Outrage is the new happy.
At a time in human history our lives have never been better you might think it’s never been worse.
The economy is still on a tear.
Living standards are the best they’ve ever been, everywhere.
Our lives only get better and better.
Yet so few of us humans ever get happier.
Anger.
Outrage.
Loneliness.
Anxiety.
Fear.
These are the daily killers of the human race.
We constantly blame it on something wrong out there, but it’s only going on in here.
A challenge some people face in retiring is what it means.
Who are you now?
How do you stay relevant?
Engaged?
Be someone of value in the world?
A Goldman Sachs partner said to me—
I saw Hank [Paulson] walking down the street and I felt sorry for him.
I thought to myself…
He was CEO of Goldman Sachs.
Treasury Secretary.
Now he’s just a guy on the street.
I love Hank and I felt bad thinking that, but really what I’m saying is what does retiring mean for me?
The drama with WeWork highlights a theme as old as humanity.
It’s not that for some rational reason investors changed their view of the company.
It’s that investors have never been rational.
As long as investors are in a frenzy they’ll justify anything.
Until, well, they don’t.
Real Estate tycoon, Sam Zell, said it well…
More or less, what does WeWork actually have that’s of value?
Cash burning business.
A model that has failed every single time.
Offset by…
Wait for it…
Being cool.
Being cool like Theranos you can get away with just about anything until you can’t.
We often talk about being open minded, don’t we?
Wanting to unlock our potential.
See another person’s perspective.
The world through another’s eyes.
For some people it comes more naturally, but for most of us it can take some training.
We live in an increasingly polarized world.
Left or right.
Black or white.
Binary or not binary.
Climate change believer or denier, etc.
This tears our world apart, but ultimately has nothing to do with our world.
Only the way our brains are wired.
Like a computer—0,1.
Like most great spiritual teachers he’s a storyteller.
Often avoiding direct answers his stories convey what you need.
I met with him to discuss a leap I was making.
Back then I felt stuck.
There were moves I didn’t know how to make.
Things I wasn’t able to do.
I only knew to continue.
After we met I sat in a filmed studio session he was hosting.
I don’t recall where he started but like a dream soon we had arrived here.
“Do you know the caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly?” he provoked the audience.
When the caterpillar goes into its chrysalis it doesn’t know why.
It’s living its nature.
Building a protective shell encasing itself inside.
It cannot know why.
Nor what it will emerge to be.
Where do you find that crazy job you truly want?
How do you hunt it down?
Best get yourself in front of opportunities?
It’s the hardest problem salespeople spend their lives solving.
Often we think of selling as what you do when you have a prospect in front of you.
When in fact most the sale happened way before that.
In the way a top salesperson prepares for the sale.
Developing collateral.
If they’re a real pro, laying out their best ideas in a selling Black Book.
But FAR MORE importantly…
In the way they target their hungry buyers.
Kids in Africa.
India.
Half the damn world.
They are TRYING to survive.
It was 2001.
The Internet bubble had burst.
Goldman’s Silicon Valley office I’d relocated to was being slashed.
It didn’t make sense to me.
Is this as good as it gets?
All these people who’ve given their life to this business just trying to survive?
We received a bunch of emails on this article, When You Must Smash It, basically asking the same thing—
How can I better do this for myself?
Great question.
Let’s smash it!
It’s often said that practice makes perfect, but this is wrong.
Practice makes permanent.
Perfect practice makes perfect.
Of course in these articles and even my Masterclasses it’s near impossible to convey how to perfectly use these methods.
Reading even 100 top books on boxing is likely far less valuable than one hour training with a pro.
And the same is true with what we can do here together.
That’s said, let’s Smash It further.
“I must smash it,” he said.
“Now is when it really counts.”
For months we’ve been working towards these meetings.
Either he smashes it out of the park.
Or missed opportunity.
On top performance, there’s no in between.
You either show up your best.
Or less than.
Most days for most people it doesn’t matter.
Unlike a pro athlete, no-one’s judging your every move.
Livelihood doesn’t hinge on top performance.
But some days it does.
Where anything less than your best is an F.
Too many people feel stuck in their career.
Not just in so-so jobs, but even many people in top jobs…
Feel like they’re stuck settling for less than they deserve.
I get that some people think what I do is craaazzzy.
But isn’t it more crazy to stay stuck in our careers?
Now, let’s be honest here.
I’m the wrong person to ask what is crazy.
I’ve always been crazy relative to settling for less than we can achieve.
Growing up working poor I didn’t get why people wouldn’t do everything they can to elevate their lives.
At Goldman Sachs, one of the best jobs on the planet, I didn’t get why many people felt stuck complaining.
It’s crazy to me they wouldn’t just make a change.
I lost count past two
Coz when I just think about it
I can never lose
Sings Livy Lee in…
In most pursuits in life there’s no A for effort.
Sure, relative to not trying…
Or putting in our worst…
We should feel better about giving it our best shot.
But in many things, like driving home safely, what counts is do you get there in the end?
There’s plenty of good-enough ideas for landing a job.
Writing your resume.
100 interview questions to prepare for.
Ace the case, and all that stuff.
Good-enough might be good-enough for good-enough jobs but not when you’re focused on…
The job you truly want.
That you’d be crazy excited to land.
The job others might perceive is way out of reach for you.
You may be “unqualified” for.
That others might think is crazy for you to even set your sights on.
Let alone for you to walk in and land.
Chasing around a laser light thinking it’s real.
Shine it on the floor they paw after it like a mouse.
Put it on the wall, they climb up.
Maybe they know it’s a game?
An illusion projected from a device?
Perhaps they play anyways because it’s fun?
They are of course just cats, easily confused by what is real.
Yet are they really much different to kids playing made up games?
No care what is real or make believe, just running around having fun.
What happens to us adults?
I feel I should avoid going deep here.
To say real-ity is an illusion.
Just a light shining through a human machine.
Yet even on a shallow level us adults have mostly forgotten the play.
Taking all this oh so seriously, pawing after “real” things to really change how we feel.
We think…
When I get that house or job or lover or 3 drinks in me, now I’ll be having more fun.
Although our greatest human knowledge tells us that’s the illusion…
We’ve never been taught to really live our dream.
If benefits are the meat of a sale.
Objections are the veggies.
They’re perhaps the most important part of the meal.
But they’re most often avoided.
Us humans hate hearing no.
No man wants to be “rejected” by a woman.
No person wants to be told they can’t have what they want.
And too novice salespeople most want to avoid hearing no.
So they do everything they can to dance around it.
Like those banker meetings, consuming all the oxygen in the room, leaving no space to hear no…
Also means leaving with no idea what stands in the way of yes.
Redoubtable was Dictionary.com word of the day.
With my third grade vocabulary I didn’t know what it means.
But I took it in with great meaning.
When you see “Re” at the front of a word it often means to do it again.
e.g. Remember. Reuse. Redo.
But here it means the opposite of doing doubt again…
Redoubtable—that is to be feared; formidable, especially as an opponent.
Great word, right?
Why again doubt when you can have…
It was the most magnificent surprise.
Friday, mid March.
Bonuses were due to hit our bank accounts Monday.
For some reason I had an instinct to check.
Woo-hoo!
My bonus landed early.
10 minutes later…
I’ll never forget the look on his face.
Priceless.
I wandered into his office.
Stood in front of his desk.
And started to explain that my bonus hit my account early.
Looking up to me as if to say, OK why are you in my office telling me this?
“So I came in here to quit.”
I turned around and walked away.
Really, why do we take our lives so seriously?
Of course we’ve got bills to pay.
And kids to raise.
And all those responsibilities at work and in our lives.
But why for so many of us does it all seem so hard?
You know that quote about all the world’s a stage…
I interpret it to mean it’s a play.
Like a lucid dream we’re directing this life on our own stage.
Here to play.
Believe me, for many years, well, basically, all but this one…
I couldn’t live this way.
I was king of…
Is a search that landed someone on my website.
Do you think that might be fun?
OK, let’s play with it.
Our minds are fabulous time machines.
Just by thinking you can travel anywhere in time, can’t you?
Like some time you were a kid running around playing.
Or an adult doing much the same.
Any time you enjoyed in the past.
Or see yourself enjoying in the future.
In fact anything you can imagine enjoying right now in your mind.
That’s how long an average worker is productive each day…
That’s a yield of 36%.
Imagine a production line that was operating at 36% yield.
Where 64% of the inputs were wasted.
That’s the average workday.
The average life.
It’s not just routine jobs either.
In fact, someone sitting answering phones all day is certainly far more productive than most professionals.
Epstein…
No comment.
People are better off that way.
Those of us without eyes wide shut know where the stink hole goes, don’t we?
How quickly our society forgets.
For a while we’re outraged when another Weinstein snakes around.
But quickly we get back to our little screens forgetting like Spacey we demand a constant stream of beautiful boys, and girls.
We pretend not to know how they do it.
That the casting couch existed long before the latest crop of pervs and pedos.
In our society that vehemently fights for women’s rights…
We tune into the fashion shows ogling our super women prancing around in their shiny heels and underwear.
No care how they got there.
Nor how many others were picked over and left elsewhere.