Copyright

Extracts from Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Copyright © 2008 published by Little, Brown and Company 2008, Allen Lane 2008, Penguin Books 2009. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

Extract from The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. Reproduced by permission of SSA, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © Will Durant, 1961.

Extract from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Copyright© 2015 by Yuval Noah Harari. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

Extracts from The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape The 9-5, Live Anywhere, And Join The New Rich by Timothy Ferriss. Copyright © 2007, 2009 by Carmenere One, LLC. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

Text © James Smith 2020

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Source ISBN: 9780008404840

Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN: 9780008404826

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 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008404840

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Contents

6  Preface

7 Introduction

8  PART I: ENVIRONMENT

9  The Essentials

10  ‘Wealth’: Real Wealth Versus Money in the Bank

11  Communication: How to Talk to Yourself and Others

12  PART II: VALUES

13  Values of Success: So, What If It All Goes Wrong?

14  Sunk Cost Fallacy Revisited

15  The Power of the Anomaly

16  Individual Values

17  Time

18  Meditation

19  PART III: FOUNDATIONS

20  Mindset

21  Limiting Beliefs

22  Fear of Failure, Fear of Success

23  Motivation

24  The Confidence Paradox

25  PART IV: IDENTITY

26  Perception

27  Identification and Implementation

28  Success, Conversions and Satisfaction

29  ‘Wealth’ 2.0

30  PART V: COMFORT ZONES AND ESCAPISM

31  A Brief Introduction to Physics (and Getting to Know Your Comfort Zone)

32  Escapism

33  Priorities

34  Future Anxiety

35  Dating

36  Regression to the Mean

37  Real-Life Learning

38  Reversing Emotions and Bias

39  Why?

40  Making it Real

41  Newton’s Laws

42  Not the Final Chapter

43  References

44  Acknowledgements

45  Index

46  By the same author

47  If You Enjoyed the Book

48  About the Publisher

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Preface

If someone had asked me when I was twenty-one to write a book that could change lives, I wouldn’t have considered myself able to change even one person’s life for the better, or offer any advice of true value. But here we are, ten years on, and I’ve found myself doing exactly that – and doing it as a career. In a relatively short space of time, I have gained valuable perspective, experience and evidence that go beyond assumption and are void of unconscious bias, all to provide you with the opportunity to change the way you think. Let’s put it this way: for the last decade, often without even realizing it, I’ve been preparing for this very moment, for you to pick up this book and read this very page.

In my first book, I delved into how to fix insecurities, physical issues and imbalance from the neck down; here, I look at all that exists from the neck up. I know what you are probably thinking right now: who the hell am I to give you advice? What puts me in a position of authority on these topics? I ask myself the same question most days, to be honest, and have thought to myself while writing each and every chapter: why should people listen to me?

I’m not trying to be an expert on life. I am not your leader, and I’m not asking you to follow me. I am not, nor can I be, irrefutably correct on every opinion I have. I am, like you and like everyone you know, only human.

The popular Greek proverb states that ‘old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in’. When it comes to the art of true stoicism and many long-held discussions of philosophy, I often sit back and wonder whether it’s all just a trail of people leaving advice they wish their younger selves could hear.

I wasted years of my life frustrated, deflated, disheartened and annoyed in the wrong job, chasing the wrong goals, eventually becoming the personal trainer that I wish had been there for me when I needed him. Now, I hope that I can be the coach I wish had been there when I was sleepwalking through my own life, held back by believing my own potential was limited.

Only you can take the reins of your own life and choose to make a change, but I can be the one to give you the tools to do so. This book is quite simply the book I wish had been there for me at crucial turning points of my life.

If you stop to look around and think about it, you will see there is an invisible blueprint to life that the majority of the world is following, and I can’t help but think it’s leaving so many people unfulfilled, unhappy and dissatisfied. Many seek and accomplish financial ‘freedom’, but it’s to no avail when there is no sense of purpose. This book, I hope, will provoke necessary change; it will begin from the turn of the next page, but it won’t finish with the turn of the last.

Where you’ll be standing, who with, what you’ll be doing and what you’ll achieve are all going to be based on what you read and what you don’t, who you keep in your life and those you let go. In the words of the author Charlie ‘Tremendous’ Jones: ‘You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.’

To leave chapters of this book unread will increase the chances that you will leave chapters of your life unlived and, without being unlocked, your potential could be limited, your growth stunted and your self-worth and everyday happiness could suffer.

This is not an ornament for your window ledge – it is not just a book you plan to read, a collation of motivating quotes or parables to live by; this is a lens through which to view the world, so that you can clearly see your underlying potential in the context of a spectrum that you couldn’t see clearly before.

I am not your life coach. I am here with one sole purpose: to change your life.

So let’s begin.

James

Introduction

What if I told you that by the time you finish this book perhaps nothing will have changed? Pretty uninspiring, right? You may be a few days older, maybe a few weeks. I don’t know your reading speed or commitment to what I have to say. But ultimately things will be the same. Your phone will lose reception where it usually does, you’ll still be daydreaming about that item of clothing you’ve been thinking about buying for the last few weeks and I expect you’ll probably be using the same tube of toothpaste you are right now when you get to the end of this book. Riveting already, isn’t it?

On a physical basis, you’ll weigh about the same and have the same hairstyle. You’ll also probably have the same job and day-to-day routine. And that very individual way you dry yourself with the towel when you get out the shower? All unchanged. However, these are not the metrics by which I want you to understand change if you commit to reading the next 275 pages. The changes I’m talking about could be so significant that you won’t recognize the person you were just a short time ago. Not necessarily from the outside, maybe not even in the eyes of close family and friends, but in how you begin to realize and perceive certain things about your life.

Stop, take a look around, and you’ll notice that everyone is climbing the ladder of life to see who can get to the highest rung. However, I don’t see many people taking a moment to really think whether they’re climbing the right ladder. It doesn’t matter how high you climb it if, when you get to the top, you realize you’ve climbed the wrong one. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re not going in the right direction.

But if everyone else is doing it, how come I’m telling you you’re wrong to do the same? Let’s flip that for a second: am I saying you’re wrong with your choices or am I alluding to the fact that your choices aren’t 100 per cent right? And when I say ‘right’, I mean that if we were to sit down and look at what you want to do with your life and what you’re currently doing with it, I think we could find some pretty blatant discrepancies. You’d probably offer excuses like, ‘Now isn’t a good time’ or, ‘If I had more financial freedom.’ But I’m afraid the universe will not align with you and the seas will not part to create an easy path for you. That’s life.

I’ve often said, ‘If a million people believe something stupid, it’s still stupid.’ Humans are brilliant at telling themselves stories, like the elaborate ones about what happens when we die – some people are more concerned with the afterlife than their existing one. (That’s not a dig at religion, but an example to consider in the wider context: if someone wanted you to buy shares, you’d want something tangible to back up their claims, wouldn’t you? Just because someone else believes in it doesn’t mean you should as well.)

I know what you’re thinking – we’re only human, right? Well, what does that even mean? Let’s look at what being human is, because if there’s one thing you need to know about human beings, it’s that we’re inherently dishonest. We lie and we can’t help it. And this isn’t exclusive to just us Homo sapiens, either. If we look across the animal kingdom, we can see it’s prevalent among primates and all kinds of other species that barely resemble humans at all.

Not telling the truth isn’t always a bad thing, though. Consider a knife, say: it’s really about what you choose to do with it – you could harm someone or you could just butter their toast. Well, it’s the same with a lie. And the reason I even mention this so early on in the book is this: you’re feeding yourself lies – the harmful kind – on an ongoing basis, and that’s not even the worst part of it, either. Want to know what’s worse? You’re believing them and therefore unaware of the harm they’re causing, and it’s having a profound impact on not just how you feel, but who you are and how you see yourself on a daily basis. Now, it’s worth mentioning that harm in this context is deliberately inflicted by yourself on yourself; it’s not a wound that’s visible like a cut, but instead it is a set of limiting beliefs, poor values and the inability to back yourself to your full potential on days of the week that end in ‘y’.

From this introduction to the last chapter of this book and everything in between you can become a completely transformed person with a new approach, mindset and entirely different beliefs to the person who is about to turn this page right now – but I need your full attention for just a handful of hours.

Now put this book down for a second, look around and tell me what you see. Most things you’ll tend to see are governed by money, greed, quick hits of dopamine, instant gratification and calories. The problem with this is that we’re told these things will make us happy. But I see money and calories as just the top of the list of currencies crippling the world’s self-esteem.

Money, that’s easy – you can buy the biggest yacht in the world, but one day you’ll see a bigger one next to yours in the marina. There’s a reason they say that the two best days of your life when you own a yacht are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. We’re made to feel inadequate and that our lives should be governed by doing ‘the right thing’, such as buying a house or prioritizing how our CVs look, rather than travelling, taking risks or, most importantly, just enjoying it the best we can before the lights go out.

Then there are calories, hedonic foods, indulgences and gluttony for those who perhaps have issues like underlying unhappiness – that is why I wrote Not a Diet Book. I wanted to bring clarity to the concept of how all diets work the same way and that ultimately adherence and sustainability are at the nucleus of successful fat-loss regimes.

With this book I wanted to move away from calories and fitness and instead challenge your mindset, ethos and attitudes outside of that realm of your life to align you with a new way of thinking. Especially in the context of a largely nuanced and subjective word that, no matter what we say, we all crave and seek, sometimes without even knowing it: success.

Why is it that our younger, more adventurous, risk-taking inner child became so derailed from what they instinctively loved doing? Why have so many of us become dead set on seeing who can die with the most money? Why do we lie to ourselves about what we wish to accomplish or prioritize things in the way that we do? Why do we want people to follow us on social media, and take it so personally when they unfollow us? (Which, if you think about it, is merely to opt out of wanting to see what we’re posting and sharing each day, hardly the stab in the gut it can feel like.)

We are so wrong about what success is, so many of us quite simply not being happy no matter what. We have more at our fingertips than we’ve ever had before, yet we struggle to feel happy about it. And we have days when we feel deflated and unmotivated despite the fact that, by comparison (which I’ll come on to later), we have it so much better than others. Why?

Why do we quantify our self-worth with finances, materialistic purchases and how much it’s possible to get laid, only to end up often overlooking the good life that has been in front of us the entire time?

And why are we blindly led to the blueprint for life by people who have spent a lifetime lying to themselves? It’s like the blind leading the blind on how to pay taxes and then die.

The world becomes safer and an easier place in which to live. I know a lot of people don’t believe this since COVID-19, but it’s important to remember that couples used to, on average, have five to six children due to the fact that it was unlikely many would reach adulthood. Although (at the time of writing) there is an impending economic gloom for many, we still have access to doctors, antibiotics, state support and education. People think the world is getting worse, but it’s getting better, I assure you. We’ve only had warm showers for around 150 years; no one even knew what a warm shower was before then. So, if you can be a pragmatist for a second, take your mind off the tabloid headlines and you’ll see that the world continues to improve. Yet at the same time, the rates for people deciding to prematurely hit the eject button on their life continues to rise. Are we fucked or are we, perhaps, just idealizing the wrong things?

It worries me to see the number of people who are anxious, emotionally crippled, insecure and unhappy, while simultaneously being given the tools to mask their real feelings with a triple tap on a laughing-face emoji in the group chat. The systems in which we live, our methods of communication and what we’re exposed to on social media all impact how we feel about ourselves, our place in the world, our purpose and our happiness. But are we truly broken or do we simply need to rethink our perceptions on elements of our lives that we have perceived incorrectly before?

I once thought I was lucky with my state of mental health. I even declared myself as someone who ‘didn’t suffer’ with mental-health issues. I have since found that isn’t the case at all; I was just much more proactive than I ever realized at protecting my state of mind, my ‘mental wealth’. I am going to share a lot with you over the coming chapters about how you can protect yours too.

Let’s say you’re injured – do you know a physio? Toothache – you see a dentist. But do you know where to go when you’re struggling with mental health – a person, a place or an organization that can help? Because you should. Athletes are proactive with avoiding injuries when possible, but they do happen; the same proactive approach should be taken with mental health – just like a check-up at the dentist. To spot things before they cause us too much pain. What could the possible negative implications be on proactively making contact with someone who could help you? You may not need them now, but in the future, it’s better to have the person and not need them than vice versa. Look at the military, for instance – on standby at all times, usually at a cost of billions to taxpayers. An essential pre-emptive resource so that if things go bad, we’re ready. If you’re an athlete and your performance is of the utmost importance to you, it is worth getting even the slightest niggle looked at before it potentially gets worse. You’ll come back from a muscle strain, but not everyone is coming back from their mental-health ‘niggles’, thus the importance of staying on top of mental health even before you think you might ‘need’ to.

But before we begin, let us be real with each other. This book can, if necessary, be read in a day. I know that; you know that. I’m asking for a day of your life (or maybe the evenings of one week or the lunch breaks of a fortnight), and in return, I am laying bare what could be the very notions to connect the dots in what will make you happier long-term.

You don’t need a six-pack to be loved or taken seriously; you don’t need to worry about how your CV looks to those who love you – or to a complete stranger, for that matter. You don’t need to die with the most money in your bank account, because there are no shops in heaven. You just need to really understand success and happiness within the sphere of your own ambitions.

Objectively speaking, we need water, food, sunlight and somewhere to sleep each night to live our lives. But the rest of what we call ‘life’ is subjective; it’s governed by our tastes, our feelings and our opinions. Don’t forget that. Life is only influenced by your thoughts; your existing beliefs are tainted by a bullshit blueprint and it’s time to rewrite your own. What’s more, there are no rules to writing it, and when you do, you will experience empowerment like you’ve never felt before.

I know what you’re thinking: I am happy, though. I am good, though.

What did I tell you about humans having that tendency to be dishonest? The worst bit is, I bet you even believe your thoughts that countered mine in the first place. But I’m not saying you’re an unhappy person, just that you haven’t even scratched the surface of your potential, self-determined success or happiness.

Right now, let me tell you this: you’re currently living in the part of your life you used to look forward to the most and I bet you don’t ever, for a second, give that enough thought to fully realize it, do you?

Social media drives self-esteem down, materialism up, self-worth into the floor and consumerism to the sky. You’re a piece in someone else’s board game and you don’t realize it. You’re not just lying to yourself but being lied to by society as a whole. People work too hard for money they don’t need to buy non-essential things to impress people they don’t like. The world remains full of people fucking exhausted and hungry in a bid to be in such good shape they could belong on the front cover of a magazine, while the bottom line is that … no one who truly matters really cares how much fat you’re carrying as long as you’re healthy, active and you have good banter. (I’m living proof of that.)

Imagine closing the last page of this book and realizing that not a lot has to change in your life, but a tremendous amount can change in your head. I am going to shake a metaphorical tree in many areas of your life; in some, you may clutch the branches so tight that you’ll know I’m wrong, while in others you’ll fall out of that tree and realize you were holding tight to a branch that wasn’t the right one for you.

But either way, it’s time for you and me to rewrite the norms and the rules to your existing beliefs, so we can align your journey with a destination that truly makes you happy and actually makes you feel successful. Not only that, but we can eradicate a lot of useless doubt, that constant feeling of undervaluing your ability, and we can stop you from getting in your own way so much. I am going to arm you with a new mindset and outlook so that you can begin adjusting anything that could potentially be wrong right now.

I hope I am wrong. I hope you’re different. But I’m confident I’m not or I wouldn’t have written this book. There are some very hard pills to swallow, but if you’re ready for this, buckle up and let’s begin.

PART I

ENVIRONMENT

The dictionary definition of environment is ‘the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal or plant lives or operates’. So, if a certain plant is thriving where it is, and we move it, the chances are very high that it will not survive, or it will take some time to adjust and recover. We can’t label any environment as definitively good or bad, therefore it’s subjective, and contextual. For instance, many things will die in a desert, but a cactus will thrive. A cactus is rather unique in its ability to store water, needing infrequent rainfall to maintain optimum internal conditions for survival. Now, this isn’t called ‘Not a Cactus Book’, so I’ll move on, but I just wanted to make the point that we should not automatically seek an objectively ‘good’ environment; we should seek the right one for our needs. What is a great environment for one plant could mean death for another and vice versa.

Animals are much the same as plants in this respect. For example, let’s consider the temperature of water in which fishes* thrive and reproduce. One of the biggest issues with global warming is the effect it is having on our seas; ice on land is melting and when that ice makes its way into the sea it affects the salinity of the water, disrupting currents and fishes’ habitats, leading to bigger environmental consequences. If it was up to a fish, we wouldn’t be altering the environment in which they thrive, yet as humans we consistently choose to do so.

So, it’s safe to say that our environment – or any environment – is crucial to thrive, to survive and, for us more consciously aware human beings, to be happy.

* I know for a second there you wanted to correct me and say the plural of fish is fish. It’s actually a double plural and scientists who study fish will say ‘fishes’. A few pages in and you’re already becoming a smart arse.

The Essentials

Strangely enough, our everyday human environment is not much of a conversation we have and it certainly doesn’t gain much traction in discussions about what’s truly important in our lives. Should you sit someone down and ask them what they’d like, they might say ‘to win the lottery’ (financial) or ‘to go on a long holiday’ (a break from existing job/routine). Rarely does anyone turn around and say, ‘I’d like to live and exist in a better environment.’ So many people land in an environment determined by a job, for example, as the first stepping stone, and then never leave it. The initial dull, dreary job may be a ‘just-for-now’ move, but before they know it, they’re comfortable, and when challenged it’s all too easy to say, ‘I’ll do it when I’m a bit older.’

Survival isn’t that high on our agendas because we’re all incredibly safe – statistically speaking, the safest yet since humans began on Earth. Of course you still need to look each way before crossing the road, get your vaccines and be sensible, but considering most people have running water, refrigerated food stores and electricity, I’d say that as far as an environment for survival is concerned, you’re going to be just fine.

Where the environment really comes into play is with its connection to how much you enjoy it, therefore how happy it makes you. I’m not a hippie, but I do often refer to my ‘soul’ and what my soul would prefer. So, it’s not my soul that wants pizza, but it is my soul that wants clear skies or to be near the sea. I’ve struggled for much of my life to understand this feeling properly. I would often just bury my urge for a different environment, believing the one I was in was the norm. And the norm only seemed that way because no one else was questioning it; not once did anyone around me say, ‘Could I be happier somewhere else?’ It’s very important that we prioritize our environment over many other things; even the smallest change in metaphorical temperature can have a profound impact on your happiness. For instance, when you move in with someone – a partner, perhaps, or a new housemate – your job, salary, relationship with your parents, etc. all stay the same, but overnight your environment changes and many other aspects of your life with it, and it’s not to be taken for granted.

The importance of change

Environment can be defined by physical factors such as country and climate. You can experience different environments by travelling and getting stuck in. I played rugby in New Zealand for six months. I got the offer to play through an agency online, and within three weeks I had quit my job, packed and flown to the other side of the planet on a whim. I learned that it wasn’t my perfect environment, but it was an amazing perspective nevertheless. I worked on a farm, in forestry and even put up signs for a living. From sheep shearing to signage, I’d come a long way from wearing a suit, and even though I knew deep down that these jobs were not right for me, at least I wasn’t bored. I found the change of environment very useful; it gave me experience and insight into different careers. People are so afraid to ‘change lanes’ in their profession, but just like dating, you sometimes need to play the field for essential perspective.

Other key factors to consider within your environment are the associated elements – for example, culture and who you spend time with are big factors. Hopefully you haven’t forgotten that Charlie Tremendous Jones quote from earlier: ‘You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.’

What if I was to say that a huge number of the failures and successes you will face in the future are profoundly impacted by who you decide to spend time with in the coming years? Our environment is not just the bubble we live in, but the people within it as well. Many diets don’t just fail because of a lack of willpower and temptation, but because of environmental factors and the people who surround the dieter. ‘Go on, just one won’t hurt,’ from the unsupportive partner. ‘Oh, but it’s the weekend, relax!’ We see this with relationships where perhaps there is a gap between the ambitions of each partner: ‘It’s the weekend, you shouldn’t be working.’ Or: ‘It’s getting late – put your laptop away.’ The people you surround yourself with are either the wind in your sails or a headwind you’re sailing against, and you must identify these. But don’t grab your phone right away and begin the cull – not yet, anyway. Just keep it in mind. I always like to remind people that birds that fly in formation do so to reduce drag; you need the people by your side to be flying in your direction, and if they’re not, it’s not personal, but it’s probably just not right. Those of you who read my first book may remember I opened with this quote:

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Abraham Lincoln

Instead of wielding the axe straight away, you need to adopt a similar perspective to assembling your team for life, especially if your environment doesn’t currently match your dreams. If you’re not where you want to be, it’s time to begin the process of moving closer to wherever that is, and you must identify who is with you and begin the painful job of recognizing who isn’t. Humans copy each other, often subconsciously, in order to fit in. Take mirroring, for example: next time you’re sitting with someone, cross your legs and wait to see how long it takes them to do the same. Then, shortly after, sit back and cross your arms, and see what happens. Humans, by their very nature, mirror each other. There is a fairly pseudoscientific communication known as NLP (neurolinguistic programming) where one of the tactics I’ve seen involves people copying other people’s actions in a bid to promote a rapport, but I feel that some of these ‘tactics’ are rubbish. Watch someone yawn,* and you can’t resist … someone has a giggling fit and you’re suddenly laughing for no reason. Put all this together and you’ll see the importance of who we surround ourselves with, as we’re often connected to these people much more than we think. Personality also comes into play, with extroverts tending to mimic others more because being liked by others is more important to them than it is to introverts.1

So, coming back to the importance of what and who you surround yourself with, I want you to think of any time when you or someone you know has experienced tremendous success. Because it’s often linked to change – not just any change, but change in environment, surroundings and the people who constitute your social and professional life. I’m not here to tell you how your environment needs to look or how it should be, just to ensure it’s held high on your priority list and that you never take it for granted. The way we think about our environment and the choices we make about it can go a long way to explaining why some people feel broken and unmotivated. Didn’t get that promotion? Didn’t get invited to a party? Got rejected by a crush? Instead of spiralling into feelings of insecurity and a lack of self-worth, consider whether the environment you were trying to thrive in was the right one in the first place.

If we’re not living to our fullest potential, I very much doubt it’s who we are that’s at fault as much as where we are and who we’re associated with. So, whether your goal is fat loss, financial ‘freedom’ or just happiness and the feeling of being content with your work–life balance, putting a magnifying glass over your environment and those within it is crucial. Not everyone will survive, I warn you now; dead wood should be removed. Whether you’re looking to get more from a business, a flowerbed or your immediate future, you must eliminate anything that does not serve a purpose in reaching your goals.

A strong associative environment† paired with an ideal physical one is only going to produce an outcome of prosperity, happiness and the ability to thrive. Changing who you are takes time; changing who you surround yourself with and where you operate can be changed today.

* Talking of yawns, some people believe yawning is to do with the brain cooling. Others draw direct parallels with empathy: ‘The susceptibility to contagious yawning correlates with empathic skills in healthy humans.’2 For a long time, people have believed there’s a connection between yawning and brain hypoxia (lack of oxygen), but this has been discarded since studies of people breathing air with mixed amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide did not affect the participants’ yawn rate. What’s crazy to me is that yawning occurs in almost all vertebrates and has been spotted in foetuses at only twenty weeks. Interestingly, the studies on yawning are done on humans and chimpanzees and there is a spectrum from close friend to stranger, whereby the closer the person is to you, the more inclined they are to yawn. So next time you yawn and your partner or best friend doesn’t, it may be a good time to reconsider the relationship … Just kidding. Yawning is one of many things that the world just doesn’t know enough about to say for sure.

† Associative environment is a term I’ve coined to talk about your environment in the context of who you associate with, not which country you’re in or the weather.

‘Wealth’: Real Wealth Versus Money in the Bank

‘If only I had more money …’ A huge misconception we often feed ourselves is that if we had more money, we’d have more happiness. But I am afraid it’s bullshit. Likewise, we know, sadly, that having a good credit rating or a trust fund won’t protect us from mental or physical health issues. It doesn’t matter how much we’re worth – if we don’t value the right things, money won’t buy us out of feeling unhappy. Let me introduce you to a concept known as income satiation.

Income satiation

Does happiness rise indefinitely with income, or is there a point at which higher incomes no longer lead to greater wellbeing?

Interestingly, in the literature I’ve looked at, I have found the threshold seems to be around £60,000 (110,000 AU$), beyond which increases in income no longer improve people’s ability to do what matters most to their emotional wellbeing, such as spending time with people they like and enjoying leisure. We seem to think of money and pleasure as being on a linear* scale – more money = more happiness – and I think that’s why, all too often, we envy the richest amongst us.3

Now, this isn’t to say that if you’re not earning a certain amount you can’t be happy, quite the opposite. But it is to explain the diminishing returns after a certain point.† By eradicating the notion of a linear route to happiness we can begin to understand that’s not how we work and it’s not how the world works either.

‘When income rises beyond this value, the increased ability to purchase positive experiences is balanced, on average, by some negative effects. A recent psychological study using priming methods provided suggestive evidence of a possible association between high income and a reduced ability to savour small pleasures.’4

It’s very interesting to see that when people were reminded about their wealth they then spent less time savouring a piece of chocolate. Sounds weird, right? It was reported that these people also exhibited reduced levels of enjoyment compared with participants not reminded of wealth. This is some of the evidence that supports the notion that having easy access to the ‘best things’ in life could very well be your Achilles’ heel, preventing you from savouring, enjoying and making the most of the little things. More is not always better; happiness, fulfilment and quality of life are not to be considered linear on paper.

I was invited as a guest to fly to Amsterdam on a private jet a few years ago. The jet was, quite frankly, ridiculous, with sofas to relax on and never-ending quantities of champagne served, and throughout the flight I had one feeling I couldn’t shake: the notion of how much the experience was going to ruin normal air travel in the future. (We flew back from Amsterdam on an EasyJet flight – quite the contrast, I can tell you.) When I was a child, sitting on any plane was an adventure that would keep me awake with excitement the night before. Now, nothing had changed except what I had been exposed to. The point I want to make is that I very much doubt regular private-jet users can experience even business-class flights without feeling cramped. If you reach a certain level of wealth, one person’s dream (such as flying business class) can be someone else’s idea of travelling like cattle.

I don’t think many of us always realize that wherever we sit on the scale of earnings, markers for happiness remain very much the same – love is the same and even feeling content with your day is the same. I want you to think about that: if you earned half of what you do currently, you could still be just as happy; and if you earned ten times as much, the same applies – the only thing that changes is your spending habits. To put it simply – expending all of your energy on thinking about how you can earn more money is not a wise investment of your time or effort. Coming home and getting into comfortable clothes, sitting back with a glass of wine or a beer and putting your feet up on the table? That feeling is the same, no matter where you do it.

Corporate life and the ‘herd instinct’

Moving on, the next terrible misconception we are all so often guilty of is the assumption, or even belief, that ‘I’ll do that when I’m older’.

Rewind the best part of seven years and you’ll find out about the time I spent six months backpacking in Southeast Asia. Of course I did – I was a typical twenty-something from Berkshire, unsure of which direction to take in my life. But before I tell you about my first happy-ending massage (which was great) let me tell you about the ‘the herd instinct’ and how it affected me as an adult, ready to take on the world.

When the time came to enter the ‘world of work’ (remember that blueprint I told you about?), I applied for a job in the corporate world because, to me, I suppose in hindsight, it was the only logical pathway to that elusive six-figure salary. I put on my cheap suit, shiny black shoes and learned how to tie a tie. Why? Because it was what ‘everyone else’ was doing when they got to my stage in life.

Now, wearing a suit has no functional purpose beyond having more pockets than casual attire. I never once questioned why I was doing it or whether the money I’d be paid for the hours in my office cubicle would be worth it. I simply thought to myself: how else can I make my parents proud, buy a house and get a nice car without such a salary? I love cars, and from when I was a teenager to my mid-twenties they got faster, more luxurious and newer, but at the time of writing, I haven’t had a car in years and only ride my trusted cruiser skateboard around. I hope you believe me when I tell you it makes me far happier than any car ever did.

The six-figure salary to me seemed like the only logical stepping stone – not once did I ever think my values were misaligned, just that I needed new shoes and to shave for the interview and pretend I cared about it a lot more than I really did. So, I held my glass of water in my shaking hand (it kept my palm cool and reduced the clamminess that was a frequent occurrence in this type of interview). Then I took a sip of water as my interviewer got to the end of his sentence, which bought me another couple of seconds to conjure a good response without seeming like I was thinking too much. All tricks of the trade, like an illusionist, my only care being getting the job so I’d have money in my bank account come the end of the month.

Well, the cool-palm/water-sipping trick paid off because I got that job. And most others I interviewed for.

There was a weird moment when I sat at my desk on my first day in that job, adjusted my chair and ensured my monitor was at the right height so that I didn’t get a neck problem (given the huge amount of time I’d be staring at it, week on week). I looked at my phone and I thought to myself: this is it. You think of your payslip, how much it means per month after tax and what that can do for those around you. You think about ‘career opportunities’, ‘progressions’ and ‘incentives’. You line up your mobile phone in a perpendicular manner to the keyboard and think of the lovely arrangement you have in front of you.

I found this mindset of thinking down, not up. What I mean is that I remember my salary was around £20,000 (36,400 AU$) – I thought to myself: OK, that’s £1,600 (2,900 AU$) a month and about £1,200 (2,185 AU$) after tax. I then divided it by the hours in a nine-to-five job, and thought that’s £7.50 (13.65 AU$) an hour, comparing it to what I earned in the pub, which was £6 (11 AU$) an hour. Then, if they ‘match’ your pension contribution, you feel like you’re getting free money (although I’m pretty sure that when you do the maths it’s not as glamorous as you think) – for some this kind of security may be what they crave, but is trading the best years of your life for a future pension that covers a much smaller proportion of your life really a good marker of contentment? The tiny increase of £1.50 (2.70 AU$) an hour made me feel accomplished at the time, but there was one key difference: I had actually enjoyed working in the pub.

So, I’d found myself doing something I never really wanted to do, what seemed like the right thing to do, only because everyone else was doing it. I was following the herd. They all seemed happy, so I told myself what I now know is one of many lies I’ve told myself over the years: that I was happy working in that corporate world, soon to be consumed by the rat race.

The ‘herd instinct’ goes hand in hand with that blueprint I keep referring to, which so many of us follow by default. Why do we not challenge the status quo? Why is it perfectly acceptable to do something you don’t enjoy so that you can live for the weekend? You’ll get carried away Friday and Saturday, only to spend Sunday miserable in bed, half dreading work the next day, while the other half is suffering from the hangover. I like to remind people that Mondays do not suck. If you feel that way, it’s not Mondays that are the problem, but the current structure and routine in your life.

So, there I was, fresh-faced, new to the corporate way of living, and in the office on day one, I was initially tested by making the tea for those around me. Do you know what I decided to do? I made the worst tea I possibly could to ensure I wasn’t asked to do it again. In hindsight, intentionally making terrible tea could legitimately rank as the highlight of my dull, dreary days in the corporate world. I developed another trick, due to the rigidity of the hours and only being able to leave for home at 5.30 p.m. (it always annoyed me that regardless of how hard I worked, I’d still have to hit the same arbitrary amount of outward calls and have to leave at the same time each day): I’d often ask who wanted a cup of tea at 5.15 p.m. (no one, obviously, as it was almost time to go), then leave the office via a fire escape, out of sight of most of my colleagues. If my managers asked where I was come 5.25, everyone would say I was making a cup of tea, unknowingly covering my back.

Being exposed to the corporate world – people in higher positions than me, earning more money than me, having nicer things than I had … You wake up, you go to work, you come home and you try to enjoy the finite period of time between that and when you go to sleep. Is it any wonder that over the years I became fixated on my job title (which changed weekly when I was bored on LinkedIn), my income and the materialistic things everyone else had? Take a suit, for instance. I fucking hated wearing a suit, but within months I was thinking about how I needed a nicer one, a better fit, more expensive. I wanted a more expensive version of something I didn’t even want, to impress people I didn’t actually even like who earned more money than I did.

This all came to an end when I snapped. When I just couldn’t do it any more. I needed to hit pause on life and just escape for a bit. So, I sold my fancy car and flew to Southeast Asia. Time slowed down for me then. I spent some days just worrying about how many beers I was going to have and others about what books I should read. I’d admire how some of the locals had what appeared to be so little, yet they had a sense of happiness much greater than anyone else’s back home – even those with the six-figure salaries.

For me, in hindsight, I am so grateful I snapped when I did. It taught me a lesson about who I was, what I stood for, what I was willing to do and what I wasn’t. I don’t mean to completely shit on the corporate world, but in my experience, it’s where I found that most organizations trade as much of your time and effort as they can for the least amount of money you’ll accept to do it. Read that again: every salary is quite literally the least amount of money someone is willing to pay you for your finite amount of time on this planet.

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.

If I look back at my biggest failures, they are the aspects of my life I am most grateful for. If you think about yours, I am sure you would agree. I don’t need much from you right now – just that you cherish the next hurdle instead of worrying about it. Time spent worrying is time wasted, let me tell you that for free.

So it’s not just who we are, it’s not just what we do; it’s not just what is going to happen and it’s not just dwelling on what has happened. Sometimes we need to sit and think about where we are right now and who we are surrounding ourselves with, to allow us to consider whether we need to adjust these things for long-term positive change. If you want a tree to grow to its full potential, you’d best think carefully about where you plant it.

* Law of reciprocity: when someone does something nice for you, you will have a deep-rooted psychological urge to do something nice in return.

PART II

VALUES

A value isn’t just how much something costs; it’s an integral part of our persona and identity. It signifies what we determine as being important in life, it’s how we decide what we want, yet so many of us lose sight of our values. Our values are reflected in how we behave each and every day, so I hope that I can help you to rediscover what they are and ensure you pay greater attention to them.

Values of Success: So, What If It All Goes Wrong?

When I was twenty-eight, I had what I can only call ‘a moment’. During this period of my life, I was experiencing what many would call relative ‘success’. I’d get high fives walking down the beach in Sydney and requests for selfies on nights out from people who watched my content. Considering that for 90 per cent of my life up until writing this book that had never happened before, it was hugely overwhelming. You see, when people see you have a big social media following, they paint a picture of your life, and there’s often not a lot of regard for how new it is for you. For a stranger to know so much about you or feel like they know you already is a phenomenon unique to the age of social media, and although I have so much gratitude for it, it’s also kind of weird. Brilliantly weird, but weird. However, before getting into the social science of social media I want to tell you about a time when I was sitting in a steak restaurant in Sydney.

It was a summer’s evening and I was with friends. I ordered my steak and had a little moment when I just looked around and took in my surroundings. It was a nice, normal evening. People were happy, the sun was setting and I was with good friends. I sat there and thought to myself: do you know what? If nothing works out, I’ll just work here in this steak restaurant. I’ll work the 4-or-5-p.m.-until-close shift, I’ll do it five or six nights a week. During the day, I’ll go the beach, I’ll learn to surf and I’ll get a dog. I’ll give the dog my attention all day. I’ll walk him and tie him up in a nice spot when I surf and then go home to nap or tan before my evening shift.

This isn’t to say that we can all work in a restaurant as an easy way out of chasing our ambitions, but instead that ‘success’ can be found in places other people may not see from the outside. And that’s fine too, because success is internal and not a value we should chase to please other people.

A simple job that isn’t stressful may not make you the best-paid person in your friendship group, but it could make you a better friend, a better student in your hobby and even a more attentive lover. We must always refer back to the metrics of success and remove our egos from any idea of the good life. The restaurant wasn’t an ambition, but more of a fail-safe that made me feel more confident to take risks.

Since that ‘moment’ over the medium-rare steak I have taken up Brazilian jiu jitsu and I will continue to devote myself to being a student of the sport until I physically can’t do it any more. I am well aware that I’ll never be considered successful in it to the outside world; I mean, think about it – realistically, I am just not going to be a superstar jiu jitsu athlete. That doesn’t mean that it can’t make me happy every single day, though (plus, that’s only about success to the outside world). To me, the feat of just obtaining my next belt promotion could be enough, as I set my own metrics for success. For someone else, it could be different; it could just be turning up to three sessions a week. Only if I compare myself to the best competitors in the world can I be left feeling deflated. Do you see the correlation with our work life now? I’ll talk about the humility that the sport has given me later on in the book, but for now, understand that between someone who does the sport as a hobby and someone else who competes and wins at the highest level, both can experience tremendous success based on their own metrics and values of what that means to them – and no one can take that away from them.

I want you to consider this, too. I could win a competition at blue belt in the next year. That could easily make me just as happy as someone else would be winning the worldwide black belt title. What I want you to realize is that the level of happiness we’d feel could, and most likely would, be exactly the same. Where the level of accomplishment sits on the scale doesn’t influence the amount of happiness you get from it. What if I told you that I was just as happy from two very different victories: the first was when a man sat next to me in a café in the UK five years ago. This man paused, looked at me and said, ‘I like reading your blogs.’ To me, that was huge; although it was only a mile from the gym I was working in and in the very café in which I wrote them I could not believe my luck. The second was the recognition in becoming a Sunday Times bestselling author. But it felt the same. The scale of the victories, objectively speaking, is substantially different; but how they felt to me was the same. You do not need to be the best in the world to be happy, as long as you choose the level you want to be happy at.

I feel that in the world we live in we’re made to feel that we must be in spectacular professions in order to be happy with them. But we don’t. It’s a bit like being an ‘on paper’ average athlete: as long as you’re happy doing it, then who can say different? I used to date a Norwegian girl, and I’ll never forget a conversation I once had with her dad. (He only said two things to me for the entire year and a bit that I dated his daughter.) We were out food shopping, and there was a lad, a good-looking lad, sat at the checkout of what, truth be told, was a bit of a shithole of a supermarket. The lad spoke fantastic English and had good banter (I’m pretty sure he made me laugh with an inside joke only British people would understand).

As we got out to the car park I said, ‘I can’t understand what a good-looking lad is doing in a job like that. How is he not doing something better – better paid or more interesting?’

And her dad turned to me and said, ‘Well, James, some people behind closed doors have very complicated lives and therefore require very simple jobs.’

I’d never thought about it like that. And I’ve never forgotten it either. The second thing he told me was: ‘All Norwegians are born with skis on their feet. Some, however, decide when they grow up to take them off.’ That made me feel a lot better – partly about how terrible I was at skiing, but that wasn’t quite his point. (In fact, I may have to tap him up for some more nuggets in this book as we go on.) I think his point (which means more to me the more I think about it) was that in life we are all born with everything we need to accomplish anything, but along the way, some of us, for whatever reason, feel the need to remove our skis, to throw in the towel and no longer pursue what we set out to do. Anyone who has ever gone skiing will testify to two things: in most cases, especially when you start out, those skis will come off; however, just as easily, they click back on. And that’s not influenced by how long they have been off for either. No one is born good at skiing; some decide to continue to get better, while others do not.

Skál (sk-ull): a Norwegian word for ‘cheers’ or ‘good health’ – a salute or a toast, as to an admired person or group. They’ll understand it if they’re Danish, Swedish, Faroese or Icelandic.

So, take a deep breath, think about your job or your profession and ask yourself if you’re getting caught up with someone else’s metrics for success or if you are being true to your own. If I were to compare my hobby with those who are the best at it, within a hundredth of a second I could go from content to disheartened. Whose rules are you playing by? Whose blueprint are you following? Yours or someone else’s?

Sunk Cost Fallacy Revisited

No matter how much you have already invested, only your assessment of the future costs and benefits counts.

Rolf Dobelli

For those who have not read Not a Diet Book, the sunk cost fallacy is where people struggle to walk away from something due to the amount of time, money or effort already invested in it. But these factors should not hold weight in any decision-making process around continuing or discontinuing whatever it is you’re currently invested in, whether that be a person or a profession.

If you invested 10 per cent of your savings in stocks two years ago, but they haven’t moved more than 1 per cent since then, do you feel obliged to hold on to them or to let them go? I bet in your head you’d be leaning towards keeping them – it’s been two years of waiting for them to increase in value, so why waste that amount of time, right?

Or take a marriage. It is based on partnership, on love, on happiness and wanting to share the great moments of life together, yet so many are unhappy. Why? The kids? Well, although yes, I agree, separated parents can be more dysfunctional than those together, surely two happy adults apart would be more functional than two unhappy ones living together under one roof? So, why do so many stay together? Because they’ve already invested so much in the marriage. Therefore, the decision is made based on the time spent in the relationship or the marriage, not the quality of it.

I know I made this point in my first book, but it’s important to make it clear again. You must only make judgements based on where you are at now, not where you were at previously and not where you might be. This is living in the present. The past no longer exists and it’s time you came to terms with that reality. What has happened occurred when the rock we live on was in a different part of the universe, and it will never revisit that location. To believe otherwise is naive.

THE MONTY HALL PROBLEM

Here’s a prime example of our fear around making decisions when the outcome is partly unknown: there are three doors, one of which has your favourite car behind it, while the other two have goats behind them. I let you pick any one of the three doors, and once you have selected it, I pick one of the other two (I know where the goats are). I open a door to show you a goat, and I then give you the opportunity to switch doors: do you take the switch? In most cases, you won’t. People don’t. They hold on tighter to their initial choice, even though more information is available to them. Your odds of winning go from 33 per cent to 66 per cent in what is known as ‘the Monty Hall problem’ if you switch. But although the odds are doubled in the case of switching, only around 13 per cent of people choose to do so given the opportunity.6

Your future is malleable, but I don’t want you to plan for that either. To be a future-planning person could cause you to neglect the present. Your today constructs your tomorrow. So, don’t try to step ahead or jump past a crucial step which is right now. The future is not in your full control, your past has happened, so you’re only left with right now. To make judgements based on your past is to make the same mistake as millions do each and every fucking day, falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy, remaining invested in the past and not the present. It sounds stupid to remind you but I think it’s fitting that I do – to remind you that you cannot change your past, you can’t fix what went wrong, you can’t worry about the situation that happened and you can’t let it affect you now; you can’t wear your failures of the past in the present. Every day is a page in a book: you should never turn back a page, or skip a chapter or worry about what is on the page to come; just stay focused on the page in hand and enjoy each and every line for itself.

So, make decisions based on now, on today, on the second you read this. Do you love your partner right now? Do you want to remain with them longer right now? Do you love your job right now? Stop thinking about how long you have been there; whether a month or a tenure, you can only let today influence your decision, not the amount of time invested. Don’t let the sunk cost fallacy take hold.

There are millions of people losing millions in currency, millions of unhappy marriages and unhappy relationships and millions of investments turning sour because people are too caught up in how long they’ve been invested in them. I know that divorce costs a fortune, but think of the cost of living an unhappy life or wasting time – the most valuable commodity of all.

Realize that sleeping on a futon* when you’re thirty is not the worst thing. You know what’s worse? Sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you’re not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and you got a job you hate. You’ll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There’s no risk when you go after a dream. There’s a tremendous amount to risk to playing it safe.

Bill Burr

Many people think of the solar system as being still, the sun chilling in the middle and the planets orbiting. But our solar system moves at around 828,000 km an hour around the Milky Way. It will take us about 230 million years to do a full orbit of that bad boy. So, guess what? That time you messed up really badly last week? We’re now at least 139,104,000 km from that point; it only remains a part of your identity if you choose to let it. We’re 240 million years away from even getting close to where that happened again in the next galaxy orbit, so don’t treat it like it’s in your DNA; it’s a part of the past. The universe continually moves on, so I suggest you do, too.

There are hard decisions to make today that will inevitably get put off until tomorrow and this will be the downfall of millions of people today, and then again the next day, and the next, I’m sure. Are you going to be one of those people? Well, that’s up to you, isn’t it? Turn this page very carefully – because what you do after reading it influences the trajectory of your life.

The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.

Seneca

* Futon: a padded unsprung mattress originating in Japan that can be rolled up or folded in two.

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