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Never Give Up

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Never give up!

Never underestimate your power to improve.

This video was shot a little under a year ago. Today, I am able to walk on a treadmill and ride a spin bike!

My journey of recovery is not over, but through focus and the power of the mind I will keep improving.

Whatever situation you find yourself in, know that you can do it!!!

PLEASE NOTE: To watch the video you will need to click on the VIDEO link.

Learning to walk, September 2019

Be Brave, For The New Economy

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DIGITAL FIRST REQUIRES A NEW WAY OF THINKING

My perspective, which I shared with a friend running for political office and I want to share with you, is that the economy is so shaky because we are still focused on pre-covid revenue drivers and activities.

We haven’t yet internalised that the world has undergone a two year shift in two months. As I intimate in my upcoming poetry collection: everything has changed; everything.

The markets have of late been buoyed by tech and other stocks that reflect this change to a Digital First landscape free from the physical and geographical tethers that have held us back. Take a look at what is working on the s&p500/nasdaq – Amazon, Apple, Zoom, Peloton.

This is the stuff we should be doubling down on in preparation for a post-covid world in which digital is the new order.

Sentiment (negative) historically clouds good business sense (positive) in a crisis: this is human nature. And this is why we need to be brave and break through that negativity and focus on the positive. 

The Great Midlife Exit

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How to treat the pandemic as the ultimate editing function.

If ever there was a time in our lives when we needed to shed our baggage, this is it. Maybe the pandemic is the ultimate editing function. Welcome to your “Great Midlife Edit.” What are you ready to let go of that is no longer serving you?
Chip Conley, AirBnB CEO Whisperer and Modern Elder Evangelist

What are you willing to edit in your life?

What will be your guiding star in this process and who will hold you accountable?

I’ve tended to be ahead of the curve multiple times for no apparent reason other than my capabilities to forward-read trends and so when I wrote and published Fierce Reinvention in 2017 was I being prescient for what was to come in 2020? It’s about the time line of other prescient moments of mine over time, but hey let’s not get hang up on that.

I love Chip’s framing of this year as providing the forcing function for a Great Midlife Exit.

Afford yourself of the opportunity to fiercely reinvent your life. Perhaps there are things that have accumulated around you that no longer serve your true purpose any longer.

Shed them.

No regrets.

For me, I’m in the process of shedding old life and project management systems and exploring new ones.

It feels like I am shedding an old skin that no longer serves me and tentatively slipping on a new, shiny one.

Evernote has been a constant companion since the early 2000s and I’ve been trialling their latest beta, but it doesn’t quite do it for me anymore. I’ve used other systems and recently explored Notion, but like Evernote it requires me to compartmentalise things and this feels artificial.

It ain’t how my brain works, so why should my ‘second brain’ be limited by such structures?

I remember how years ago I used to spend many hours on a Sunday evening placing emails into folders in Outlook. I never had enough time to keep up with the deluge and I often forgot where I’d placed an email when I needed to reference it in a hurry. And then along came gmail. It had a really powerful and intuitive search function and since I moved over to it I haven’t placed one email into one folder.

Oh, and I got my Sunday evenings back!

And so I was looking for something powerful yet unstructured.

I do believe I’ve found this with Roam Research. I’ll leave it to you to explore this system if you want, but I am highly recommending it.

It feels liberating to be applying an editing function to the systems that run my life and I encourage you to have a hard look at what you can change around you too.

Meet Your Ultimate Mentor

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Here’s What Death Can Teach Us About Living

I grew up amongst sickness and death. My father was a veterinary surgeon and I would accompany him on farm visits and regularly visit his animal hospital. I got to see sick animals being put down. When he carried out inspections at the abattoir I got to see the wholesale slaughter of animals for food. I saw first hand how my father converted the carcass of a lamb hanging in our outside shower, a gift from a grateful farmer, into food on our dinner table. I learned to catch fish, gut them and cook them on the barbecue.

But I noticed that our relationship to death was different when it came to people. The adults didn’t talk much with us children about the passing of a family member. And when my sister was diagnosed with brain cancer at the age of 6 we were shunned by many former friends in the community. In the 70’s there was a lot of ignorance around cancer.

Death is taboo, an obsessive morbidity that cannot be healthy for us. Or so our culture seems to say. It’s ok to bring it up briefly when someone we know has died, and we recognise grieving, but not for too long. For a few weeks after having had a loved one die we are offered condolences. We respond with a polite “Thanks,” and then the topic of conversation quickly moves on.

But death is all around us: everything is dying; everything is impermanent; by denying death and impermanence we are avoiding a major part of the natural cycle of life; we are creating an imbalance and to so we envelope ourselves in denial, fear and a grasping for control and ownership. Accepting impermanence frees us from both fear and ignorance.

By denying aging, death, impermanence and sickness we set ourselves up for a life of fear, reactivity and a meanness of spirit. When we do break through the death barrier we find that we relax into our lives and our place in the universe: we pull back from the acquisitive, busy, controlling mentality that held death and our fear of it at bay; we feel a wave of relief wash over us and we shift into a more honest and real relationship to ourselves and the people around us, becoming more present, more aware and more compassionate.

We measure success by what we own and what we do in society. And so at a young age we start to acquire assets: watches, cars, jewellery, property. We also allow our workplace to define us. “So what do you do?” is the catch cry of the 20-30-something social set. In the technology space I’ve seen multiple examples of the scrappy entrepreneur who seemed so passionate and focused on changing the world transform into a driven narcissist trapped by the quarterly corporate profit treadmill with no time for others once her company grows beyond the billion dollar point.

And we struggle when all this stuff is taken away from us due to happenstance, ill health and ultimately, death. We grieve the loss and rue how impermanent life is, but this is often too little and too late to give us much comfort.

We would be far better off making impermanence our friend and death our mentor at a young age by creating a daily practice of recognising that nothing is forever: reflect on your health and remind yourself that it is in our nature to become sick; reflect on your life and remind yourself that it is in our nature to die; reflect on what you have and remind yourself that everything we have will become separated from us. This becomes a powerful tool that we can use when impermanence inevitably strikes our lives. Instead of being shocked when something departs our world, we can instead recognise this loss as natural and wish that person, relationship or thing well on its journey.

Let’s play a game of charades. I want you to act like an old person. What actions would you communicate to me that you are old? For most of us we would hunch over and mimic a fragile person walking slowly with a wobbly walking stick. Yet in cultures where death is more a part of everyday life, or amongst people who are regularly in contact with the dying, such as hospice workers, people would portray an old person as being more graceful, with an understated fullness of life and the power of wisdom.

There is a radiance that comes with aging and impermanence. People who have suffered a near death experience speak of the deeper regard they now have of their vulnerability, not so much as a measure of weakness, but of an end to the need to put up defences along with the discovery of a newfound sense of freedom and openness.

My father was always strongly independent. And yet as his cancer spread he became weaker and more reliant on others. One day I saw him break down and cry as he spoke with a pharmacist about his pain management. This took a lot more courage for him to do than to continue with the veneer of control and independence. In that moment I saw in him a little boy, lost and frightened. In that moment it was as if I was seeing him for the first time and while it was hard, it also gave me a deeper sense of connection to him, a realisation of the interdependence that exists between all of us. Through his realisation that he was not in control and perhaps never had been in his life, he was giving me the gift of increasing my perception of impermanence and the gift of being able to connect and care for him more intimately.

It has been harder for my mother. She is trying to hold onto her sense of reality as her Alzheimers untangles the synapse pathways in her brain. There are times when she lets go and accepts that change is inevitable and that her independence is ephemeral, but there are other times when she rails against the need to be cared for. She fuels her anxiety by letting her discursive mind get the better of her: “I’m so stupid”; “I don’t know how to cook”; “I can’t find anything.” An attitudinal shift brings her comfort: she quietens down the negative monkey chatter; she stops repeating ‘bad experience’ stories from her past; and she experiences life from the heart. By just being, she relaxes into herself and accepts the heightened impermanence of her situation.

One of our greatest challenges as we age or deal with a life threatening illness is maintaining the veneer: our sense of who we are can shatter; our self-image no longer portrays stability to ourselves or others. This can be enormously confronting, yet it is a reality of our situation as we simply do not have the energy required to keep up the front.

When my father was in the final few weeks of his battle with cancer he turned to me one morning and asked, “What do other people do?”

“Do you mean other people in your situation?”

He nodded.

“Does it really matter what they do? You need to dance to your own tune and not worry about what is a socially acceptable way to die. It is your time, there is no right or wrong way.”

It was hard hearing myself say that. This was my father. This was the toughest man I’d ever met.“

All I ask is that you keep breathing. Relax into this part of your journey and breath. Don’t let social pressure or fear control your behaviour.”

While it is useful to create a practice for dealing with our own death, this is no guarantee of how we will face it. Nor will being prepared necessarily reduce the anguish for those around us or lead us to dying in a serene state. Life is a series of unknown moments, strung together by our minds to create a narrative. What is important to remember is that each and every moment is not only unknown, but unknowable. Our death is but one such moment. Contemplate that, explore the unknown, become comfortable with infinite unknowables and your fear of death and dying well will diminish. Replace your anxious mind with curious mind.

Building a strong practice of meditation is particularly helpful for creating a heightened level of comfort with the unknown. In meditation we release our biases and preconceptions and let every moment arrive abundantly unknown.

Embrace death, it can teach us so much about living life to its fullest without delay, without fear and without masks.

What Do Curated Communities Look Like in 2020?

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It’s Nearly Time For The On Deck Writers Fellowship

On the morning of the 9th September 2020 I checked my emails and was beyond excited to see one titled:

You’re In (On Deck Writers Fellowship)

I’d been not only accepted, but was being made a direct offer, circumventing the usually rigorous interview process.

So what had I become a fellow in?

According to the Program Structure document for the fellowship:

On Deck is here to maximize your chances of successfully achieving your writing goals, whether growing your audience, establishing expertise, generating income, or just improving your craft.

Although the Fellowship officially lasts eight weeks, On Deck is a community for life. We’re aiming to foster the digital-first, 21st-century version of the influential writers’ circles that evolved in certain places in the early 20th century, like the Bloomsbury Group or Gertrude Stein’s 1920’s Paris salons—what Kevin Kelly called “scenius.”

As you’ve no doubt already gathered from the application process, the Writer Fellowship is highly selective. We’re filtering not only for excellent writers, but for those who are going to contribute to the community more broadly.

We’re also aiming to build a community that’s diverse in both background and subject matter. Our first cohort includes college professors, venture capitalists, founders, tech execs, professional authors, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, students, marketers, bodybuilders, sailors, fashion models, politicians… the list goes on!

The fellowship kicks off on the 10th October and I will be joined by an incredible cohort of talented writers and entrepreneurs all hell bent on exploring the boundaries of their writing and its influence.

Usually an On Deck Fellowship would take place in person in San Francisco, but due to COVID On Deck Writers will take place over Zoom, Slack and other virtual communication and connection tools.

What about the broader On Deck?

On Deck started in 2016 when Erik Torenberg was thinking about leaving Product Hunt and wondered: Who else is exploring new ideas? Turns out, talented people are often thinking about what’s next. So he started hosting dinners with soon-to-be founders.

Those dinners turned out to be a hit. Soon enough, they spread to other cities: From Detroit to London to Sydney, founders loved to explore ideas in a nurturing and collaborative space, going on to start companies.

Fast forward to 2018, when David Booth joined the team as CEO and decided to take On Deck to the next level. The Fellowship was born: A 10-week program gathering 200+ talented founders to work on their next company, featuring workshops, cofounder dating, VC dinners & more.

Today, just 16 months and 5 cohorts later, the On Deck Fellowship (ODF) is booming: 250+ companies have raised over $150M+ from funds like FoundersFund, Sequoia, FirstRound, Initialized, and other top tier funds.

ODF is the perfect place to explore ideas, meet a co-founder, or build on an early concept.

What is my goal for the Fellowship?

I was involved in similar curated communities from the mid 1990’s having founded and sold Paradigm Violators, helped run First Tuesday and been a co-founder of Innovation Bay. While these had a virtual component they were also very much centred around a physicality. I am interested to explore what a modern, COVID constrained community evolves into.

All of these groups were instrumental in furthering my venture guy and entrepreneurial career. My focus has since shifted significantly to my writing. Connecting into a rocket ship of inspiration and momentum that will supercharge my writing platform is what the fellowship is about for me, while also giving me an opportunity to add value to others on a similar journey.

I’ll keep you posted as I make progress.

How To Find Your Calling With A Roam Research-Based Self-Inquiry Practice

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Leading Questions, Deep Thinking, True Answers

OVID has afforded us a unique momentary pause in which we owe it to ourselves to inquire into our own personal drivers and motivations. A process of self-inquiry can catalyse us finding our true life goals free from all the nagging narratives that had attached themselves to us.

Too often we write the story we want to hear

My suggestion is to fire up a program like Roam Research and input the following sets of questions. From there you can build out your self-inquiry practice. You will find that some questions are harder for you to answer than others. That’s OK, pull on a loose thread and get the process going.

You will also find that some questions resonate more deeply with you and you will want to repeatedly return to these. In Roam you can use block references (see the Note down below if you want more info on block references) to drag these questions into your Daily Notes or diary and delve into them on a regular basis, building up a rich tapestry of truth for yourself. You could also create a shortcut to the main Self Inquiry block/page/section and place this in your left tool bar so it is easily accessible. If you don’t use Roam you could do this with any other form of note taking or diarising tool, but Roam allows you to build up deep links between your inquiry points and that is where the magic lies.

These self-inquiry questions are drawn from my book Fierce Reinvention: A Guide to Harnessing Your Superpowers.

Who Are You?

• Who are you? What are your belief systems? What do you believe in? What values do you hold? What don’t you value?

• What do you believe to be true about the world?

• What vision do you have for your life?

• What kind of person do you want to be—when you grow up, tomorrow, at some point in the future?

• What do you bring consciously and unconsciously to your day?

• What feelings matter to you most during your day?

• How do you want others to remember you?

• What change do you want to see take place in the world and how do you want to play a part in bringing that to fruition?

• What do you want to stay the same—in the world, in your life?

What Do You Fear?

• What do you fear? How does that fear sit within you, where do you feel it in your body? What triggers that fear?

• What are your oldest, most deep-seated fears? Have you named them? If not give them a name, such as “the little girl,” “the San Francisco me.”

• What could you do to submit to your fear?

• What would you do differently if you conquered this fear? What would you ask for?

What Makes You Vulnerable?

• How do you feel? Where in your body do these feelings reside?

• How can you get comfortable with your vulnerability and other emotions? What makes you relax into them and leaves you feeling your stress wash away?

What Is Work?

• How do you define your work—passion, joy, job, begrudgingly? Are you engaged with your work?

• What is your relationship to work? In the past, right now? What work do you see yourself doing in the future? In a perfect world?

• What is success/failure to you?

• Do you bring anything from your parents into your work? How did they relate to work? What did they teach you about work?

• Do you show up in your entirety at work? What parts of you show up? How can you show up completely?

• How do things that you have denied about yourself, or feel uncomfortable about yourself, shape your company?

How Do You Achieve Flow?

• Under what circumstances do you work best?

• What is the algorithm that enables you to get into flow—exercise, food, sleep?

• What systems can you put in place to ensure you achieve flow more regularly?

How Do You Play

• What do you do to untether yourself?

• What gives you unfettered joy and has you excited beyond the norm?

• What gives you unbounded energy? How far away from work does this make you feel?

• What could you do to create moments of joy during your day?

What Are Your Soul Habits

• What are your current rituals for connecting to and centering yourself?

• What things do you do that fuel your energy, that nourish your deepest self?

• How do you create moments of pause during your day?

Note: Block References in Roam Research

_Everything is a block in Roam Research. This makes the block reference feature very powerful.

_The main purpose of block references is to avoid duplicate content in your database. The idea is that you only need to type something once and you can then use it in as many contexts as you like.

(Thanks to RoamStack for this explanation)

Five Essential Tips For Harnessing True Power

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Learn the secret to true, non-transient power and where to find it.

In this post we are going to explore how to break out of the all-consuming cycle of striving for more and more power?

Power is a loaded word in our modern, ego-driven lives. We equate more power with more freedom, more happiness, more prestige, and more wealth.

The less power we have, the less freedom we have, the more we are subject to the whim of others, and the deeper we sink into despair and poverty.

This is the Western power narrative we are immersed in. It is for most part a self-immersion with our personal power above all else being our obsession.

However, some of the happiest people in the world have the least amount of such power, as understood by our Western philosophy.

Take the Kingdom for Bhutan, for example; it may be classified as a ‘least developed nation’ from a socio-economic and infrastructure point of view, but the people of this Eastern Himalayan country don’t seem to care less. Their focus is on gross national happiness, an index which measures their collective happiness and well-being.

The people of Bhutan may be poverty-stricken, but for all intents and purposes their demeanour seems to be the reverse of this laden term: they are poverty-rich. In fact, they have far more power than many of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Their power is true power: they have rejected Western power, the ‘power’ of others who would wish to exert control over them and influence them. Instead, they have doubled down on the power within themselves, that innate ability to accept the universe for what it is without wanting to exert control over it.

I recently spoke with a Bhutanese local who confirmed for me that she does not focus as much on her personal power or happiness, but on that of her community. For example, there is no such thing as homelessness in Bhutan. People always have a set of welcoming arms to turn to in a time of need.

Power duality: everything changes

Western power is a figment of your mind. It only exists relative to something else: powerlessness.

In this respect, power is the same as any mind-induced duality: rich-poor, happy-sad, quick-slow. It is, only in relation to its opposite.

Getting through customs at an international airport can either be a snap and you literally fly through, or the line of dishevelled and exhausted travellers ahead of you seems never-ending while the border control officer looks half asleep behind the counter.

Quick-slow.

And like these other dualities, Western power is fleeting and entirely subjective.

You go to work and issue instructions to others that result in your company succeeding in some business transaction. You feel happy, you feel all powerful, you feel ready to take on the world. But the next day that transaction unravels and you are at risk of losing a lot of money, being made to look like a fool, or you even lose your company or your job. You feel sad, frustrated, and powerless. How could you be such a fool to let that piece of business not succeed?

Happy-sad.

But then you hear some good news from your life partner and you become happy again. In your mind, the failed transaction feels inconsequential in the scheme of things and you move on.

Sad-happy.

As with all dualities, everything changes. You will experience many moods during the course of a single day: powerful one moment, powerless the very next. This form of power is external and transient. It is caught up in appearances; it is caught up in the house of cards that both we and society build around ourselves.

Finding true power

True power may seem a bit ephemeral, but if you want to live in a state of joy, it is worth making the effort to find it. You needn’t make the journey all the way to Bhutan either. Here are five navigation pointers to finding true power in your life, right now.

1. True power exists at the source

True power is within you and it is infinitely abundant. But despite this, it is easy to totally miss true power completely: if you continue to pursue appearances, if you continue to chase after power in the guise of prestige or wealth, or any other external measure. The impact of not finding your true power is that you totally miss your self. You spend your entire life living a dream; you end up never breaking out of a distorted reality.

Perhaps you achieve some measure of external power: you become the CEO of a large company, you become the leader of a nation, your book becomes an international phenomenon. At the time you think this will give you lasting joy, but it soon proves to be just as ephemeral as every other semblance of power you ever aspired to in your life. That inevitable moment will come when death shines a mirror on your achievements and you will see that its reflection is empty. Your power was powerless in the universal scheme of things. It was but a fleeting moment and, like all other momentary appearances, it was impotent; it was helpless in the face of death. You may have believed in its strength, but death releases it.

2. True power transcends death—true power transcends mere appearance

You find true power by looking within yourself. Consider your age: you may have heard someone say, or you may have said this yourself, “I might be 43, but I feel 23!” Close your eyes and try to determine how old you really feel. Hard, isn’t it? That’s because there is no age to consciousness. Age manifests in your body, your external appearance. Your soul is ageless.

3. True power resides in your soul—finding it takes contemplation

When you centre in on true power you will be amazed by two things. First, you will notice how vastly more powerful it is than any fleeting external power you had been chasing, because true power is absolute power: it is non-changing and eternal.

And secondly, your quality of being will change, markedly. You will become more able to observe, rather than acting on or reacting to the external world around you. And this will become a positive virtuous cycle: action tends to feed your ego, which in turn feeds your striving for external power. When you are not acting, your ego is not being fed and it dissipates; as your ego dissipates you will have more capability to operate from within, from your soul and this will lead you to unlock more true power, more meaningfulness and, ultimately, real and lasting joy.

4. True power reveals itself in awareness

One of the most effective ways to achieve true power is to shift from being in your mind to being aware. Mind is never where you are now. It is always thinking about what was and what may be, which is why elusive Western power is such an addictive trap: you hear of someone you believe has been successful and you start remonstrating yourself for why you have not achieved their level of success yet, and you start scheming how you can be even more successful than them.

If you drop your mind and simply become aware, you realise that awareness is always with you where you are now, in the present. By dropping mind more you become more and more aware and less and less susceptible to the cravings for transient forms of power. The more you break the habit of mind, the more you enjoy being in the now and accessing true power.

5. True power exists between striving and emptiness

True power exists in that serene space between striving for activity while being entangled in the outer, and the emptiness that comes from focusing on inner feelings. Finding true power requires a subtle balance between the outer and the inner; it requires finding your flow point. True power exists in that middle point between being active and being passive. And it is in this middle point that you transcend the world: you are no more alive; you are no more dead. This is where true power resides – this is tranquility, and the joy you will find here is off the charts. This is the joy that powers gross domestic happiness.

Get Conked.io: finely distilled writing, curated thoughtfully

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Subscribe at Conked.io

I’ll go into more detail on the genesis of Conked in another post, but for now I’m excited to bring this media entertainment bundle to you.

What is Conked?

At its heart Conk is a weekly substack newsletter which on deck’s (hey it’s an annagram spotted in the wild!) writing pieces of lasting value that are both intensely enjoyable in the moment, but that can also stand the test of time.

Topics include areas orthogonal to the usual contemporary, business and tech news: anthropology, culture, history, philosophy, future trends.

1+1=3, or Why Bundling is Better

In addition, Conked will include fortnightly chapter drops of Rand’s serialized true crime thriller Last Ally. It’s a ‘you can’t make this shit up‘ novel based on a true story surrounding South Africa’s worst serial murderer.

I’ll post more details on the novel to build suspense before the first chapter drop (sorry, I can’t help myself).

You can choose to nourish your senses with the curated writing, or the novel, or preferably both as your senses need more nourishment in these dystopian times!

Subscribe Now!

Subscribe now at Conked.io so you don’t miss out on some great pieces of writing; subscribe now as you’ll most certainly not want to miss the suspense build up before the first chapter hits like a freight train. It’s free, but I’ll turn on paid subscription options in due course.


Shifting over to Conked.io

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Please note that Rand has shifted all his writing over to Conked.io and rand.substack.com and will only sporadically be updating this blog. Thank you for your patronage over the past 20 years!

Meta Rand is back!

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Friends, followers and others, I’m putting up this short post to let you know that after a solid year-long hiatus, I’m back!

I’ve been focused on my health and a bit of writing and have decided to make a return to my favorite platform and re-engage with you all.

It sure has been an interesting few months, what with the requisitioning of the metaverse and the term meta by Mark Zuckerberg. I still remember talking to a well known VC firm that had backed him early on. We were already well into building early segments of the metaverse at the time and they were most excited by this young buck they had backed with his nascent social network project, Facebook. Good luck to him and his team!

Besides talking with you about writing things I will from time to time indulge you with insights from my metaversal experience. After all, I did begin using ‘meta’ some twenty years ago!





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