Home Blog Entrepreneurship

Your life is a cult

Excuse me to get all conspiracy theorist on a Monday Morning but I was browsing a few Tony Robbins videos over the weekend and he mentions one of the reasons why successful people achieve better results in life is because of the rituals they consistently perform by themselves.

This started me thinking of how our school lives are the start of the rituals that produce the working class mentality. The Monday to Friday school time is the very essence of breeding a culture of people who struggle to think out of the box. All school taught us all to do is to get a job.

Get a job!!

Whereas this kind of education served an entire generation of the Industrial age very well indeed, I feel it is really letting our children down now.

Jobs for life are not common place any more.

It took a few industrialists back in the last century to set up a few companies and employ thousands and the peripheral service industries followed, to create a wealthy economy. This age is finally dying, and the rest of the world quite easily competes with Europe and more often for much cheaper.

Unless we prepare our children to think more laterally, and stop kicking their creativity out of them, we will not see an end to any recessions soon

Recent scholars of our education system are bemoaning our lack of divergent thinking; we are shown that an average 4 year old can think of 50 uses for an elastic band, whereas when they have finished school they can think of less than 5, school is kicking the imagination out of our kids, and sadly it is imagination that will fuel our economy of the future with many smaller industries creating innovative ideas.

I feel we should encourage our children to be more creative and think less about looking for a job and to create their own businesses,

The UK government panicking throwing money at small business to revamp the economy at present, is a knee jerk reaction to something that should have been implemented at school many years ago. Instead of simple say; bookkeeping lessons, why not throw it out to the kids to come up with something easier or more streamlined I bet our teachers would be shocked at our children’s willingness to take over the next generation and mold it into something better.

So next time your alarm goes off at exactly 0615 and you shower at 0630 breakfast at 0645 and leave the house at exactly 0710 and join thousands of others on the M6 with a face to crack thunder ask yourself this; is this your choice really? Or did school teach you to get a job and quash all your dreams into a little box somewhere at the back of your mind?

Meetings such a waste of time

I think our rituals are firmly set in stone from the first day at school, and I believe our children are smarter than we think, and can see a different world out there from the one we are used to. If we don’t start preparing them differently and give them what they crave and fuel their imagination we are heading for oblivion.

But what about us, surely to start giving false hopes to people who have mortgages and children is irresponsible? The bills have got to be paid right? Yes of course nobody ever said leave work now and fulfill your lifelong ambition of navigating the Nile for six months with an occasional post card home to the family in the soup house.

We are seeing more and more new businesses start-ups than ever before, and I think a lot of them are reluctant business owners with little passion but ask anyone over 40 how difficult life after redundancy is and how hard it is to find a job and you will begin to understand why.

Baby steps, most successful people I have met recently spent a few hours each week part time, developing a part time business with an idea they have always had.

Ask anyone in work each day do we think we could do this better? and suddenly you will see a plethora of good ideas and some crazy ones like ‘kill the boss’, which was always my personal favourite. People will always have ideas, take an idea develop it, and you never know what may become of it unless you try.

Following your dream a few hours a week isn’t got to make your partner leave you and your children will still have shoes for school! Everything in moderation.

As Tony Robbins Internationally acclaimed life coach and business mentor (Just YouTube him) has said it’s such a small redirection in your thinking you can find enormous changes, but you must first recognise that:

You are where you are right now because you always put your left sock on first, and then wonder why you are in so much debt,… thus begin your day as an indication to the rest of your life’s opus.

‘The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results’

Albert Einstein