normal is bad news

Thought:

Have we become the country of the seven deadly sins as activities that are not accepted but encouraged?  Boys are mocked if they are not driven by lust, pornography is now a norm.  All advertising is coveting what others have or greed to get more of what we don't need.  Self help is pride.

What do we do when the things that are wrong are now the accepted and expected.

Which society is scarier, one where religion is illegal or one where morality is actively suppressed?

Chucks idea

I met an incredible woman who helped start the firm that runs Charles Schwabs personal assets.  She sweetly refers to him as Chuck.  Chuck has this idea, what money managers are selling is not going to make people money, not real money.  He said that if you look at all of the first generation people on the fortune 400 list that all of those people did not get their money by following what classic money managers say, those people created immense wealth by doing three guaranteed things and one possible thing.

1 - concentration
2 - leverage
3 - luck
4 - talent (optional)

Think about that, talent, which we pay millions of dollars for in sport and business is optional!  Luck however, is required.  If this makes you double take on wealth creation and how people actually achieve greatness monetarily than let me take you one step further, but you may want to sit down.

I think faith is the same.  We are taught in church to love God but fit him into our lives, the Holy Spirit is at best a nice tool, Grace is good but so is the average person and if you really want to excel than you have to go to divinity school and get a 120 credit hour masters degree.

But what are we taught in the Bible?  Concentration, put all of your heart, soul, mind and strength into Christ.  Leverage, you now have the Holy Spirit to do more than even Jesus did.  Luck, grace has nothing to do with us, God loves us and there is nothing we can do about it.  And talent, sure there are smart guys like Luke, but then there is Peter right next to him.  We are told in our weakness his strength is perfected, not the greatest endorsement of talent.

So our preachers are acting just like our money managers, teaching us to be safe, keep us in the middle and keep us luke warm.  You will never be Bill Gates if you act like that, but as a truly humbling thought, God said acting like that makes him want to vomit.

culture

So many of us in business read incessantly about building proper company culture. That the culture of an office or a company in general decides the customer service, the dedication to excellence, the length of employment, and most importantly innovation. Companies like Zappo's, Apple, Southwest Airlines and Starbucks are known for both guarding their culture and relying on it to take over an entire market.

What is the culture in your life? What is the culture in your house? What is the culture of your downtown relaxation? Your religion, consuming, communication, information ingestion?

Lastly, and most importantly, what is the culture inside your head in regards to you?

jogging and bananas

Schlomo tells us the "self control is not a problem in the future, it is only a problem when the chocolate is right next to us." 3 out of 4 people say they want a banana one week from now over chocolate, but in the present only 1 out of 4 eat the banana. He's right, and he has found a way to crack the code for financial gain with savings that takes our psychology out of the equations.

The question is, how do we do that with physical behavior?

I've run 100 marathons in my mind and one in the real world that I was not adequately prepared for. I've cleaned out the garage once a week for years in my head.

What do we do when the chocolate of time is right next to us?

just the hard part

If you are an artist, a creator, a thinker, the only thing that is left for you is the hard part.

I remember sitting at Southwest airlines years ago with a bunch of baggage handlers watching television in between flights and a Hollywood happenings show was on. It was discussing the physique of some actor and one of us bag monkey's said "well, if it was my full time job I could look like that too!". There was instant degradation of this individual as bag humpers are inclined, but I realized she was right in her vocalization of thought. That is a universal thought.

If I could write all day I would be James Joyce. If I could dance all day I would be Martha Graham. If I could think all day I would be Seth Godin. But the truth is you can do all of those things and in all actuality, you can only do those things.

Your not going to get a book contract because those are dying. Your not going to get things handed to you for winning anymore, all of the power of winning is already yours. You can reach millions by word, speech, or film. You can live in vast comfort for mediocre pay. You can have, on average, enough time to produce a top 20 novel eight times a year!

The problem is there is only the hard stuff left. Just the writing, just the choreography, just quieting the lizard brain to think beyond. Good luck, because that is actually harder to do than 20 years ago, 100 years ago. For all of our winning we have created spectacular noise.

a little easier

Image courtesy of ucumari

It's easier to do nothing. Just a tiny bit. Not cleaning, working out, reading, organizing, playing with your kids. It is a tiny bit easier to do nothing and the mass production society since the end of WWII has worked diligently on moving that point just a bit closer to nothing. Like the fat people on Wall-e who haven't moved in generations, we, like water, will always choose the path of least resistance.

Thus, the greatest habits any of us have are habits of difficulty. Habits of doing something over nothing. The habit of putting on your sweats and shoes and getting out the front door. The habit of sitting down in front of a google doc spreadsheet with all of your bills on it. Because then you too can become one of those people.

We all want to know what the big trick is, not so we can actually do something, so we can get a tiny high off of thinking about doing something and then continue the Doritos induced comas we call living.