Not a Life Coach

It’s not all grim, however. There are ‘incentives’, rewards like an Amazon voucher for picking up the phone enough times each day; and they’ll even let you wear jeans to work on a Friday to make you feel like you’re getting something out of the deal, too. Most people within the corporate world have to work to something called ‘KPIs’, which stands for key performance indicators. Although they’re presented as a way to keep track of performance, they are largely to make sure you’re doing enough; when someone isn’t motivated to do a task, KPIs are a good way to ensure it gets done anyway. And if that doesn’t hit home for many readers, what about this nugget here: not only do you get a pretty shit deal, you also, in most cases, sign a contract to let an organization design almost all aspects of your life for you.

These organizations, more often than not, decide when you wake up, when you eat, when you go home and (to them), most importantly, what you earn for your ‘work’. I say ‘work’ in inverted commas because it’s human nature to stretch whatever task is at hand across the amount of time you allocate to it. I’ll expand on this later in the book, but many hours in the 9–5 are not spent working; they’re just spent staring at a computer screen bored and worrying that you need to look busy.

When someone asks you why you’re in that job, because you can’t conjure up anything more compelling you’ll immediately jump to the ‘perks’ and ‘benefits’ you get with the role: free dental, 5 per cent pension matched and £20 (36 AU$) contribution to your gym membership each month. In exchange for enduring busy public transport, sitting in traffic, wearing a suit on the hottest day of the year and becoming an expert in appearing to look busy every day.

I wish there was another word to describe it, but I felt very suffocated by the structures in place when I was in the corporate world. Now, I know that it suits some people, but for me I couldn’t thrive in those surroundings. It’s not that I was broken, but the environment wasn’t right for who I was. My advice to others would be to really gauge if you’re working in an environment that is right for you; just because it’s right for everyone else doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good fit for you. For example, I have always spoken about dieting being like a tailored jacket: it needs to be thrown on and tailored to the person over time; what might fit one person perfectly may be an awful fit on someone else. And we need to take the same pragmatic approach to our work environments and to realize that we’re not broken or outcasts if it doesn’t fit – we’re just sometimes in the wrong place. No harm in that, just something to be aware of. Because enduring something that isn’t right only makes it worse over time, not better.

There’s a parable I love to think about whenever I need to remind myself of the important things in life. It’s about a fisherman and a businessman.

THE FISHERMAN AND THE BUSINESSMAN‡

A successful businessman on vacation was at the pier of a small coastal village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked alongside him. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The businessman complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman proudly replied, ‘Every morning, I go out in my boat for thirty minutes to fish. I’m the best fisherman in the village.’

The businessman, perplexed, then asked, ‘If you’re the best, why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish? What do you do the rest of the day?’

The fisherman replied, ‘I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, spend quality time with my wife and every evening we stroll into the village to drink wine and play guitar with our friends. I have a full and happy life.’

The businessman scoffed. ‘I am a successful CEO and have a talent for spotting business opportunities. I can help you be more successful. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats and eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats with many fishermen. Instead of selling your catch to just your friends, you can scale up to sell fish to thousands. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to the big city, where you can oversee your growing empire.’

The fisherman asked, ‘But how long will all this take?’

To which the businessman replied, ‘Fifteen to twenty years.’

‘But what then?’ asked the fisherman.

The businessman laughed and said, ‘That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!’

‘Millions – then what?’

The businessman went on, ‘Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, spend time with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play guitar with your friends.’

Why does the plan for everyone have to revolve around accomplishing so much only to then go back to doing not a lot at all? The fisherman had his own values and it’s rare to see that these days. Everyone else blindly has the mindset of the businessman. To give everyone the same blueprint to follow in life or to aspire to is just like giving them all the same thing to eat each day. It overlooks the simple fact that we’re all hugely different and that we all want and need different things to be happy and truly succeed. My closing thought for this section is this: out of the businessman and the fisherman, who is truly the wealthiest when it comes to life?

* Linear is a straight line plotted across a graph, whereas exponential growth would usually have an upward curve.

† I don’t want to get caught up in the numbers here, as I know incomes vary hugely, but the findings of the various studies and the meanings behind them are applicable and crucial to all of us.

‡ Unknown source

Communication: How to Talk to Yourself and Others

Communication is such an important element of all human behaviour and relationships. Even the slightest improvements in communications can add profound benefits to your life.

Social Media 101: Who’s your audience?

For my social-media presence to grow I had to forge an identity, a brand, within a particular environment – online. I would have to tailor this brand to the social-media platform, the person I had in mind and how I would communicate with them. One of the most interesting things from a marketing and social-media perspective is being incredibly clear on your ‘avatar’. Who you’re speaking to and how you speak to them. You may notice on TV, when you listen to car adverts, for instance, the voice on the advert has the exact person who is buying the car in mind. A pick-up truck or a van will be in a male voice with a working-class tone. For something a bit more high-end, you’ll note a more ‘well-spoken’ voice. Many personal trainers make the mistake of communicating with other personal trainers on social media, therefore targeting the wrong audience and using the wrong language. You must know who you are talking to in order to get them to listen, and that applies to all aspects of life, not just social media. The language and how you put across the information needs to be right.

Instagram, for me, is a more crass and punchy forum, while Facebook is a little slower-paced due to the nature of videos being in a longer format, and my podcast is an opportunity to have a conversation that can last hours opposed to seconds; I don’t need to edit out any pauses in what I say and I can have someone’s attention for their entire commute. Podcast James is like I am sitting in their passenger seat, while Instagram James is like I just got in the elevator with them and I’m getting out on a different floor.

This is not a way of being dishonest or tricking people; it’s merely about being the right chameleon colour for the environment I am in at the time. On Instagram I might only have three seconds to capture someone’s attention before they scroll past, ignore me, swipe away, go to another app or even unfollow me because I’m not entertaining them enough. I’m lucky on a good day if 5–10 per cent of my following see any given post, let alone interact with it. There’s an art to social media that many don’t see. You’re talking to someone in a very crowded room, and you only have so long to impress, get your point across and get out with contact information.

The problem with finite thinking: how to win social media

The biggest thing that people get wrong with social media is thinking that they can win at it. I’m sorry but you can’t win at it, but again, you can’t lose at it either.

No post or video I publish can technically fail. It’s only a failure if I have the wrong metrics or values surrounding its success in the first place. If I base its success around arbitrary likes or views, it could ‘fail’, but that’s the wrong way to see it. You can’t sit in the fancy part of a plane with the amount of likes or double taps your last post got – that’s how you set yourself up for the false notion of being able to fail social media. Social media serves a purpose, but it’s often misconstrued by so many. To me, I see it very much like giving out flyers in an area to build a business: the more doors the better, and I expect most of them will go unnoticed. If a modern-day flyer campaign had a 1 per cent success rate, they’d be very happy with the outcome. When you can get your outlook into the marketer’s mindset that a 99 per cent failure rate is completely fine, as long as you deliver to enough doors, you not only become mentally invincible and robust, but incredibly successful in your line of work.

Each day I set myself my own values and metrics. My outcome for success is posting content that will help people, realign their train of thought and be of benefit to the majority of those who see it. No number of likes, shares or comments can detract from my personal values for success with each post. With that, of course, I then at times collect data from people in the form of email addresses. I see the social-media posts like little jabs, then when you set yourself up with a right hook you can ask for someone’s contact details to then try to sell to them further down the line. I like to utilize the law of reciprocity when I do this:* if I give enough to them, they’ll hopefully feel inclined to give back with something which can seem so trivial like an email address.

People misunderstand social media and what it actually does. It’s a means of getting in front of people and that’s about it. People assume that Instagram or Facebook pay you the more followers you have. They don’t. Most people give up on social media because they haven’t even realized what they should want from it. For me, simply, I just need email addresses. My years of pursuit of those emails grew my following as a by-product; just growing your followers doesn’t do anything to your business bank account. That’s why washed-up celebrities would literally promote poison in a bottle for a payslip; they have the following, but not enough business brains to monetize it in an ethical way. No one would care if I had 10 million email addresses, but they do care if I have a million followers. The first is actually much more powerful, but society just has generally different values about the metrics across the board and many naively follow the herd’s idea of social-media success. Therefore, many are left unfulfilled from their efforts.

Life, relationships and business are not purely transactional. You need three key things to conduct a business: people need to know you, like you and trust you. Without all three you have nothing as a brand or business. I feel that no matter what I post about or talk about, if it plays into those three things, I am doing all right. Social media is not a popularity contest for anyone. We should all know we cannot please everyone.

Each day on social media I can achieve my own goals and win in that sense, but you can’t actually win at social media itself. So utilizing social media in a bid to see who has the largest penis or biggest following is, in some way, simply setting yourself up to fail. When I see language like ‘THE MOST’ or ‘THE BEST’ I can straight away spot the mindset of finite thinking. It’s the polar opposite of the long-game attitude to life. I don’t want to have THE BEST business or be the BEST jiu jitsu athlete in the world; it’s stupid to even say. However, I want to grow my business over time and develop my skills whenever I can. See how even the language used separates a goal from the long game and short game. I’ll clarify further:

There are things in life that are finite and those that are infinite, by which I mean some things can be won and others can’t. For instance, a game of rugby has a beginning, a half-time and a final whistle to end the game; there are rules laid out and the game can be won or lost. It’s a finite game. However, in the games of business, life, finances or social media (or even love), you cannot win – it’s infinite, and the best part is that there are no rules.

Thinking of some of the most successful and most brilliant minds of our time – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs – I don’t believe any of them would have aimed for short, finite wins to see who could have the most of something. Instead, I think they had a long-game mentality, not to winning per se, but perhaps changing the status quo or the way people see things currently. Whether it was the most innovative technology or running a business to provide solutions to people’s problems, I doubt they’d get caught up with who sold the most computers or made the most money in the second quarter of 2014.

The mission statements of Amazon and Google never reflected finite thinking:

Amazon: ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company.’

Google: ‘To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

Neither of them set out to be a billion-dollar business. That’s a finite approach.

TASK

If you’re passionate about something, why don’t you write about it? Why not set up a social-media page for it? I personally find it therapeutic to post each day, and you don’t need to get caught up with how many followers your page has either, nor the likes. That’s just you subconsciously quantifying the success, value, performance and worth of your page based solely on the herd instinct of the many who have come before you with poorer values than those you currently hold. So what if it doesn’t have millions of followers, if it makes you feel good and serves a purpose? Who the hell can say otherwise?

Fall in love with the process and see what happens; you may monetize in a few years, you may not. There are no rules. Remember, social media and your therapeutic posting are not a finite game; there is to be no winner, nor is it about seeing who has ‘the most’. If posting about your passion brings you a bit of pleasure, then you’re winning already. Many don’t experience that in life. If you enjoy making wooden tables, then make them and find a local marketplace online to sell them. Who doesn’t need a custom-made table in their house? You can align what you love with making a living. Or just do it for fun. I don’t care how much you do or don’t earn from it. Just do me a favour and fucking do it.

So many people around me in my line of work fall into the trap of seeing who can die with the most followers or who can get the most likes on their social-media posts. By doing so not only are most people setting themselves up to fail, but they have their values for what real success is largely wrong, and I feel that there is not genuine happiness to be found with these poor values.

Social media for me started out as a place to post helpful articles to reduce the amount of time I spent getting rejected on the gym floor. However, it very quickly evolved into a marketplace where I could share content to help people. If I am honest with you, it was also a place to challenge my fears. For years, and still to this day, I’ve been petrified of being wrong (or being persecuted for being wrong) and being outed as a fraud and a charlatan. That fear doesn’t go away. It’s constantly there. But you can’t always talk about it because the people who need your help need it to be delivered in an authoritative manner. To doubt yourself all the time is to do a disservice to those who need your assistance in the first place.

I have a fierce rivalry with another man in a similar profession to mine. Over the last few years, people have gone so far as to insinuate that there’s hatred or animosity between us. I emailed the person in question a few years ago (and I’m sure he’d remember it) simply to let him know that in the world we live in, we punch up, not down and not to take it personally. The sentiment that ‘you never get put down by people above you in life’ has helped me deal with my own fear of failure and the rebuttal that usually comes hand in hand with it.

I strangely have so much to thank social media for. Not just because it enabled me to become a bestselling author or to operate a large online business, but because it put me on a track to discover the single most important thing that makes me happy on a daily basis, which no one and nothing can take from me. I learned something about who I am and what makes me happy, and it can all be summed up in five simple words I discovered via a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck:

Becoming is better than being.

Through the pursuit of my own values on social media, it finally made sense to me. My early content was pretty awful, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Since I am just honing the skill over time, I do it outside of social media with talks, writing books and many other things, especially Brazilian jiu jitsu, which is the single best sport I have ever discovered or taken part in, and which I will talk about later in the book.

There is no finite end point to all of this. To think there is sets us up to fail from the get-go. Each and every day to me is about doing it a little better than I did before. My trajectory is far more important than where I currently am. When I was a personal trainer sitting in a café writing articles for free, all I wanted to do the following day was write a better article. It was therapeutic. I enjoyed putting on my headphones, zoning out from the world and just typing away, knowing deep down there was satisfaction to the point that if just one person read it I could change their perspective without ever having met them.

Fast forward a handful of years and all I care about is that my second book helps more people than the first and that my second TED Talk can impact more people than the first. It’s the same process, it’s just shuffled up a notch since that first article back in the day that only thirteen people viewed. Without social media I am not sure I would have found myself on this path, so for that I am grateful, and for every perceived negative associated with it I think there are positives that are not often weighed up.

Social media helped to detach me from the blueprint completely and I forged my own rule set in what is a very new way of operating a business and a brand – through a smartphone, tablet or computer.

There is no finite number of followers I desire, no financial situation I dream about, no yacht I want to buy and no set standard of content or writing I produce. As long as I try my hardest to incrementally improve, I am happy. That’s what I’ve discovered makes me happy. Sure, I’ve seen some impressive payslips in my time, but they can’t compare to a simple comment on a post that says, ‘That’s your best post yet, James.’ There is an insight into my thinking and values, whereby what I post is held in higher regard than what I earn. And that’s good values in a nutshell.

I was asked by a close friend how I felt about writing ‘book two’, as I named it during the writing process. And I honestly took so much satisfaction from the process itself that I said to my friend, ‘I am happy.’ Nothing on top of that could make me happier. Writing this book, knowing someone would read it, makes me much happier than any sale or royalty I make from it. If you see me on my book tour, I’ll be ecstatic – not from book sales, but from sharing a space with my best friends and the people who bought my book. That feeling and emotion can’t be put in a bank account or quantified in sales figures. As long as I feel like my ability to write a better book has improved, I’ve won before the first sale ever occurs.

Understanding your own mindset

Carol Dweck has helped me identify two types of mindset: growth vs fixed. The fixed mindset gets very caught up with what has happened and thinks the worst; they think they’re a failure if things don’t go as planned. The growth mindset thinks about what they can do to improve their situation, even just a fraction, so that next time they can hopefully do better. What I find personally is that the biggest differentiator between growth and fixed mindsets is how open you are to learning:

A growth mindset is defined as a belief that construes intelligence as malleable and improvable.

Carol Dweck5

For instance, if you’re not willing to learn, and you believe you can’t become better or smarter, you think: what’s the point in reading a book? Those who are willing to learn, willing to read and willing to study don’t just think it, they know that through that book there’s a chance they can become a slightly smarter version of themselves. And the best bit about those with a growth mindset is that if they finish the entire book and learned nothing, they can at least sit back and be happy with the fact that the book they just finished was probably not the right book for them.

If you take one thing from my book right here, it’s that if you can just become more willing to learn, there can be an overnight shift in mindset that will allow you to become someone who is more of the growth mindset and less of the fixed. One of the most powerful tools for achieving a strong growth mindset is to realize that you can overcome anything that life throws at you. And if you can’t do that right now, in time you can, if you’re willing to put the work in. You can see any obstacle as a challenge.

Think about how many changes you have experienced in the last few years: your watch, phone, haircut, trainers or maybe even a house or car. But how many people in the space of even a decade have a change in mindset? Sometimes the most powerful and most needed change can occur somewhere you didn’t even expect – not on your wrist or on your feet, but inside your head.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.

Truman Capote

Dwelling on past experiences or failures is of no use to us. Every failure is a blessing and the past is really the foundation that supports you in the present. Mistakes are imperative and to be seen as adjustments necessary for the right direction. The good isn’t the good without the bad. Instead of focusing on what happened before, we must put all our mental energy into what is ahead, readying ourselves for the next hurdle, the next failure. How we react to adversity is much more important than the adversity itself. Embrace it, look forward to it; without failure ahead the future would seem much more bleak, possibly even boring. Therefore, future failures are something to look forward to, to cherish and to face with gratitude, not despair.

We also can’t dwell on things that haven’t happened. Worrying about something from your past and how it may crop up in the future. Instead of worrying about it, just think about how you can own it. You may have done something stupid when you were younger, but everyone does. I sometimes sit back and worry about whether or not I sent anyone a dick pic as a drunk teenager, but thinking about that is only going to drain me, so why worry? Why open the door to anything that’s going to drain my energy for no positive return? We like to think of ourselves as one person, but the truth is we’re many different versions of ourselves, as over the years we grow with experience and we develop knowledge. The person we are later in life perhaps wouldn’t do what the younger version did. That doesn’t make us bad, though; it just means we’ve changed and that shouldn’t warrant any type of anxiety. If it happens, you will deal with it. Don’t worry about the speed bumps in the road until you see one that’s worth slowing down for.