Welcome to the site that really can transform your life
Here is a summary of how:
This blog covers key points that are missing from most personal and business development books and courses.
It is highly likely that these keys will enable you to open the door that is blocking your path to the wealth, health, happiness and freedom you dream about and work for.
About the writer:
Richard Swift has spent 40 years in business and personal development. He started in industrial lending at a finance house, did 20 years in company rescues and then moved into working with start-ups and not for profits to solve growth problems.
Richard's job has been about turning failure into success and this blog covers much of what he has learned that is not covered by conventional wisdom. If conventional wisdom was correct and complete, most people who try to succeed in business, in relationships and in staying healthy and happy would succeed. The reality is that most people fail most of the time and they don't know why.
Who doesn't need this blog?
If you have succeeded in every area of your life that matters to you and in everything that you have tried to do, then we probably don't have much to teach you. If you are in this happy position then please share your knowledge by responding to one or more of the posts.
If you have succeeded in some things and not in others, then give the tips that have worked for you and take the tips that you need to solve the problems you still have.
The problem with most books and courses:
Most personal and business development 'gurus' play the same mantra 'how to succeed, how to succeed'. The usual messages are
1) You attract what you think about so don't think about failure
2) focus on your strengths and USPs.
The usual pitch is 'I used to be fat and poor, now I am thin and rich, so learn from me what worked for me and copy it'.
The plain fact is that most people who read the books and take courses still don't succeed. Whilst something is clearly 'less than perfect' the gurus say that their system worked for them and for others so it must be your fault.
I am not saying that what the gurus teach is wrong, simply that it is incomplete or that it is not precise enough to work for most people. Here is an example:
If you said to a guru, 'help I have lost my car key' and he replied, 'OK, copy my key, it works fine for me so it will work fine for you', you would know that he did not know much about locks and keys. You know that a key must precisely fits your car lock. There is clear evidence that this also applies to the lock on the door that is blocking your road to success.
The purpose of this blog:
is to enable you to understand your particular lock and to feel when one of the key points in a blog post is 'making the tumblers click'. You can feel this happen when you tension and rotate the wheels of simple combination locks for briefcases and cycles and you will be able to feel it happen inside you. It is quite a wonderful feeling. Enjoy!
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Failing to live
In this post I propose that a worthwhile life has to be lived in the broad landscape as well as in the niches between the rocks.
Most of us have heard the advice to ‘work to live’ rather than to ‘live to work’ and most of us ignore it or think, ‘yes OK, I will start next month when I have achieved this goal’.
The reality is that goals are milestones along a road and as soon as we reach one we see the next one beckoning in the distance.
‘Ah, look a that, let me just get to this next one then I will take a break and do something else’. and then the next goal beckons and so on.
In the film, ‘Lord of War’, the arms dealer was asked by his ex. wife why, although he had made a fortune, he kept circumventing arms embargoes and selling weapons that enabled vicious little wars that made lives miserable in so many small countries. He thought for a minute and then replied with a pained expression ‘because I am good at it.’ At school, we all liked the lessons we were good at and were good at the lessons we liked. The arms dealer seems to have never grown out of this and neither have most of us.
Don’t worry or beat yourself up for sticking to what you are good at, we all do it and we are the lucky ones. The not so lucky ones are those that keep trying to achieve more and more goals until they fail. Like a salmon trying to jump ever higher waterfalls, they eventually collapse from exhaustion and die. This is the final stage of burnout in the business world and is nicely paraphrased as ‘Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down a bit’
The even less lucky ones are those that do not even attempt the first big waterfall, they find a pool and stay in it. They find food and survive but they do not make it to the spawning grounds.
I heard once that it is better to live a day as a tiger than a year as a sheep. I dont know whether being a tiger is such a great life but I do know from simple observation that people who act like sheep usually end up as lamb chops. I think this sums it up rather well. Perhaps I will be famous for this phrase in 100 years,
Most people assume that the business of life is making and storing wealth. That is OK and it is quite understandable. We are taught in school then in University that we are getting the skills required to get a good job to get wealth and security etc. However, wealth, and the food and shelter you can buy with it, are tools to help you live, they are not the point of life any more than the point of having a car is to visit petrol stations.
I have heard it said that a man can never have too much money and a woman can never have too many shoes. I suggest that people who feel this way would benefit from a broader view. If you see a grossly overweight person on a park bench, immobile and munching something out of a paper bag while joggers and skaters whiz by, you may have thought the same. Why on earth are they doing that? Their world has shrunk to processing and storing food, possibly at a deep level to protect against a food shortage that will never arrive.
The main point of this post:
The truly inspirational parts of the world are the great deserts, mountain ranges, the deep oceans and the skies. They are wonderful food for the spirit and the soul but there is very little food for the body in them. Most fish are to be found around coasts and in the shallow parts of the seas, the deep oceans are sparsely populated. There are a few animals in deserts and there are a few mountain sheep and snow leopards in the high mountains but most of the food is to be found under the bushes and in the niches between the rocks and below the ground below the mountains.
Most plants and animals specialise in finding food in ecological niches and most of us humans specialise in employment, business and market niches. If you have seen the film Kung Fu Panda, which I recommend, you will see a lovely illustration of this point. The father simply could not see any world beyond selling noodles.
The point is that our niches are good places to find food but they are not the point to life any more than buying shoes or munching the contents of one more paper bag.
To succeed in life, feed the soul and the spirit by spending time in inspirational places, see the world beyond whatever are your noodles. What is likely to happen is that you will come back with the inspiration needed to sell a lot more noodles more profitably and for less effort, but even if you don’t you will be living a more adventurous, fulfilling and balanced life and this, I propose, is what living is about.
I hope this is useful.
Richard Swift 14th April 2011
Posted: April 14th, 2011 under Universal - No Comments.
The wisdom of crowds is a reliable way to find which medicines are most likely to work
This post is different because it is a proposal for group change and action rather than an offer of personal advice gained from experience.
The failure we are looking at is the failure of most modern drugs to do what they are supposed to do.
1) to get people better
and
2) to do more good than harm.
Most of the drugs that do get on the market manage symptoms rather than tackling the cause of a disease. The side effects or adverse drug reactions (ADRs) , particularly when multiple drugs are taken, can be severe. ADRs to correctly prescribed drugs are now estimated to be the fourth largest cause of death in the USA. Deaths from wrongly prescribed drugs and from overdoses are additional.
Although we have the right to choose and to refuse treatment the concept of choice is becoming somewhat theoretical as regulations increase, more and more natural medicinal products are banned and synthetic products take over the market.
Most of us are familiar with the drug approval process, in the USA it is run by the FDA, in the UK it is run by the MHRA which is actually an organ of the European Union rather than the UK Government.
The byzantine regulatory process means that it now costs around one thousand million dollars to bring a new drug onto the market.
Anything that falls outside the myopic dogma of self acclaimed ‘scientific medicine’ tends to be persecuted and that persecution has become institutionalised. I am reminded of Galileo being convicted by the religious court for his heresy that the earth rotates round the sun. I am also reminded of the million wise women who were tortured and burned because their truth and healing went against the dogma of the church at that time.
Forgive me if I now have a rant for one paragraph. I argue that the worship of corporate power has effectively become a corrupt religion and that it has bred some unholy dogmas. One example is the food supplements regulations that take effect this year. Natural forms of vitamins have been banned, for reasons of administrative convenience, whilst synthetic forms made my large corporations are allowed. The really sick example is that sodium fluoride, which is lethal at a 4gm dose, (look up the material safety data sheet via google), is on the permitted list.
So what can we do to stop this failure of our health system and to arrange for a level playing field for all medicinal products.
My proposal is to bring in an improved system for selecting which medicinal products should be allowed on the market. The improved system will use decision markets, also known as prediction markets. These have been shown to consistently out-perform expert groups in making correct choices. The drug company Eli Lilly and the Los Alamos National Laboratory are among the many organisations that use these markets to make predictive choices.
For further information on these markets please see reviews of the book The Wisdom of Crowds.
I will add more to this post if requested, it could become very long!
Posted: March 11th, 2011 under health - No Comments.
Business 101
If you have read one or more of the posts in the Universal category then you will understand our approach.
We aim to show aspects of the world as they really are rather than the world-view we have been taught to believe exists and that salesmen try to sell us.
There are thousands of books and courses on business success but few deal with the following two realities:
1 Trading and retail businesses are fundamentally different to service and manufacturing businesses. Why? because service and manufacturing businesses make money by adding value to raw materials or the abilities of employees whereas trading and retail businesses do not add value, they simply buy at a price and sell at another. The attitude, skills and approach that make a successful trader are different to those of a value add business.
Grey areas re. the above rule: Some high end shops sell ‘the experience’ of being in them to charge higher prices for what are in fact commodity items. Banks try to wrap up their buying of money at wholesale and sale at retail as a value add service. Building societies talk about ‘Mortgage Products’ etc. I leave it to you to judge whether these are real value adds or dressed up trades.
2 There are system businesses and there are invention intensive businesses and they require different attitudes and approach. Solving difficult one-off problems and inventing new products and services for emerging markets is clearly a very different job to getting another 2% efficiency from a production line or a sales team.
Whilst it is healthy to be able to change from one mindset to the other, (over-specialization is usually unhealthy), it is not healthy or productive to try to flip from one to the other and then back. An easy example is that the attitude needed to do the books is different from that needed to make successful sales calls and you would not try to flip from one to the other and then back.
The same goes for invention and running systems. There is a very good man called Michael Gerber who explains it well and in detail. His advice is to think, try and experiment until you find something that works well and then write it out step by step so that anyone can read the page or manual and do it themselves. You then make yourself redundant from that function and go onto making another part of the business work better and you write that down for others to use and so on. This is essentially what all big franchises, from McDonalds down do and it is very effective.
Trading businesses have inventive and deep thinking needs too. A foreign exchange derivatives dealer told me that he spends half his day doing big maths and the other half waving his arms and shouting at people. Selling a tanker full of oil in a highly structured market or a million halal chickens to Saudi may take some very inventive thinking, but this is generally different to value add product and service development
Once you have worked out whether your present or intended business is trading, value add or a hybrid of both, you will have a real chance of succeeding
The next post in this series is called ‘Business plans for people who hate business plans’.
Posted: March 10th, 2011 under Business - 5 Comments.
Failure 101
The basics of success and failure
To succeed in almost any journey or project you have to do three things:
1 Make a start and do the right things
2 Continue doing the right things until you get to your destination
3 Avoid doing the wrong things
These rules may seem obvious but almost all failure stems from failing to obey or to attention to understand one or more of them.
Exceptions to the rules:
- If for example a child’s parents take it on a journey then the child does not need to get much right.
- If you keep doing the right things but die before you reach the goal
Aside from a few exceptions like these, the rules are universal.
Some journeys and projects are much more forgiving than others and it is important to know which is which.
For instance, if you are on a weekend pleasure drive and you make a mistake like getting lost or driving onto the verge, it is not the end of the world. If you are driving a race car then a mistake can cost you the race, your career or your life.
Other fairly obvious examples are climbing a hill and climbing a dangerous mountain and hunting rabbits and hunting bears,.
Two other examples that should be obvious but that trip many people up are the differences between:
- dating and getting married.
- starting a hobby and using your savings or borrowing to start a business.
You can probably think of a few more examples, please put them below.
When dealing with romance, business and in other important decisions, the gurus teach us to trust our gut reactions, our inner feelings. The question is is this good advice?
I suggest that if you are a guru it is OK to trust your inner feelings but if you have problems that you are trying to solve then no it definitely is not a good idea! The reasons are as usual seemingly simple but each opens out into a wider subject. Don’t worry, the subjects are not that complex, you don’t need to know everything and help is available when you need it.
A short tour of inner feelings. For everyday decisions we have three inner minds. Our brain mind, which does the logical ( or less than logical) thinking, our heart, which deals with higher feelings, ethics, morals etc, and the gut feeling which deals with self preservation, safety, sex and thrill seeking. Most desires start as a gut feeling and if you are perfectly aligned inside they then accelerate up through the heart, through the brain and burst out into the world as perfectly focused and massive action. At least that is how it can work once you are perfectly aligned. However, if you have ‘system conflicts’ ‘corrupted programmes’ or ‘bad scripts’ running in your gut area or above then the desire will bounce around inside you and will come out, if it comes out at all at greatly reduced power and in a random direction.
This is one of the actual causes of most failures in most people most of the time. The good news is that it can be fixed quite easily and quickly. The main tools are KCR, EFT (which is free) Click tracks( which are free) and RPT, which can be learned inexpensively or you can go to an expert.
The next blog post will deal with the importance of taking things out rather than putting things in. It is called Always start with a clean dry surface. I hope you have enjoyed this and will enjoy the next one.
Posted: March 10th, 2011 under Universal - No Comments.