“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

You Are Who You Are: Be Thankful for That! 

It’s damn hard to be thankful.

We know we should. Every shrink, spiritual leader, and self-help guru on the planet espouses the many benefits of being thankful. But it’s hard to do.

That’s because “doing” thankfulness means feeling it – actually feeling grateful in the muscles of the heart.

I have a sort of prayer that I recite every morning: I’m grateful for my health. I’m grateful for my family. I’m grateful for my work, etc. I recite this dutifully and with concentration. But its effect on me has been only a bit stronger than practicing positive affirmations – which is to say, not great.

I do feel grateful now and then. But the feeling doesn’t come when I call for it. Like happiness, gratitude arrives spontaneously, dressed in workaday clothes, ushered in by mundane and trivial matters. Like finding my boarding pass a minute before they close the doors. Or recognizing a familiar landmark when I’m driving, lost on a dark road.

The important things that I should be grateful for – life, liberty, and my right to happiness, for example – I appreciate most in their absence.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. If you’ve been striving to experience more gratitude in your life, you might have noticed the same thing.

Consider this…

A Possible Solution

The feeling of gratitude is indisputably a positive emotion. It feels like breathing. Like opening up and becoming lighter.

But there are other emotions that feel very different – sort of like the opposite of gratitude.

They make you feel like you’re being squashed. Like you’re suffocating or drowning. They make your heart race and weaken your muscles. They feel like pressure, like tightness, like you can’t breathe.

Do you know what I mean?

These opposite-of-gratitude feelings – there are lots of them! Feeling ignored, unappreciated, or disrespected. Or insulted, excluded, or misunderstood. Or robbed or cheated or taken advantage of. Or mentally or physically abused. Or just generally feeling victimized – whether by individuals, society, or even the universe.

So, here’s my thesis: Maybe the secret to feeling more gratitude is to make more room for it by clearing out these other feelings.

Maybe, rather than making lists of all the things we should be grateful for, we should make a list of all the opposite-of-gratitude feelings we have, consciously or subconsciously, and focus our attention on getting rid of them first.

I’m talking about clearing out the dark shadows in our hearts and brains. Letting the sunshine in.

To be honest, this is not a brand-new thought for me. I’ve been thinking about it – and even working on it – for more than 50 years.

One of the first negative emotions I tried to banish was jealousy. By the time I was 16, I had figured out that it was, indeed, a green-eyed monster. I understood the stupidity of it, and vowed to excise its gangrenous hold on my heart. But I was an adolescent, and the biology of adolescence is selfish and self-centered. So, I was not entirely successful. (I still succumb to jealousy’s poison today. But rarely.)

I was much more successful in my early attempts to banish most forms of envy. Although I had much to be envious about as a child, it never had a strong hold on me. In fact, if I ever felt envious of anything or anyone, I don’t remember it. I was surrounded by people then – and still am – who were (and are) richer, smarter, funnier, and better looking. But I didn’t/don’t envy them. I don’t know why envy was so easy to exorcise while jealousy wasn’t, but I do know that not being envious has allowed me to feel good about those that have more than I do. By clearing out envy, I’ve been able to let a sort of happiness in.

There is, however, a kind of envy that I have not entirely banished. And that’s the feeling of resentment I had in high school for my classmates that had a higher social status. I thought I had rid myself of feeling socially discounted and underprivileged. But when I went to my last high school reunion, I realized that I hadn’t entirely forgiven my classmates that had been fortunate enough to grow up on the “right” side of town.

There are many other negative emotions – some that set in later in life – that, until recently, I allowed myself to feel, even though they were self-destructive. One of them was about my body image. In my youth, I was always unhappy with my skinniness. Despite lifting weights like a maniac, I was never able to pack on muscle. I started as a linebacker and offensive guard for my high school football team. I was somehow able to do that with sheer aggressiveness at 155 pounds. But when I failed to make the cut for college football, I cursed my body’s inability to grow.

After I turned 40, my body took revenge on me. I ballooned to 230 pounds (still weightlifting) and have struggled to get back down to a respectable 200 pounds ever since. Every time I stepped on the scale and found myself heavier than that (which was almost always), I cursed my genes.

I was also angry at my biology every time I caught a cold. K never got sick. She went years without a sniffle or an ache, but I… I was catching every bug that came along! I was taking supplements. I was eating my damn greens. Why did I get stuck with this crappy immune system?

But the most negative emotions I allowed myself to feel had to do with my self-imposed mental goals and expectations. I would get furiously upset when I’d arrive late to an appointment, and yet I was late to appointments almost without fail! (While I was publishing Early to Rise, my friend AS used to say, “Early to rise, but late for everything else.”)

I would get angry when I failed to accomplish any and every project I committed to. It didn’t matter to me that my failure might have been due to situations beyond my control. Or that the expectation itself was entirely unrealistic. I mentally flagellated myself.

I would constantly chastise myself for the writing I did that was, in looking at it later, not very good. I would do the same whenever I couldn’t keep up with my work, even if I was working (as I often did) 70 to 80 hours a week.

And then there was the self-derision that ensued every time I failed to meet other people’s expectations. Whether it was friends, family, business associates, or even strangers, I allowed myself to take on their expectations of what I should do or be.

I always knew that these negative feelings came from me and my own expectations. I always knew that they were impossible to avoid so long as I took them on. I always knew that they were making me miserable. And yet, I allowed myself to have them.

Finally, a change of heart 

One day recently, in my 69th year, this all changed. I am still struggling to figure out how and why – but one day I woke up and thought to myself: “You are forgiven.”

I know how that sounds. Like New Age, narcissistic rubbish.  But that is what it was – a single thought. “You are forgiven.”

I will try to figure it out in a future essay. But for today, I will simply tell you what did and didn’t happen. What didn’t happen was a transformation in my behavior. I continued to set goals for myself that I couldn’t achieve. I continued to try to live up to other people’s expectations. But when I failed, I no longer beat myself up about it. The impulse wasn’t there. And so far, it hasn’t returned.

How to explain?

I feel like Popeye! I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam!

The shadows are gone. All that space in my heart that they were occupying is open now to better feelings. When I fail now – and I’m not making this up – I feel a little smile on my face. And for that, I am very, very thankful.

This essay and others are available for syndication.
Contact Us  for more information.

My post today is about developing your gut instinct to help you become a more effective business leader. I’m sending it from our home in Nicaragua. As you may have heard, the country was battered by Iota. The east coast was destroyed by 150-mile-per-hour winds. The west coast, where we are, was devastated by flooding. Our family is usually here for the Thanksgiving week. Not this year because of you-know-what-19. So, it’s just me and K. And we’re busy working with FunLimon, our family “caridad” here, assisting in the many relief efforts going on right now to bring clean water, food, and other supplies to the local communities. It was a long day. Now we’re back home, having a sunset cocktail.

“Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.”  – Don Marquis

Head vs. Gut, Part I:

Why Intuition Beats Rationality in Making Good Wealth-Building Decisions 

I once read an article in the Harvard Business Review titled “When to Trust Your Gut.”

This is a subject I’ve spent some time thinking about. And my feeling has always been that experience-based gut instincts are at least as valuable as MBA-based analyses from the likes of Harvard, Wharton, or Yale.

I was surprised to see that this article supported my view.

The author, Alden M. Hayashi (senior editor of HBR when the article was published), says quite correctly that, in making good business and career decisions, it makes sense to rely on both reasoning and gut feelings.

“The higher up the corporate ladder people climb,” Hayashi says, “the more they’ll need well-honed business instincts.”

In lowlier positions, he argues, one should rely more on facts, figures, and established protocols. Instinct is still important, but when you’re new to a company you need to be careful. Those that hired you are alert for mistakes. To avoid costly mistakes, he advises, make sure your impulses align with the facts.

Middle managers that are new to an industry should be careful about shooting from the hip. By sharpening your pencils and following the rules,” he says, you’ll keep the bottom line black.

After you move up the ladder of corporate power, however, attention to detail becomes less important and gut instinct can help you make the game-changing decisions that will accelerate your career.

Hayashi looks to the late Ralph S. Larsen, former chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, to explain why.

“Very often, people will do a brilliant job up through the middle-management levels, where it’s very heavily quantitative in terms of the decision-making,” Larsen says. “But then they reach senior management, where the problems get more complex and ambiguous, and we discover that their judgment or intuition is not what it should be. And when that happens, it’s a problem. It’s a big problem.”

Richard Abdoo, former chairman and CEO of Wisconsin Energy Corporation, agrees. He says that as business speeds up and decisions must happen faster, instinct is even more important.

Henry Mintzberg, professor of management at McGill University and longtime proponent of the utility of intuition, believes the subconscious mind is always processing things the conscious mind may not be aware of. A sense of revelation (the “Aha!” moment) occurs when the conscious mind finally learns something that the subconscious mind has already known.

I agree.

Decision-making at the higher levels of business cannot rely solely on rational thinking and logic. To make the best decisions, we must also call into play our emotional intelligence.

To explain how gut feelings work, Hayashi refers to Herbert A. Simon, a professor of psychology and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Simon, who studied decision-making for decades, claims that gut feelings result from observing repeated patterns and rules. Emotional intelligence involves noticing, storing, and “chunking” such patterns so we can retrieve them instantly and automatically.

It’s been my experience running and consulting with dozens of growing companies over the years, that this is true.

It makes sense: The human mind has an amazing capacity to recognize and “remember” patterns. Much greater than our ability to remember and recall facts.

In chess, for example, Simon found that grandmasters are able to recognize and recall about 50,000 major patterns in the huge number of ways in which the various pieces can be arranged on a board.

How do they do it? How is it that some executives seem to have the superhuman ability to make good and profitable decisions?

It’s all about this mysterious process of recognizing and storing patterns. According to Hayashi, the experts say they do this while also “cross-indexing” them. That’s when our brains find patterns in one experience that correspond to patterns in other experiences and “tag” them for instant and automatic recall when we need them.

I – and just about every advertising writer I know – do this routinely. While watching commercials about a Rolex, we may notice a pattern in the pitch that is similar to a newspaper ad on vitamins and/or a radio spot on some financial scheme.

We sometimes recognize the patterns consciously. Very often, we don’t. But they are recorded somewhere in our gut.

And that’s why, if you want to become a better business leader and wealth builder, you should make your decisions carefully when you are beginning, but, as the years pass, begin to rely more on your gut.

Caveat: Sometimes gut instincts are wrong. How can you fix that? We’ll cover that tomorrow.

This essay and others are available for syndication.
Contact Us  for more information. 

 “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.” – Tom Peters

Cultivating the “Super” in “Superstars”: the Handful of Employees That Will Make Your Business Soar 

Yes, every one of your employees is important. In some way, every one of the people that work for you – from the rank-and-file on up – contributes to your bottom line.

But there is one group – a very small group – that can do what the others can’t do: generate 80% of your sales, wring out 80% of your profits, and then grow those profits over time.

I have gotten into the habit of calling these people superstars, but I should probably call them something else. Maybe something like “phenoms,” because besides being so remarkable in themselves, they are very rare.

Not Pareto Principle rare. Not just one out of five of your employees. It’s more like one out of 10, if you are lucky. Even one out of 20.

You already know who these people are. (They know it, too.)

* They arrive early and stay late. And they work at home.

* They almost never take a day off.

* They don’t consider their work to be a job. They consider it to be a career.

* They are not afraid of new ideas. They welcome them.

* They take responsibility for any problems that crop up under their watch, even if they are not to blame.

But what makes superstars not just valuable but invaluable is that they are not only great at what they do, they are eager to take on as much additional work as you can give them. Whether it is developing successful new products, creating additional sales, or managing profits, superstars will eventually do it better than you can… and take some of your leadership burden on their shoulders.

And that’s why losing a superstar is like losing a limb. It is a disaster you want to avoid at all costs.

So how do you attract and nurture – and keep – superstars? What are the things they want and need?

1. Space 

First and foremost, they need the freedom to do their job as they see fit. You can and should give them the tools they need to do their work. And you should give them your best advice. But give them room to fail, too – quickly and in small ways – so they can learn (and teach their employees) from their mistakes.

2. Autonomy 

In a similar vein, superstars need the authority to get their job done without being micromanaged. They should not have to ask for your okay on every minor decision. Agree on the sort of reporting and feedback that you both feel comfortable with, with the understanding that you will be asking for less and less as they become more and more accomplished.

3. Challenge 

The main thing that superstars need is big and constant challenges – and it is in their nature to come up with most of them on their own. Give them free rein to learn about any areas of the business that interest them – and welcome any suggestions they may have.

4. Fair Compensation 

Superstars are not primarily motivated by money – but you won’t hold onto them if you pay them a nickel less than what they are worth.

How much is that?

I have a few rules that I follow: Their base pay must be equal to or higher than what others in their position get. In addition, they should have some sort of incentive pay based on some mutually agreeable objectives. And if they end up running an entire offshoot of the business for you, they should get some sort of shadow equity.

Just never lose sight of what’s really important to them: the satisfaction of growing and improving the business.

This essay and others are available for syndication.
Contact Us for more information. 

 “A weak currency is the sign of a weak economy, and a weak economy leads to a weak nation.”

– Ross Perot

Scary but True: China Paves the Way for a US Digital Dollar

On November 6, I said that I could imagine the US creating a digital currency one day to fend off the threat of Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) replacing the US Dollar.

It would offer all the conveniences of other digital currencies (which is what most concerns the average user), but it wouldn’t have Bitcoin’s most important benefit: the built-in protection against its own devaluation because of its strictly limited supply.

Our politicians don’t know much about economics, but realizing that such a feature would severely limit their ability to spend money, they’d make sure the US Digital Dollar would come with counterfeiting provisions.

The second major benefit of Bitcoin is that it’s a cryptocurrency, which means it allows users to transact their business anonymously. That, too, our government wouldn’t allow, because it would make it near impossible to crack down on income (and other) tax evasion.

The US Digital Dollar would come with some patina of privacy – perhaps limiting access to transactions between users. But the government would make sure it had full and easy access to all such transactions. It would sell this idea by pointing out that it would put an end to illegal drug and sex trafficking. However, it would surely be used by the IRS to eliminate tax cheating. And eventually, it would be the perfect tool for the government to know just about everything every one of its citizens was doing.

I know that sounds like an idea from some dystopian novel. But assume for the moment that you were the dictator of a big, powerful country with more than a billion citizens. How could you resist using a tool like this? How could you say no to being able to know exactly what all those people were doing – every place they went, at every hour of the day?

As with so many things these days, China is several steps ahead of the US in the move towards a government-issued digital currency.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, in announcing the new digital yuan, said that it was going to “accelerate the digital economy, digital socializations, state and industry digital developments, and updates.” And that it would move China “ahead of our competitors.”

According to my colleague Tom Dyson, writing in “Postcards From the Fringe,” China’s “pull together” should be considered an advantage in the digital currency race – an advantage only further solidified by Jinping’s words. The president’s push for advancement in the field certainly will impact China moving forward with the digital yuan, but it had an impact on Bitcoin as well. Following his speech, the Bitcoin/US Dollar parity jumped from $13,300 to $14,000.

In preparation for promoting the use of the digital yuan on an international level, China has tasked smartphone developer Huawei with stateside implementation. Huawei’s new phone, the Mate 40, is expected to have all the latest technology and features as well as its own proprietary digital yuan wallet. This will ensure that China’s new digital currency will find its way to the US. And the timing couldn’t be better. Due to recent supply restrictions, the Mate 40 might be Huawei’s last phone to be sold in the States.

If their new digital yuan succeeds, it would be a massive accomplishment for the Chinese Communist Party. According to a Reuters report, Yi Gang (governor of the People’s Bank of China) claimed that 4 million separate digital currency transactions had taken place since the start of the “human trials” last month.

And it’s not just China. From my friends at Tradesmith:

“The Bank of International Settlements, BIS for short, is known as the central bank for other central banks. In January 2020, the BIS published a new research paper – not its first one – on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

“Eight months ago, the BIS found that 80% of all the central banks they surveyed were investigating CBDCs, and 40% had moved from the research stage to the concept and design stage.”

China is definitely the front runner in the race. BIS and the European Central Bank (ECB) are trailing. Right now, the US is behind. But if China does succeed, you can bet that the US will be looking to follow.

Sources:

https://www.somagnews.com/digital-currency-statement-by-xi-jinping/

http://www.qstheory.cn/dukan/qs/2020-10/31/c_1126680390.htm

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/04/investing/china-yuan-us-election-intl-hnk/index.html

https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/02/huawei_mate_40_digital_yuan/

https://www.reuters.com/article/china-currency-digital/spending-with-chinas-digital-yuan-around-300-million-pboc-says-idUSL1N2HO0B1

This essay and others are available for syndication.
Contact Us  for more information.