I was on a seminar yesterday, resented by a billionaire venture capitalist who goes by the nom de plume of Dexter Abraham.

When a very successful bloke gives tips, I listen, because what works for him may work for me.

Here is the gold.

To stay on top of your game you have to be sharp.

To stay sharp you have to be wide awake.

If you are tired you will make mistakes, you won’t be 100% present and engaged.

So take a nap if that’s the case.

I have done this a few times in the past and here is what happens to my productivity.

Normally I wake up early – dawn, no matter the time of year.

And my best most focused work occurs in the morning – usually.

After lunch my energy slowly declines and by about two pm nothing useful happens.

When I press on, nothing productive gets done. I usually end up distracting myself on “social” media (gotta blocker now though).

But.

If I have a long nap (like an hour or sometimes two of rem sleep) I can wake up and do busy work for a bit while I wake up properly.

I find I can then do sharp accurate work for another three to four hours in the late afternoon and early evening.

So instead of maybe three to five hours of effective work done in the day, I can almost double that.

My naps are not the usual power nap, but real dead to the world REM sleep.

Since I am a contrarian to everything, most productivity/sleep experts will decry that.

But for me, it works whenever I need a re-power during a heavy work day.

BTW it is also a good thing to do if you have eaten too much sugar at lunch time and you are having an insulin overdose that makes you sleepy.

Give it a go.

“Men would soon be about their duties, hurrying from one nothing to another, to compromises, to banal degradations, anxious lest they fail to be on time.
They would not care for the blackened grass growing between the bricks; they would take no note of the spider’s architecture, nor marvel at the flight of a wren darting to its nest among the pollution blackened, carved stones.
There would be no time.
There would be no time for them, no time for seeing, or feeling or touching or loving or finding out what it might be to be alive.
Clouds would be strangers to them, rain an inconvenience, snow a nuisance, a tree an anachronism, to be cut down because it would destroy “the view”.
These are the men without meaning, so full and so empty, so crowded, so desolate, so busy, so needlessly occupied. These are the grey men, the hurrying men, the efficient, smug, tragic insects, noiseless on soft feet, in the billion orehills of technology.
How few of them gaze ever on the stars.
Is grandeur so fearful that men must shield themselves with pettiness from its glory. Do they not understand that in themselves, and in perhaps a thousand other intelligences, reality has opened its eyes on its own immensity…
Do they shut their eyes lest they see gods? ”
– J Norman

 

In 2014 my wife sold her business (at a loss I might add).

In 2015 we sold the majority of our stuff in a three month rolling garage sale.
When you look at a lot of stuff you have not seen for years, and sell it for cents in the dollar, knowing that the original cost (added up) could have paid for a one or two year round the world trip…

Well it sharpens perspective about what is real.

At the end of that year we sold the house too, and put the remainder of our precious (to us) things into a 20 foot container and went on the road in an old 1991 4WD and 1998 caravan.

We are now one of the “no fixed address” crowd and are pretty happy with that, because we are no longer “chased” by either people who want to sell us stuff, or Govt that wants to control us.

House sitting and constant moving around makes it hard to track us physically.

So why?

Why go against the mainstream thought about how life should be lived?
You know, go to school, go to uni, get a good job, retire, then die.

School doesn’t prepare you for life, or even give you a wide ranging education any more.
Basically it is designed to create compliant drones.
Uni is now a left wing factory for student radicals of the feminist type.
Where kids with no common sense are taught to self hate, and hate everything that is actually good about our society with a bunch of SJW imaginary inequalities.

To prepare them for jobs that don’t exist (gender studies?), or will no longer exist very soon.

The retire and die bit is now Govt policy for anyone not self funded as a retiree.
Treatment of pensioners is abysmal, and of course the cost of living makes it impossible to live with dignity if you don’t own your own home.

So we got out of dodge and haven’t looked back.

My values are now aligned with my lifestyle.

It takes courage to sell everything you own, and become a bit of a drop out at 65 years of age.

However it is an adventure, with every day presenting either a new horizon or a new challenge.

It gives us the freedom to be who we really are, free from interference and control (as much as is possible in the surveillance society we live in nowadays).

We get time to be with family, and lots of time to work on keeping and improving our health.

All the above ensures we live with integrity, and align with my values.

So I decided to write something on this blog every couple of days, just as an exercise to sharpen my pencil and brain. Social media isn’t particularly “social” any more, and I prefer to talk face to face, because it is more nuanced, and requires more thought.

A lot of social media commentary, if said face to face, would ensure the commentator takes their teeth home in a bag.

Anyway. One down and plenty to come.

I’m not sure who you voted for in the last election…But consider this for the next one!

COMMENT FROM ROSS GREENWOOD (Financial presenter on Australian morning TV show)
Reality pill needed for Australians
This is really well put, in terms the average punter can understand ..
It cuts thru political doublespeak and provides clarity USA Today

Lesson # 1:

Why the U.S. Was downgraded:

* U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
* National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
* Total budget cuts: $385

Got It ?????

OK now Lesson # 2:

Here’s another way to look at the Debt Ceiling:

Let’s say, you come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighbourhood …
And your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings.

What do you think you should do?

Raise the ceilings, or pump out the (ummmm) “effluent”?

Lesson # 3 :

Australia today FROM ROSS GREENWOOD

Quoted by: Ross Greenwood of Money News..

Right now the Federal Government is at pains to tell everyone – including us the mug-punters and the International Monetary Fund, that it will not exceed its own, self-imposed, borrowing limits. How much? $200 billion. And here’s a worry.

If you work in a bank’s money market operation; or if you are a politician; the millions turn into billions and it rolls off the tip of the tongue a bit too easily. But every dollar that is borrowed, some time, has to be repaid. By you, by me and by the rest of the country.

Just after 5 o’clock tonight I did a bit of math for Jason Morrison ( Sydney radio presenter). But it’s so staggering its worth repeating now.

First thought; Gillard, Swan, Wong, before that Rudd, all of the Labor Cabinet, call these temporary borrowings, a temporary deficit.

Remember Those Words : Temporary Deficit.

The total Government debt will end up around $200 billion. So here’s a very basic calculation .. I used a home loan calculator to work
It out….. it’s that simple..$200 billion is $2 hundred thousand million.

The current 10 year Government bond rate is 4.67 per cent. I worked the loan out over a period of 20 years. Now here’s where it gets scary …. Really scary.

The repayments on $200 billion, come to more than one and a quarter billion dollars – every month – for 20 years. It works out we – as taxpayers – will be repaying $15.4 billion in interest and principal every year .. $733 for every man woman and child – every year. The total interest bill over the 20 years is – get this – $108 billion.

Remember, this is a Government, that just 4 years ago, had NO debt. NO debt.

In fact it had enough money to create the Future Fund, to pay the future liabilities of public servants’ superannuation, and it had enough to stick $20 billion into the Building Australia Fund …..

A note was sent to me which explains that the six leading members of the Government, from Ms Gillard down, have a collective work experience of 181 years, but only 13 in the private sector.

If you take out of those 13 years the number that were spent as trade union lawyers, 11, only two years were spent in the private sector.

So out of those 181 years:

– no years spent running their own business
– no years spent starting their own business
– no years spent as a director of a family business or a company
– no years as a director of a public company
– no years in a senior position in a public company
– no years in a senior position in a private company
– no years working in corporate finance
– no years in corporate or business restructuring
– no years working in or with a bank
– no years of experience in the capital markets
– no years in a stock-broking firm
– no years in negotiating debt facilities with banks
– no years running a small business
– no years at the World Bank or IMF or OECD
– no years in Treasury or Finance.

But these people have plunged Australia into unprecedented debt. Well, in a way you can’t blame them. It’s clear the electorate did not do their homework, because the Government is there by right. Ah, but they are Labor and people vote for them because Labor is good for the working family – right???

If you have read this you may like to pass it on to your friends to help educate a little as you, them and I, will be repaying the above.

Thankyou Tony Longbottom for sharing.

Well it happened again, just four years after my ablation.

Had a trip to the GC hospital last Sunday after my heart flipped out and wouldn’t spontaneously revert to sinus rythm.
What a pain in the arse. I had the zap and was back home late afternoon.

I guess the cause was overtiredness, and too much time in front of computers working.
Anyway I have permission to have naps if I need them, and we go to bed by eight pm with the usual dawn awakening.

The long term idea is to not take drugs every day, but to find one drug that will do a reversion when I take it.
Ideal for when I am out in the sticks and days away from a hospital…

Will have a scan in a couple of weeks to check the old heart out for any deterioration since the last one four years ago and go from there.

Waste of a day but a great wakeup call. Can’t ever get complacent about health and fitness, which I have been ever since I wrote my car off in 2008.