. No matter what our cultural programming, it’s a statistical fact that 2/3rds of workers in America, regardless of class, admit to being unhappy in their job.

But if the 1% aren’t winning, who is?

The builders. Creators. Sure, many of them may not yet have the success that they want, but they are living a life of purpose, driven by a vision and passion to make the world a better place.

Here are five of my favorite builders: