44. Spearheading Change With Jonathan MacDonald

To every 10 things that you do, like six of them, seven of them are going to go to hell. Experience is a hard teacher because it gives you the test first and then the lesson afterwards. Historical analysis is not a predictor of the future. We need to be as productively paranoid. If you're in a business that you know what would disrupt you, then you've got to build for it now. Because the fear of rejection is a bigger weight than the joy of the upside.

This is Professional Builder Secrets, the number one podcast to help you grow your building company safely and securely. Brought to you by the association of Professional Builders. Join us every week as we talk to industry experts and your fellow professional builders on everything you need to know to generate more leads, more sales and higher margins while improving the building experience for your clients. Hello and welcome to the Professional Builder Secrets Podcast, a podcast by the association of Professional Builders for building company owners, general managers, VPs and emerging leaders. Here we discuss all things running a professional building company from sales, processes, financials, operations and marketing. Hello and welcome. We have another great episode from the Professional Builder Secrets podcast. I'm joined today by an award winning best selling author and KEYNOTE Speaker, Jonathan McDonnell. Jonathan, thanks for being here today.

My pleasure. Great to be here.

Well Jonathan, I actually picked up your first book Powered by Change and I spent the last few days getting into it and I was really, really inspired by your story. But I wanted to start off with for our listeners to actually get into your origin story and how did it impact your business acumen and what you took to the world after. Could you briefly share a little bit about your background and your story from the book?

Yeah, sure. So yeah, given up at birth, so then put into an orphanage and some foster homes, got adopted by two entrepreneurs who used to have proper careers and then decided to shelve them both in to get into the entrepreneurial game and found out they couldn't have kids. So I was adopted and there I grew up literally underneath the checkout till of their little lighting shop selling light bulb and lampshades, which wasn't tremendously successful for them. But my childhood was watching the Entrepreneurial Journey. So it was only when I was maybe 10 or 12 when I realized that other people's parents didn't work seven days a week. I thought that Saturday and Sunday was just two extra weekdays at the end of Monday to Friday. So also people were talking about the 9 to 5 and it took me ages to work out what people meant by nine to five. It's like, well, as far as I See, it's more like 5 to 9 and it's 5am till 9pm, but maybe they're just saying it in reverse. So, yeah, my work ethic kind of kicked in then. And through my childhood, I was significantly bullied from the age of 5 till 16. And so at the same time as watching the entrepreneurial journey of my adoptive parents, I was also under significant challenge. And what I kind of learned from those challenges was not dissimilar from the entrepreneurial journey. So on the entrepreneurial side, the amount of times you get knocked down, it's just more opportunity to stand up again. And from a bullying side, it's exactly the same. So the adversity of things not going your way or being in a situation which is not ideal was my precise boilerplate template of my life. That's the architectural diagram of life. One of the things I found interesting is as I, as I got older, so late teens into 20s, I would meet people who had a very different upbringing. They had stable parent, nucleus situation. They knew that they were always going to go and have a job as a X, Y and Zed. And then when adversity hit, when they're like 23 years old, first relationship breaks down, that to them was like the whole sky falling in, you know, Whereas for me it was just like, well, that's, that's the way life is anyway, right? So everything, every 10 things that you do, like six of them, seven of them are going to go to hell and three of them might work. And, and even then, you know, if you start a venture, things are going to cost three times more than you thought, they're gonna take twice as long and they're going to make half as much money. And I just thought that was normal. I figured that in relationships as an entrepreneur or in life, in relationships, at least one in two people that you meet you can't actually trust. And even the people that you can trust at some stage can be untrustworthy and do untrustworthy things. I learned about the difference between an outright blatant lie and a white lie and the importance of transparency and building trust and how it takes a long time to build trust and a very short time to lose trust. Everything that, that I learned was from the start. So to some extent, and obviously this is post psychotherapy, I can speak about this in a productive, cathartic way. I had a head start on the realities of life and the truism of the Chinese proverb that starts the Powered by Change book, which is actually my fifth book. But most People only know that one is the first one, even though there were four that no one bought beforehand. The beginning of the book says that when the winds of change are blowing, some build a wall and others build a windmill. And that's the truest statement I think of my life is learning to be powered by change as a human and as a business person is the key. Education, I think. But just as a footnote to this experience is a hard teacher because it gives you the test first and then the lesson afterwards, and that's it.

What a fantastic origin story. I mean, your norm was overcoming adversity at such a young age. And it's a pretty humbling story to hear because it makes you appreciate the different struggles in life from different people from all walks of life. I had read your book and you talked a little bit about how the origins of your younger days led you to get into martial arts. And reading a little bit about your background, your jiu jitsu, British title holder as well, is that correct?

Super heavyweight and also world number three in sports, Jiu jitsu, yeah.

And you know, it took you on this journey and I just wanted to know what are some of the disciplines from martial arts that one can apply or you applied to business and that, you know, took you on this journey. Because a lot of the people that I know that come from that background talk about the disciplines of life. And martial arts isn't just self defense. There's so many different things that come from it. Energy, forgiveness, using it as a way to protect yourself, but also at the same, the same time to use it not as a power trip for some people as well. And there's so much that we can get into. But what was your martial arts around the disciplines?

I think there's three key learnings that I've taken from my three and a half decades of martial arts. And you know, getting to black belt, black belt kickboxing was first, my first discipline, full contact kickboxing, and then went on to different martial arts. But the three key learnings are in no particular order. The first one I'd say is that martial arts helps you deal with uncertainty in a very, very practical and very real way. Especially if you're standing in a cage opposite someone who actually wants to kill you. That's a very, very real world, instantaneous learning of dealing with uncertainty because you have no idea what's going to happen next. And that's actually very true for life. The second I'd say again, in no particular order is discipline. So the truth of the matter Is. And as I think it was, Steve Jobs said that every overnight success takes 10 years. And one of the things with discipline and martial arts and in business and anything else like that is that there's a reason why even black belts will still practice a jab. Today I was training nine hours ago doing a jab cross hook. And so that's now about 35 years of jab cross hooks. That's 20, 30,000 hours of jab cross hooks. But that discipline in life is very useful, for instance, if you're trying to maintain a healthy relationship. It's the same as maintaining a garden and maintaining a martial arts practice. If you completely ignore it and just leave the plant in the corner to gradually wilt and die, then guess what? It does. And if you stop training martial arts, then short parts of it is a bit like cycling, you know, being on a bike, you kind of can pick it up, but if you want to master it, then you need to do it all the time. And the third thing I'd say is in terms of confidence, so there is undoubtedly an amount of confidence that comes from knowing that you are increasing your ability to not only practice what you're doing, whether it's in business or in life or in martial arts, but also the improvement that you can see. And you then in martial arts, you never actually, until you're in a tournament, the rest of the tournaments, 1% of the time, 99% of the time, you're not in a tournament, right? So you're, you're actually in a tournament. You're. It's you versus the other guy or the other girl in the rest of the practice. It is about you and your potential. What's the distance between where you are now and what you could achieve. And of course, the irony being is that when you achieve what you think you could achieve, you then realize that the bar is set much higher by yourself. The first day of martial arts is actually the day you get your black belt. That's when you become, that's the starting, that's the cornerstone of your learning. It's like, okay, now I can begin to really learn. So that takes years and years and years to get there in a good school. And the world championships in Florida, in Orlando, I should say we went to Miami afterwards for holiday in Orlando. We arrived, 60 of us, all wearing GB team, Great Britain's team uniform and everything. And everyone's a black belt. We have six days of acclimatization training and we start the training program and it's jab cross hook, and this is like everyone on the team has either won a British title or come second in a British championship. And so you've got a room, a plane full of black belts. And then we start by jumping jacks, push ups, chin ups, jack cross hook, six mile runs. And that's the same. Every single elite artist, or at least elite athlete or elite business person is still making sure, let's take it from a business perspective, that the red numbers on the spreadsheet are mitigated by the black numbers. The cash flow is enough to actually take you through the burn rate to grow the business. And that's the same for the people who are running the bigger business in the world and the smallest business in the world. There's actually no difference between a black belt training, a white belt training, or a relationship of 15 years or 25 years and a relationship of 15 hours. The discipline is still the same discipline, and you just have to keep doing it. That's the key thing.

Practice, basically.

That's it.

I started reading the book and I was really impressed by this concept of flipping the coin or the coin flips, basically. And I want to know a little bit about, obviously without giving too much of the book, because there's so much in there, but without giving too much away, where did the concept of the coin flip come to you and how has it shaped your life?

Yeah. So my sixth book, the Rise of Advanced Thought, that's available on Amazon and you can listen to it free of charge on Spotify. The Rise of Advanced Thought actually is bookended by the stories of my coin flips. So 15 years ago, 16 years ago, I was at a party with a group of friends and this guy who I'd never really spoken to, but it was a neighbor. So I decided to strike up conversation and I said, so what's the most exciting thing that's happening in your life? Which, by the way, is a great icebreaker. If you just say what you know, what are you most excited about? Then it gets through all the small talk. You immediately get through the what the weather's like and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So what's the most exciting thing you're doing? And he said, I'm running the Marathon de Sable. And the Marathon Desable is a group of multiple marathons back to back across the Sahara Desert. And only a small percentage of people make it, and a significant percentage of people actually get extraordinarily ill or die. And you have to pack everything that you're going to need over the next six, seven Days for six or seven marathons in your backpack whilst you're running through sand in 50 degree heat. So he told me this, right? Wow, okay, that's insane. We spent the rest of the evening talking about it. By the end of the evening, I get out a 50 cent piece of 50 piece in the UK. And I decided in front of him and then everyone else, all my family and friends and kids, I said, I'm going to flip a coin now and I'm going to choose two things that I can't do. And one of them is going to be swimming's channel and the other is going to be run London Marathon. And I couldn't even run up a flight of stairs. So I was like running on the marathon. I hate running and I definitely don't want to swim through feces and bacteria through in freezing cold water for a day. That's the last thing I wanted to. So I flipped the coin and it landed on the London Marathon. And three and a half months later, I'm at the start line. And 26.2 miles later, minus a few toenails, bleeding nipples, ruptured Achilles heels, I crossed the finish line after six and a half hours and it was the worst experience of my life. But then within an hour, it was the best experience of my life because I was like, well, so if I can do that, then surely I could pretty much do anything. So next New Year's Eve I get a coin out. And I chose between two things. I did that for years and years and years and years and years. And even like, I think five years ago, I actually outsourced it to Twitter and just said, right, okay, you choose, guys, you've got one month to choose and the top vote. And I'm not even going to choose the options. You choose the options and I'll do the ones. And I think, and I may be misquoting myself in the book now because there may be a different challenge that was the outsource, but I think it was scale El Capitan without ropes, free climb. And I'm scared of heights, right? I can't climb up a ladder. So scale El Capitan free climb with no ropes or become a British champion in a martial arts you've never done before. And it landed on the martial arts one that was like, okay, because each coin flip you only get two years. And so no one knew at the time is when I turned up to the British Sports Jiu Jitsu championship. I had done 900 hours of training and I was still a white belt. And so no one knew that it was, you know, everyone just arrived and I entered the Open, which, and no, I didn't have a club representing me. And so, you know, my final, I mean, I broke my rib in the first round of the first fight. And I fought loads of fights that day. Rib, first round, and then the final, which was nine fights later, I broke my fifth metacarpal, but the fight only lasted for 31 seconds. He went straight to hospital and I became British champion. And the only reason why I was able to do that flip successfully was because those 900 and something hours that I did to train for it were specifically to how to win. It was less to do with discipline and more to do with technique. I looked up what the most effective 5 Ways of Submitting someone in Jiu jitsu, and what's the top five ways of avoiding being submitted, and what are the top five exercises that I can do that strengthen the body parts that are needed the most for jiu jitsu, which is very, very different from taekwondo, kickboxing, karate that I'd done before. So. Yeah, but there's other coin flip challenges that I won't go into now. But that's. It was all inspired by hearing someone who was doing something that was ridiculously impossible. And I learned over those years, over the decade and a half that nothing is.

And I'm going to ask you later on what you're working on your next coin flip. But before we get into that, I opened your book and I was mesmerized by this quote that said, when the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills. And you alluded to this at the start of this conversation. How do you go about discovering this proverb? And more importantly, how did it play a part in inspiring you to write this book? You talked about writing other books that many people don't know about. Why did this book make it to where it went? And why was this the one that you took to the market?

Okay, there's a couple of questions inside there. So let me start with the proverb. So I've spent years on stage, doing thousands of keynotes and workshops and so forth, and always trying to find an analogy about change that resonated. And I became a historian on change because of that. So you can Google search quotes on change if you like, but I wanted to look backward to what were the original texts. There's a Chinese text from thousands of years ago, multi thousand years ago, between 4 and 10,000 years ago, called I Ching C H I N G And it's one of the first books about change. And change was a philosophical construct. The fact that the metamorphosis of life and the atrophy of the universe and the constants of change and the accelerant of change was a very much discussed thing. And in those days, philosophers were leaders. You didn't have politicians, you had people who were seers or fortune tellers. And they were the leaders of society. And even if you had a king or a queen who wasn't one of them, then their right hand person was one. It was only in Roman times that those people were chastised and burnt at stakes and were, in Socrates's case, murdered. And it was something that struck me. And so the proverb that I found was from those days, paradoxically now that proverb, the winds of change, is now kind of more in popular knowledge. And I played a modest part in that. But the reason why Powered by Change had to come to life was because of the life experiences that I decided needed to be shared and the analogies between those life experiences and business practice. I then realized that I had helped huge companies with their processes using Power by change methodologies. And so I approached those companies and asked if I could write about them in the book, which is why there's case studies about Lego and Heineken and Amazon Unilever and blah, blah. And then I approached Ikea's chief executive and said, hey, did any of the stuff that I've helped you with over the last six years help you? And he said, help me. We call our innovation unit Powered by Change. So I said, well, would you write the forward to the book? And he said, absolutely. And so he wrote the forward to the book. And when you have the chief exec of the largest private company in the world and a couple of hundred case studies from the biggest companies in the world that I've impacted, and then you put it within a marketing vehicle of a large publisher that makes the book every airport and every news agent and petrol station. Then I was grateful that it went to best selling status on Amazon and Sunday Times bestseller and it sold ridiculous volumes. Now and most, I was getting a medical test done today for a travel trip that I'm going to do. And I walked in and the doctor's first line was, I didn't realize I was going to meet the famous author. And he was so proud because he's just ordered my most recent book, the Rise of Advanced Thought. And it's really strange when you Google search your name and Google have actually now put Up Jonathan Manuel, the author, British author. And it's weird because all I've really done is almost two decades actually, sorry, over two decades spanning the six books in total is write about things that I found that I've the insight that I've got. And it's a bit weird how, let me think something like 400,000 words of text no one's ever read and then that much ages like ah, yeah, this guy's like, you know, this author. And it's like, well, I've always written it. It's just no one ever bought it before. But I wasn't writing it to be bought. It's great to be a bestselling author. But that wasn't the point. The point was so that I had a legacy of thought that people could take with them. That was a point.

It almost sounds like it happened by design as well. It was a series of different events that complemented to go there.

Well, it's funny you say that because I must admit writing Power by change was a coin flip. So the coin flip was Sunday Times bestseller or becoming a yacht captain I think. So anyway, it landed on Sunday Times bestseller. And so I learned about what makes a best selling book a bestselling book. And so those components, huge publishing house, massive marketing arm, giant personal story backed up by heavyweight executives at the right price point with the right cover and the right title with the right editor is actually the. That's the model and it's an architectural diagram of a bestseller. And it was not surprising at all that it went bestselling status because that was exactly the point. And similarly, it wasn't an accident to fight at the world championships and win a medal or it wasn't an accident to finish on the marathon or learn the languages I've learned or forgive all the bullies that beat me up when I was at school. All of these are coin flips that you can read about in the rise of advanced thought. And the outcome is always success. Not because I'm good at it, because in fact none of the things that I achieved I was good at. So the reason that they've become successes is because there was no other option. You make a decision and then you execute. You don't start in between the decision and execution, pontificating as to whether or not I can do this. It's like, can a human being achieve this? And as long as we're not talking about breathing underwater unaided or flying without wings, the answer is yes.

And what you're talking about is also going into the Mindset of embracing whatever those challenges or fears or whatever those might have. Let's switch into the business side of things because our listeners are builders that own building companies as well. And they'd love to hear your thoughts around how does change and the ability to handle change impact success and what goes into that mindset?

Yeah, well, I think I have an affinity with the building trade. I'm an investor into properties and I've flipped nine houses in my life and I fancy myself as a bit of a handyman, which is an absolute insult to building trade. But what I can tell you is that it is actually a crucial set of decision making that everyone has the ability to make or to have. And the first part of that decision is, do I believe that I am somehow ahead of the change? Can I foresee it? Can I predict it? Have I got enough money to buy it, or whatever it is? These are all business poisons, all of which are found, by the way, plug, plug in my third book, which no one bought, called Business Poison Anyway. But the first choice is do we believe that we are better than change? And a bit like the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program, there's a position, I think it's maybe second or third step where you actually admit defeat and you go, you know what? I can't control this. This is controlling me. I'm not controlling it. And with change, that step is the same. So am I going to somehow out think change? And if you can accept the fact that change today is the slowest pace of change we'll ever experience, do you think that Covid is the last pandemic? Do you think that the only thing we know is that change happens? And the other thing we know is that we die and we don't when we die or how fast change happens. And so the best thing to do then is go to step two in the thought process and go right now I accept the fact that I can't out think this. How can I use it as a power rather than rebelling against it and everyone in every trade? And let's take it from the building perspective, and I'm saying this on the back of the fact that arguably some builders will feel as if they've never had a better year or two. But the truth is, is that the historical analysis is not a predictor of the future. Just because the last two, 10, 20 years or months has been successful doesn't mean that the next two, 10 or 20 years or months is going to be successful. And so what we need to be is productively paranoid. We need to actually have a level of paranoia that says, you know what, things happen that aren't great in life. And let's assume that things that could disrupt us are going to disrupt us, and we can see these things. As Bill Gates said, we often overestimate the change in the next two years and underestimate the change in the next 10. And so if I say the words 3D printed houses or biofabrication and things like that, people will go, yeah, oh, yeah, I heard about that. It's in China. It's going to hit our shores in 30 years time. The safest way forward is to assume that 30 years, just knock off the zero. If you think something is going to be 30 years off, just play with the idea that it's three. And if you feel as if you're so comfortable that the rest of your career is always going to be pretty much using the same goalposts you've got at the moment, what you're not looking back is last year, 50 years of the fact that around 86% of the Fortune 500 companies have gone out of business. That's just the Fortune 500. The truth is that 9 in 10 small businesses go out of business. And so in any period of time, whether you want to look at that from one year, three years, five years, and then of course, the listeners will go, yeah, but I'm in one of the 10, I'm the one in 10. Are you? And also your three competitors, are you all four of you the one in 10? Because statistically, one would say that it doesn't work out. Yeah. So I think it's okay for us to have some humility. Of course, for me, it's innate because most of the things I've done went wrong. So if in an entrepreneur's life, you shoot five things out the door as ideas or concepts or business ideas, and four of them, three of them are going to go wrong, really badly wrong. And so if you can have the humility to think, okay, what would go wrong? And most of the things that go wrong are based on the decisions we make, thoughts we have, as opposed to external factors.

So what you're really saying is it's not just death and taxes that's imminent. Change as well should be.

The third entity, taxes, is purely based on domiciliation. So that's, you know, people who are in the Cayman Islands and other places wouldn't say that death and taxes are certain, though I would say change is the one that is, and death is one of those changes because it's the change from life to death. So all there is is change.

How do you leverage change as fuel to spearhead transformation? You've talked a lot about some of the brands you've worked with and some of the journeys you've gone on with them as well. How do you fuel it to spearhead change?

It depends on the circumstance. So some companies are easier to work with than others. And it's purely mindset, right? So sure, part of it's kind of, I guess, budget and whatever, but it's the mindse mindset of the leaders that are key. There's a Japanese proverb that says that a fish rots from the head. And if you have a leader that is willing to accept the mindset shifts, then the chances of success are high. So let's take Jesper Broden, the chief executive ikea, who wrote the forward to the book Power by Change. The most powerful conversation we ever had, I would say. I'm not sure whether he would say this, but what I viewed was the most powerful was when we were in a Marylebone London Cafe breakfast and he was telling me excitedly about all the new innovations they were going to be building in the Powered by Change division. And I said, yeah, of course, the thing is, is that you are actually, because of your catalog, the largest printers of any material on earth, therefore have the most direct impact into felling trees and therefore the processing of that. You have the largest corporate impact on climate change. So I reckon that out of 1.3 meters increase in sea level over the next 30 years, during the time that your daughters become adults, you'll be responsible for at least 10% of that. And he started crying, wow. And he has now spent 2 billion euros a year, every year for five years on the IKEA sustainability initiative. I mean, every single member of IKEA staff has a grant for a solar powered system for their house and electric vehicle for their transportation. Every single time a tree is pulled out of the ground, two trees are planted, there's a recycling agenda. If you just Google search IKEA sustainability, that's the outcome of that conversation.

You actually see the sustainability initiatives in store as well. There's so many different subtle things that you look at and you go, right, this screams of sustainability. You've worked with some of these amazing brands over your illustrious career, IKEA and all these other brands as well. Have you noticed some form of commonality with the business approach when you've consulted these brands?

Yeah, most people don't want anything to change. So yeah, that's like 99% of the time. Yeah. And so, you know, it's kind of like a mass formation psychosis against change. So the psychosis is kind of a mind numbingly mediocre hypnotic belief that today is the same as yesterday, is the same as tomorrow. Right. That psychosis, out of that psychosis, a third of people are completely oblivious and will remain oblivious to hypnosis. And those companies eventually go out of business. That's a guarantee. And then you have a third of people on the other end of the spectrum who are completely change positive. And my first conversation with Heineken, with Bruce Reiners, CMO at the time, was he said, john, we don't want you to come and help us scale Heineken across the world anymore. We want you to work out how we can hit Africa. And so after a few days of conversation, we came up with a water offering, a subsidized water offering that they were people who didn't have water to have water brought to you by Heineken. No one even knows about this stuff because it's not branded Heineken. Right. So they're change positive, whereas you get the hypnotic side and the other. And then you've got 30% one end, 30% the other end. Then you get 40% swing votes. And that 40% swing vote is the hard work, because you can't change the hypnotized who are. You know, I came off stage after speaking at a particular mobile network and. Sorry, I was just about to go on stage from speaking to a particular mobile network, and the CTO came on stage just before I went on to my keynote, and he said to the audience, all of his staff, he said, whatever this next guy says, we're not going to implement. Right.

No pressure at all.

Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan McDonald. And so there's nothing you can say. It was the shortest keynote of my life. I was on stage for three minutes. I basically said what I've just said to you, and that was the end. I was like, thank you very much and good luck in the future. And then I sold all my shares in that network. So they're the hypnotize and then Change positive look after themselves with support for sure. The swing votes. I've realized that there is this one metric that is the most powerful, and it's part of Power by Change methodology. It's inside the book Power by Change because it's based on the windmill theory of wars or windmills, each with a windmill in Power by Change is it's got four blades and Inside each of the four blades, which is purpose, people, products and process, you've got three sub blades in each. Inside one of those sublays is this methodology and it's called risk of inaction. And it's my alternative roi. And it's the most laser sharp swing vote change influence you can have which is like okay, cool, you are, you're not decided as to whether you need to do anything different in business. You're not decided yet, you haven't seen enough data, you haven't, whatever it is, you haven't been convinced. So what I want you to do now is I want you to write out your return investment business plan for the next five years. I want you to write your risk of inaction, your another ROI plan for if you do nothing and other things change. So sure, let's assume that these things that won't happen, quote unquote do happen. Let's assume that this particular material logistics thing changes or the logistics industry changes or harmonization taxes changes or the port authority mandates change or the government legislation changes, changes on certain materials and planning reform changes and all these kind of things. Let's assume that those things change. And the likes of Amazon getting into real estate and all this, let's assume that these things change and you do nothing. What's the material impact over 3, 5, 7 years and gradually over time and this can happen over the period of 30 minutes, 60 minutes, a few hours, a few days. Sometimes you see the enthusiasm of yeah, well I'm just not convinced yet. Becoming, hold a minute, we're screwed if we do nothing. And then they start selling it to you, they start convincing you that they're going to do this, this, this, this, this. And then I start going, right, okay, well let's call it a pledge. So what are you going to do by May 30? What are you going to do by August 30? What are you going to do by December? You know that's. And then they actually make that pledge. They write it to me, I write it back to them, it's our contract. And then I hound them for every single executable point for money.

I think Blockbuster should have consulted with you as well. I read that in your book as well. That was mind blowing.

Dude, I got in so much trouble for writing that. I got in that dude, that chief exec at Blockbuster emailed me. So he read Powered by Change, right? He emailed me and he was furious. He was absolutely furious. And I was like, I just wrote down what you didn't Do?

Yes.

What you didn't do. And so as eyewitnesses inside the boardroom of your decision to do nothing, that's all I wrote. You can't like retrospectively come to me and go, how dare you to insult us and defame us. We demand you to remove it from the book. I was like, okay, sure, if it's not factually correct, I'll remove it. And I never heard anything back.

So how do you inspire these brands you work with to think long term? Because again, many business owners think short term, many business owners think narrow, focused as well. Or we're constructed to niche and focus on that niche. That's what they tell us. And your thought process here is something that they're not used to. So why is it so important to think beyond the niche and think long term?

Yeah, I mean, I think I'm not even sure whether the word the taxonomy is long term. What I'm doing is I'm enabling to think near term, like now to. And if you can really, really accept today is the slowest pace of change you'll ever experience, that means the change in the next five years will feel like the change in the last 20 years. As an example. So everyone think back if the year you're listening to this, let's say it's 2022, 2023. Think about the change between 2002 and 2003 to now. So we're talking analog phones and not smartphones. This is pre, all of the most of the digital technologies that we use, pre broadband, mass scale broadband, pre 4G actually, sorry, pre 3G. Let's go all 20 years. That change between now and then and now is now and five years future. And so the near term philosophy of change is less to do with thinking what's going to happen in 2030, 2040, 2050. Because everyone just goes, our flying cars. That's not practical. We need to think what future do we want to design now? Because we tend to wait for the future to come. And this is one of the reasons why I'm really suspicious of futurists because they tend to talk about, you know, how everyone's going to be living on the moon or, you know, Mars. It's like, cool. Yeah, I think that extra planetary exploration is extremely important. But as a builder or as a builder's merchants today, if I can't construct something on Mars in the next 36 months, it's an irrelevance. So I would suggest instead of that, it's like, what are the three technologies that could Completely obliterate your business model that you think are five years away, 10 years away. Good, now we've got them. Let's build a strategy around how we can leverage that now. So we're the people who disrupt it. And we did that with myself and two other consultants did that with Amazon. They were relying 100% on books. And so we said, well, what would disrupt you? And the answer was digital books. It's like, great, well, let's build a digital book strategy. Because why would you not. Why do you. Oh, no, no, we'd prefer to wait for someone else to and then eat our lunch. No, you create the thing that's going to disrupt you. The biggest disruptor ever to an imac or to a MacBook is an iPad. So surely you get better MacBooks, better iMacs and better iPads and a better iPhone. Why don't you just disrupt yourself? Funnily enough, the years that I did with Apple as a consultant, just not many people know this. The first product when Steve Jobs came back in was the iPad, and that came out after the iPhone. The iPhone was to transgress ipod users and itunes users in the ecosystem to walking around with more capable ipods. And then of course, you then need a bigger iPhone. That's all an iPad is. A bigger iPhone, an iPad. And then you also need an imac because it's got a different operating system. So you can't actually do all the things that you want to do on your iPhone. You also need an iPad and a MacBook or an iMac. And so that's creating the future you want, as opposed to waiting for Dell or Microsoft or HP to do it for you. Because they will if they're given the chance, right? Yeah.

And if anything, the last few years has thought everyone about the unpredictable certainty of how life has gone. And for many of us, and for builders, you've got issues like supply chain issues and ordering materials and pricing and everything else. Fixed contracts that could go on all day. But in a world of uncertainty, why? I think you've already alluded to why we need to be paying attention to this. But how should business owners embrace the concept of this changing landscape? Because it seems to be the new norm, I think.

Well, firstly, it is definitely the new norm. And in fact, the only reason it feels like the new norm now is because the speed of change is more apparent to people who have lived through the last two years of COVID So even from non business perspective, everyone has witnessed faster change, which is good because this is the slowest phase of change you'll ever experience, so don't get used to it, but the importance of grasping the power inside that when I first wrote the book, so I probably submitted the manuscript in 2017, I want to say published 2018, or maybe 2015, 2016, published 2018, updated a bit in the years since then. So the one you've got there is the latest version. Then Rise, Rise of Advance sorts sequel. When I first. The reason why my first four books didn't sell is because they were set in the future. And then the future came. But now these books and the thought processes and this, this conversation, in fact is a survival podcast show, rather than the way it was in the beginning, which was a something to consider, you know, maybe, you know, so four years ago it was like, you know what? My view is that but if we can be powered by change, then we'll be set to escape significant disruption and become the disruptors ourselves. That's 40 years ago. And it was like, yeah, cool, all right, Relatively inspirational. And then the future played itself out. And the companies that have gone under, I mean, the speakers who are staged, keynote speakers who have now gone out of business and are working flipping burgers, were people who didn't skill up on online presentation skills. When I wrote Powered by Change, I had to apply it to myself in terms of what would disrupt me. And the thing that would disrupt me would be if suddenly conferences were cancelled. Guess what? 2020 came and all of the conferences were wiped out. By then, I'd already released an online program called how to Be a Professional speaker and how to Present Online. So all of the speakers that took up that course then became professional online keynote speakers. So about 30% of them and the rest went out of business because they didn't know how to present online, which is a completely different discipline. Speaking online is nothing like speaking on a stage at all. The only similarity is the fact that words come out of your mouth. But how you present yourself online and how you can get messages across in an empathetic way, in a concise, charismatic way through a video screen, it's completely different discipline. So I looked into that two, three years before COVID happened. Not because I knew that Covid was going to happen, but if you're in a business that you know what would disrupt you, then you've got to build for it now. It's the only way forward.

Yeah, it's interesting you say that because as a speaker I had to pivot to or recalibrate it. Actually. I'm not a fan of the word pivot, but recalibrate towards consulting and storytelling because the world changed and as speakers, you had to survive and find a different entity. And like you, I had, you know, 53 events in a year, and all of a sudden no one was traveling, no one was leaving the door, no one was flying, and the borders were shut. So you basically had to improvise. I really resonate with what you just said there. In the book, you talk about the future, allude to the fifth Industrial Revolution being around AI. I love the examples, love some of the thought process around it. I'm curious because that book's still timely. I read it in the last few weeks and I've to say there's so much in there. The concepts around the blades and how you came to the notion of the blades when you were designing your mind, and all of a sudden it fell into play. All of that was just beautifully mastered. But I'm curious, what does the next Industrial Revolution look like? And is it around sustainability?

No. Okay, but it needs to be. And maybe the sustainability is a part of the next revolution. However, the next revolution, I am increasingly convinced, is a philosophical revolution. And within that philosophical resolution, the upholdings of civil rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and also therefore freedom of health and therefore sustainability, hopefully can components, they're sub blades, if you like, of the prime windmill of philosophical revolution. Because. And what I mean by this is that that there is an introversion that's happening now and Covid helped it. And that introversion is we're starting to look at ourselves more and go, what is it that makes me happy? What are the things that actually drive me at my purpose? What is my purpose? Am I doing something that I really want to be doing? Do I believe media outlets? Do I think that the government has our best interests at heart? Do I think that the way that things are is the best way forward? Do I believe that just because you're a massive building firm, are they actually the exemplary characters of the building world? Are they doing things in the right way? Are they managing their cash flow correctly? Are they actually accounting for things in a way that is truly methodological? Or are they actually basically blagging it and thinking that 300 grand in the bank means that they're worth 300 grand even though they've got 301,000 of liabilities? So that introversion of starting to look at why we do what we do is by nature a philosophy. We are starting to account for why we are here. And philosophy and ratio reason, which is which is our new way of calling ratio. The reason that we look for things in our lives has become more important because we're now more aware there's a division between noise and signal. And we are addicted to noise. We're addicted to worthless pop stars and stupid TV shows while we eat crappy fried food, friends with sometimes people that we wouldn't cross the road for if they're bleeding to death, working for people who treat us worse. And signal, which is actually why we are here. There's a beautiful Greek practice, ancient Greek practice called telos, or telos, depending on your pronunciation. And the study of teleology, or teleology is a study of why we exist. In those days, gravestones, tombstones didn't have people's names on. They had the purpose of you being here. Like why were you here? Was that you were here to teach and inspire? Were you here to construct and protect for you? No. And we're now arriving back almost in a devolutionary perspective to a few thousand years ago where we actually go, well, why am I here? And the revolutionary structure of that is immense. It is the same size, if not bigger than the industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution that came before it and the digital revolution that we're in now. A philosophical revolution is one that starts and ends within us. And if you think about how that then manifests from the introversion outward, so coming from the universe into the inner verse, that has manifest capabilities that change the structure of capitalism, structure of industry, the structure of how we do business, and more importantly, underlined why we do business.

And you're talking about the great realignment at this point too, because we're questioning everything we're going through right now. People are changing jobs. And it's funny you mentioned this too, because six years ago, actually yesterday was my six year anniversary for my last TED Talk. And I talked about how to live life with purpose. And I can't tell you how many people have reached out digitally to tell me how they're all questioning what they're doing today as part of their purpose and what they're doing for work and questioning everything from relationships to family. So it's just a testament to what you're just talking about. You've talked about coin flips, you've talked about the fact that this next or this book that you've written is all about the coin flips. I'm just curious if you're willing to share, what's your last coin flip alluded to and what are you focusing on for the Next two years.

Well, here's the thing. The final coin flip was between doing the splits, losing a bunch of weight, and some other things, and I just executed them all. And so I took heads and tails and something else as well. I got to a stage. And I guess this is kind of the point of the rise of advanced thought, is that when you finish the rise of advanced thought and if you actually use the tools that are inside there and there's five primary tools which, which, which are, which will enable you to do anything, if you actually apply those tools, then there's no need to coin flip because you basically just think of what it is that you want to execute and then you do because you are armed with the tools to do it. So I don't actually need to do coin flips anymore because I'm doing at least three or four things that are ridiculously impossible, quote, unquote impossible. And I don't. It's desensitized me to the impossible because now it's just what do I want to do that will fulfill my values? Which is one of the tools inside the rise of advanced thought? It's called the values matrix or values grid. In fact, anyone can go to the academy advancedthought.com so academyofadvancedthought.com and on academyofadvancedthought.com you can click on resources and you can actually see some of the tools that are inside the rise of advanced thought. And the values grid is, is really important because if you can actually map out what it is that you really stand for, then it's just a question of how do I want to manifest these things? How do I want to manifest freedom? I want to buy a boat and I want to be able to charter it to other people. I want to sell around the world. Okay, well, how do I manage freedom from governments and freedom from taxations? Well, I want to. I want to redomassign myself to the Cayman Islands. How do I want to manifest peace? Well, I want to get even deeper into meditation, transcendental meditation. How do I want to manifest? And so, so all I do now is I look at how I can manifest my values more in life and then execute the thing that would give the highest probability of that value being hit. And so it's like a constant coin flip. It's like a quantum coin flip that I live within, as opposed to having just two things out of. It's more like which of my nine boxes on my value grid do I feel as if I'm underperforming? It. And then I look at that and say, okay, well, this is health. Because that happens to be one of my values. It's like, how could I improve my health? How am I not training in the right way? What am I putting inside my system that is suboptimal versus optimal? And so some of those things become really hard questions. I love cold beer, but cold beer doesn't link to my health very well. Therefore, I don't drink cold beer.

It's a choice by design.

Yeah, you just design it like running a marathon. It turns out the way to do it is to not get pissed, not get drunk, and not. Not consume things that you know and then start training. And you do. You do 100 meters on the first day, and then by the end of the first week you can do a mile or two. By the end of the sixth week, you can do five miles and so forth and so forth. Before the marathon, you get to about 17, 18 miles. It's tough, but you know that the adrenaline is going to carry the last 10 miles on the day, and then it does. So it's not rocket science. None of it is complicated. There isn't one coin flip that was methodologically complicated. It's emotionally complicated because you actually. The hardest part of marathon, by the way, is actually turning up. The hardest part of any coin flip is actually doing the work that turns out to be the case.

And so the concept over comfort over fear. Right. I could talk to you for ages, but I think we need to save you for another episode. For another. When I read the second, the next book that I've just ordered, I'd love to ask you questions around that as well, but I'm going to save this question because I think this is the question that I think really spearheads this conversation, and that is why do builders and people fear change? If you think about your last or your current fear, how did you navigate through that? Because a lot of the things that you're talking about is comfort over fear.

Yeah. I found there to be a number. Two or three, probably three reasons. Actually, there's two. There's a duality. I'm going to be really fast on this one. The duality. There's two, lots of three. The first is inertia based resistance change, which is they don't know that they should change or they know they should change. They don't know what to do, or they know what to do. They just can't be bothered. So that's the first three I've noticed. And the Building trade is unlike any other trade in terms of that inertia. Then you've got another three which are kind of in parallel. And the three of these. The first is fear because people fear change because it's uncertain, unknown and so forth, and therefore it could go wrong. The second is lack of understanding, and understanding encompasses why they should move versus what would happen if they don't. And the third is that we would prefer to know for sure facts to begin with before we change, which is a fallacy, because the only way of getting to facts is through experimentation. And the only way of getting through experimentation is from speculating. And what we really are when we're resistant to change is we're resistant to speculating, even if that speculation is the only way of getting to facts. We would sometimes prefer to suffer and not speculate than to speculate and potentially lose. And that is a human condition. And it happens. It's the reason why we don't try things, because the fear of rejection is a bigger weight than the fear, than the joy of the upside. And that's a human condition. That's the reason why.

So really, you're provocative of trying new things and reframing your thought process as well.

Yeah. And that's the rise of advanced thought in the book.

And just for our list is out there, the book can be found everywhere.

Everywhere. Absolutely. I'm a shamelessly mega maniac.

Well, I'd highly recommend both books to our listeners as well. I've had an amazing read and thank you for nourishing my thought process before this interview because I actually wanted to really immerse myself in this conversation and really get to know you a little bit more. But interesting enough, I had a coin flip moment when I was in Sydney because Russ called me and said, you really need to get this book. I highly recommend it. I had three QBD stores that I was trying to go get the book from and I picked one. Turns out that was the store that had the book. All the other ones were all sold out. I couldn't find them. But internally my gut was like, while I'm here, I'm just going to go pick this up and just made that sort of moral choice to go get it. And it was sitting right in front of me before I even asked someone, where can I find this author or this book? So synchronicity is an interesting thought, but yeah, really, really appreciate your time today and your energy and really appreciate the knowledge that you've imparted on us.

Thank you. And by the way, powered by Change and Rise of Advanced Thought are meant to be read synonymously. So if anyone's listening to this and reads Rise of Advanced Thought, then that becomes the prequel to Powered. So either of the two work together, but they sit together as a body of work. And it's the whole of my 30 years in business, all in. Well, the whole of my 50 years in life, all in two books.

That's amazing and inspiring as well. Jonathan, thanks again for your time today.

Cheers, buddy. Thanks man.

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