The Agile Life - Extentia - 23rd Sept 2024

Giving us a couple of minutes to sort things out and we will just get started as well. So welcome to mark my words 6 Living an agile Life. Most of you here already know who Mark is, a long time friend and partner. And Mark is also a self made entrepreneur, an offshore tech specialist with over 25 years of multicultural experience. Mark has many feathers in his cap including being a TEDx speaker, he's a Spartan racer and he's also a fourth dance sensei. So very exciting things. But more recently Mark is also a mental fitness coach. And Mark when it comes to agile living doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk, which is what we're going to be learning about today. So without further ado Mark, please take it.

Thank you very much. Sim, I've got this one on so I am good to go. Real sign of the modern times that there's now more people watching a presentation that I'm doing from India. They're in India but they aren't in this room with me. So things have changed. So before I launch into the formal presentation, I think this might actually be mark my words 9 or something by now when we count them all up. And it's lovely coming back here in the same way that it was coming working with my previous company Stuba, because a lot of people here here over time have been part of the evolution of the journey around all things Mark My Word, which began with an email to amid late May 2020 saying we should form a positive self help group through the pandemic. He said put some presentations together and before we know it, here we are all this time later, so many from extension will already know some of this sort of stuff. So forgive me if it's somewhat repeating. Coming to this trip to India was about getting in front of people with the new content that I've been producing, the workshops that I'm running, the courses that we are now running. And so a lot of them are starting from, you know, sort of a lower level of history when it comes to all things, Mark my words. But all the same, it is exceptionally good to be here. But with a formal start of the presentation underway is to say something that most people won't say at the start of a presentation and that is that this little session won't change your life because we don't eat the fruit the day we plant the seed and until we do something with knowledge, it's just noise. We only actually learn through the doing or the application of the knowledge that we put together. But if you would like to do more and be more and hopefully I won't have a copyright infringement in using that life. And if you would like to literally begin living the life that you have dreamed of, then the agile life is the how. There we go. So when I break this down and I look at my journey to become talking about this topic, I've loosely broken it into five different phases of professional life. Professional life began when I completed my chemistry and biochemistry degree. So I went from science geek to computer geek, worked in science for a short period of time, then in 1999 or in other words half of my professional life, which is quite terrifying really, I've been spent working in it. That first phase leading up to 2016 was really all about learning offshore software development and management, time zones, process, how do we get better QA in place. It's a period of time where I really learned to work hard, party hard. And my major lesson through that period of time was those two don't align very well and eventually you've got to choose if you are going to do one or the other. It was a period of time that I went from being broke to being a millionaire single, to being a married dad, house owner and lucky enough to become a business class traveler. Where it gets interesting and where I'm really grateful now to be able to talk about this portion of the journey which you will understand I couldn't talk about before now was phase two in that period of 2016 to 2019. And that was when my eight year old daughter was diagnosed with ADHD which which was severely impacting her ability to absorb knowledge or stay engaged in the moment. And the latest research on ADHD is actually not that it's attention deficit, but that people with ADHD have too much attention. So that's why they get so distracted because their attention needs to be taken up with something. But it also explains why the 30% of the world's very best top performers as CEOs are, have ADHD because they've learned how to channel their energy and their productivity. As a dad, I went hardcore in learning everything I could about adhd. How did she think, how did she learn? What could I do? Other medications safe and you know, it was quite a full on period of time because when we went through the whole diagnosis process, you also go through this process of chewing cash like you're making extra mortgage repayments. So when it came down to needing tutoring to help her relearn the basics of writing and mathematics, that was my job. So for a while I was getting up at Four, working till seven, making her breakfast, homeschooling her two or three days a week, dropping her to school, back in the office until 9pm and what I learned about that little lesson in life is that's not very sustainable. I was a sensei at the dojo and now I was sensei dad, the homeschooler for a period of time. And at work, what I found was this idea of becoming a servant leader, because I was trying to find ways for my daughter to be her best. And it's funny how the way we do one thing becomes the way we do all things. I was competing a lot. I'd gone from being a white belt to a sensei or a sensei in that period of time. But I still wasn't winning any tournaments. Come 2018, my natural father, who was a reformed alcoholic, was retiring. And for 23 years or so I'd been managing his life for him. So for 8,365 days, we had planned and built and schemed on how we could get him to move nearer to us when he retired. And we eventually did build an apartment for him down the road, 500 meters from where we lived. And after those 8365 days, he lived there for only 11 nights before, before he died of the cancer that we didn't know he had. And I learned again, or for the first time, I guess, that we have to focus on what we do, but we can never control the outcome. Sometimes life just happens. And interestingly, whilst he lay in palliative care, you go into these places where people die and the nurses say he can still hear you. So I read from Marcus Aurelius Meditations, which was actually the same thing that I'd read to my daughter to retrain her reading when she was an 8 year old. And I learned again, life happens. Focus on actions, not the outcomes. And I really discovered then what happens when we channel our raw emotion and our vulnerability. And I channeled that energy into everything I did. I won the national title for the first time, qualified to represent Australia, qualified for the old People's Olympics, which is the World Masters Games in Tokyo. Straight after they finish, you get to go and train and play on the same place as the athletes did. And it was exciting. Phase three started 2020. CIO, shareholder of an awesome travel company that was booming. And I was loving the life that I was living because I built that life and it was awesome. Come April 2020, that world beating CIO was borderline alcoholic, forlorn, directionless. And for the first time in my life panicked, which is a pretty horrible thing to feel. And then the long and the short of that was the understanding that I had people relying on me, business partners that needed me to lead a major project, staff that needed me to support them, stand up meetings rapidly becoming counseling sessions. I was a dad and a husband and they all come with responsibility. And that was the genesis, I guess, that I did everything in every self help book that I could possibly do. And through that period of time that was fundamental to the biggest and most successful and most challenging IT project I've been involved in, which was the Cloud Transformation project. It was delivered on time by an amazing team who rose above and beyond the challenge. And I've had a lot of people comment about that and say, oh you did so well Mark. And the truth is I showed them the framework, but they were the ones who did the work. Yeah, it was the second time I learnt through that period of time when for a number of reasons the realization was that sustain that travel business, I had to bet the other half of our wealth we hadn't lost, which was the family home. And that wasn't a gamble that I was willing to take. And so I exited it after some time. Once again we focus on what we can't choose what happens, but we can choose how we respond. Fall down seven times, get up eight times. Phase four and this is this 2022, 2023 period. There were quite a few messy pivots in involved in that as well. But this is where all of that self help book knowledge was now formalized into study. Became a qualified health and wellness coach, a mental fitness coach, a group teacher, a quality mind mentor. And I really began trying to hone that knowledge into place. Phase four I guess is where I'm at now. And a lot of this really aligns with a lot of the stuff that I love about martial arts, which is we actually learn the most by teaching because to teach something that we've learned from someone else, we, we have to disassemble the knowledge into a way that is authentic to the way that we deliver it. And thus here I am today and what I really learned was about how we can build the new you version 2 or that elevated version of ourself but the agile life. And it's great speaking to a bunch of software geeks because I don't have to go into great detail on why agile, what it is and so on, but the four fundamental principles at the top, software that works. We have to collaborate with other people, there are other individuals and interactions that take place over the course of the journey. And the simpler something is, the more likely it is to work. The ones most relevant to the Agile life discussion today is this concept of responding to change. Because constantly life happens, whether it's in software, whether the monsoon rains, something like a pandemic, your company gets bought out, all of those sorts of things, it happens constantly. Change is the only constant. And the second one is was about sustainable pace. And I like talking about sustainable pace in the context of coming from version of us today and wanting to get to this elevated of us up here. It could be starting the project and getting to delivery date. And the shortest path between two points in a graph is always a straight line or a consistent line of consistency growth. A sore tooth like this in a software development project is the equivalent of staying up until 2am to deliver some code and being absolutely wrecked all day on Friday and losing your weekend to recover and doing it again the next week. That's a lot more work. We'll come back to that later on. But what's really fascinating for me in this context is the only thing that is consistent in life is change. So I've been alive 50 years, which for those people in the room that's plainly obvious. The soft focus on all things teams is making me look a lot younger. But I'll tell the story about 50 years of big changes in regard to technology. So in the 70s my stepdad worked for a milk processing plant. The 1970s, there wasn't real time payment of anything. There were checks, credit cards were a swipey machine that you autographed and hoped you hadn't just blown your bank balance. But he worked at this revolutionary dairy where farmers could drive up with 30,000 liters of milk. They took a sample, they weighed the truck, and they ran the tape deck of computers to work out a price and pay that farmer on the spot. And this was revolutionary. At the time, 1984, my grandparents, who were visionary in their own regard, bought me a Commodore 64 computer. 64K. That's the amount of memory required to save store a small 640 x 480 JPEG file. At the time it cost US$300, give or take. Today about US$2800 for that computer. My stepdad said, mark, I think you've got it wrong, because all Those tape drives 10 years before processed 64k of data. And he couldn't believe that this box had the same amount of capability. You fast forward to today and I've now Created a digital clone that under interrogation from my teenage daughter Shorter, she's decided it gives better advice than I do and I can access that from a mobile device that we've all had tons of by now that are more powerful than the computer power used to send the rockets to the moon. And these were big changes when they happened. And every time massive change happens from something like the Berlin Wall falling down to the future that we're going to live in with AI is we end up with two types of people. Most will panic, will complain. Life has happened to them, they hate it and they are the victims of the change. The other stand still and go somewhere in this is opportunity. Somewhere in amongst this is a chance for growth. And in the context of the agile life, I look at our learnings from the pandemic and have we just tried to go back to where we were or have, have we used it to make us better? And in that context, well, the work from home revolution was forced upon us. 2021, it was found across the world that work days increased between 50 and 60 minutes. And this was significantly beginning to stress people out. The increased screen time at home in non ergonomic chairs was beginning to significantly impact different like posture, muscular breakdown and loss of muscle tone. Cardiovascular disease was kicking to the point that sitting has been defined as the new smoking. And American optometrist noted significant increases in reported eye strain and boosts in the dispensation of new contact lenses and glasses for people. And in 2022 a fifth of workers worldwide were now saying that isolation was, was the biggest stress factor that they were handling at work. It's estimated that 60% of Australian white collar workers are on the edge of burnout for the reasons that you see up on the board. And I think one of the biggest one is around blurred boundaries because people don't know how to work at home because no one told them boss asks us to do work, we generally do it. It's hard to say no, but burnout is happening. Decreased productivity in decreased productivity, headaches, depression, these things are all realities that are now being researched and shown as we speak. One of my currently being coached by a really great Australian coach called Craig Harper. So I've made the decision that I'll keep trying to develop myself and as a coach I'll keep trying to find better coaches to learn more from. And he had a fantastic saying that he mentioned for the first time the other week which was the life that you, it's unlikely that the life that you planned will come out the way you think without planning, process and execution, the chance of your life turning out the way you want it, without preparation is about zero. So in this simple context, if you imagine up on the screen we have our white canvas and on that we're going to design our life. Now this whole, whole life design session is a whole new one. And if I say to people, have you got a life plan or designed your life? They'll go, what? People don't talk about it this way, but imagine this is your life plan for your future from this day forward, you've got your paints in front of you on your easel. Now, without planning, without a process and without a design, it'd be like planning and painting without really looking at either the colors or the paints that you, you're using. And what that produces over time is a poo brown smudge on the canvas. Poorly executed, messy, no definition. And if I can put it gently, shit has happened because we haven't really thought about it. But if we want our life to be the masterpiece that we desire, we've got a planet, we've got to think about it, we've got to define what we want. And the key to all of this, and it's outscribed. Another present described in another presentation, is most people actually just don't think about most of their lives. We often don't think about what we're doing today or how we're going to get to the things that we want. But we'll design a software package, we'll design a house, we'll design a bathroom. It's quite fascinating, but in the context of these work from home woes, or the hybrid woes that are happening at the moment, there's a bazillion things we could do. Eat better, sleep better, so on and so forth. But I've broken them into the simple heading of, not unsurprisingly, mental fitness. So the very basics that we need at the core of getting ourselves together and getting the very most out of our life, the hows, if you like, is emotional awareness is important. We need to be aware of how our own emotions are impacting us on any day and greater awareness of what's going on with the emotions around us, because they are the filters through which we interpret information. We need to be resilient. Put another way, we need to keep doing hard things, because it's only by doing hard things that we can build resilience. There's a researcher out there called Andrew Huberman, and he says that engaging in challenging activities stimulates and grows the anterior mid cingulate cortex. And that's the part of the brain that enables us to take on challenges and perform well under pressure. And what's awesome is, is that putting ourselves under physical duress. Sundar, I still hate you for making me do that run yesterday. So if I sound a bit flat today, that's because Sundar from extension said, mark, when you come over we should do this half marathon. It's like ah, the dates that you booked, I've booked in Sunda. You know, that's a week after I leave. And I was like, oh, that would have been fun. And then in my email a week later I get thank you for enrolling for the Singabad Sinhabad Sinha then half marathon. So if any of you know about this, it starts with a 12 kilometer hill climb and then you run down the hill for 9 kilometers, 660 degree. A 660 meter climb. All the Indians accustomed to the humidity and the heat, generally pretty good. The white Australian, who's probably a bit stocky these days for long distance running is still struggling in recovery mode. So forgive me if I'm feeling a bit rough, but taking on things we know that are going to be hard is one of the best things we can do for ourself. Literally stepping into discomfort is how we get tougher. How we get tougher is how we practice for those moments when things get really tough. Cognitive control. If we are going to perform at our very best in life, we've got to be able to focus on stuff. We've got to be able to remember stuff, we've got to be able to make decisions under moments of problems, pressure. And finally these all go around in a really big circle. Is social connectivity. The easiest way to explain this is that people who talk to no one get boring because they only have one opinion and that's their own. People who mix with lots of people and are stimulated and are challenged, learn a lot and can develop degrees of understanding about different viewpoints. Men who live alone die 10 years younger than than if they were still in a relationship and they had the cold hard facts about the way it goes. This is why I cannot emphasize enough that to get on with life, get back amongst other people. I worry that work from home is going to really damage the next lot of generations as we go along. But then there's always this thing, well, why would I bother with all this hard work of getting back amongst people and doing the hard physical stuff and doing all this meditation and learning all these new skills. And that's because this agile life is not about just producing better software going to fall through the floor in the moment. Wouldn't that be awkward? Mark disappears through the floor halfway through a presentation. But the Agile life is about increasing our capacity, and not just professionally, but in every aspect of our life. So that comes down to optimizing work from home and hybrid, and that's just not working better, but better chair, better screens, better environment. Making that environment a great productive place, like the Zen lab here is great for creativity. Secondly, we've really got an opportunity to increase our capacity around the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual connections, the pillars that are actually all about what make us our best version of ourselves. With an Agile life mentality, we can not only get our work done faster, but better. And once we get done what we've got to do, we can then do the things that we want to do. And finally, it's a chance to do more and to be more and to be worth more and to live the life that we want to do. Because what we all really want, even though what you want and what you want and what everyone in here wants in life is different, is that we want to enjoy our human experience to the most possible. For some people it's fancy cars. For others it's holidays. For others it's time with their kids. Whatever defines your most satisfying human experience, this is the framework to go about doing it. But when I say to people, well, imagine taking the rigour of agile software development and applying that to your life. It starts to sound a bit awkward, but I'll put this in context for you with regard to a conversation I was having with my daughter the other week. So every day, get up at 5, go through my morning routine, different days, and I work hard to hit the targets, to deliver things for other people, my clients, to get paid Saturday mornings, get up early, teach karate, train at karate, pick my daughter up, drop her off, pick up some dog poo in the backyard, you know, little bits and pieces, and maybe watch some cricket later on. But Sunday is my day. Yeah. So all of those days of the week, I'm planned, I'm executing, it's awesome. But Sunday, I start off with two hours of inactivity sitting on my ass, saying, oh, shortly I'll go and do all those things for myself. Then before I know it, I get to 12 o' clock, and that's not very far away from 5 o' clock Sunday, which is when we start winding down. And I never get to do the things for myself while I spend all week delivering to everyone else. And particularly in India, and particularly for mums in India. There is a massive guilt around making time for themselves, doing something for themselves. There's actually guilt for anyone doing something for themselves. But in this context, if we apply this methodology and do the work on ourselves from the inside out, it impacts positively every other part of our life. And that's the context that I offer you. And interestingly, one of the best support mechanisms we put in place for my daughter when she was diagnosed, we sort of got through those first couple of years was the elevate education program for kids, which is pretty much project management for the life of a teenager. You get a homework coach and the homework coach shows you things such as, okay, so you've got this exam in three weeks time. The night before you finish study at 4:00', clock, you're not up until 10:00pm because that's no good. The three days before you do practice questions, the week before you go through and make sure you've really consolidated your knowledge. The week before that you work out what you've got to learn. So on day one, you get the test and you put this three week project plan in action. But do you know what the very first thing the elevate education program focuses on? Any takers from the 748 people in front of me here today? Any guesses? Yes.

Yeah, they need to have a buy in. The person participating should absolutely be convinced.

That they want to do this 100%. And we're going to get to how they do that in just a second. So with your question of they need to have buy in, how would you get a teenager's buy in to do homework? What's the first thing that you plan in their life schedule to get them to do homework?

Incentivize.

Yeah, so they incentivize buy. The first thing that they plan is. Okay, show us your social schedule over the next month. Where's the party you want to go to? If you want to go to rowing training, if you want to do all of these other things, let's work out what you want to do. Okay, great. These are the things in the diary for the next month. Next, let's find when you can do your study. Well, if you've got rowing training on a Thursday morning and then you're going to be going out for a family dinner that Thursday night, there's no homework done on that Thursday. Yeah. So you work backwards on all those sorts of things. Things to have a realistic idea of when work can be done. So they incentivize by putting homeworking to live at the core of it. By the first thing that you do is plan your life. Because for a teenage girl, maths is not exciting. Yeah. Seeing her boyfriend is going out for a sleepover at a friend's place is. But if she's got the maths test on the Thursday and she wants to go to the sleepover on the Saturday night, and even though they say they turned the lights out at 11pm, they've been at my house. Yeah, you're shaking your head because you know they're up till 5am, not very good homework done on the Sunday. So if she wants to go to that sleepover and the maths test comes up, it's like, cool, show me on Thursday. Your homework is up to date. Let me help you do it. And that's the basis of the way they do this. And it's awesome and it's one of the best things that I've seen. So you guys, you know, you're a Salesforce house and you're an SAP house and, you know, you were a mobile development house specialist there for a while over time. And they were all like religions for a while, weren't they? So I know that Salesforce is pretty much a global religion these days for a lot of people, you know, it's all consuming. It's a massive singing and dancing thing. Now, this 10 Commandments of the Agile Life works a hell of a lot better when I'm working in front of a predominant Christian audience. I found over time, I've got a tailor my presentations a little bit. But Christianity, Moses stood on the hill, God struck his pieces of rock with a bit of lightning. And thus came out the 10 basic tenets of Christianity. So the 10 commandments for the Agile life begin with play the long game. Whether it's a long day, a long week or a quarterly sprint for a project, you plan to get to the end of it and work out what you need to do. Every day is different. More specifically, in rhythmic life, different days have a different cadence and need different attention. And in amongst those different days, we have to be realistically optimistic on what we can actually get done. We need to rest before we get tired. In the same context that before Sundar made me lure seven litres of fluid running up a hill yesterday, we were rehydrating before we ran. Because. Because by time, you get thirsty, you're already dehydrated and your performance is dropping. The same way that when we work by time, we're Tired. We were already losing productivity before we got there. And from that point afterwards, our productivity is shot. One of my fascinating ones, I'll show you a bit more on this in the moment is this context of increasing focus and reducing distraction are exactly the same thing. Yeah. That better quality of work is always better than more work. And in amongst all this planning and this wonderful schema that I'm showing you that no matter what we do and how well we plan, life happens, shit happens and we just have to get on with it as soon as it does because that time spent afterwards is just wasted. Expect the unexpected and the unexpected is best managed by resilient people. Yeah. As I'll speak to in a moment, we've got to balance the streams of life because it's only through a balance life are we our best in every part of life. So the fitter we are, the better we sleep, the better the quality of our work, the happier we are, the more content we are in relationships, the better the quality of our work, the more content we are, the more satisfied we feel at life, the better we'll sleep. And on it goes. So this Agile life is all about finding life, balance and balancing the streams that we look at in Agile. Play the long game as the first point, finish strong is the ninth point. So that when you get to the end of the day, still be focused on being productive at the end of the day or the end of the project or the end of the week, rather than blowing out a Monday and Tuesday and then losing everything as we run along towards the end of the week. Finally, one of my favorites is Kaizen, which is that good change learning retrospective. What went well, what went, didn't. How do I get better? And the great thing about this is it's not getting better to earn the company more bucks. It's getting better to make life a hell of a lot more satisfying, which in turn will earn the company more bucks. It's a crazy mix, but it is literally as simple as that. But in amongst all of this planning, in the agile life mentality and Robin Sharma's 5am Club, and I still curse him regularly for making me get up at 5am is win the morning, win the day. The horror of that alarm going off at 4:45, 8:00am has since been replaced by, even through the pandemic, hundreds of astounding photographs that I saw from my backyard as time went along. Productivity in the morning when we first get up is the most productive time of the day and we can get more done than we could Ever possibly imagine in that period of time. And that's the period of time in the day when we do the most hardest stuff, the most complex stuff, because our mind does not pick up any noise from the day as of yet. Start with the big jobs before the noise of the day gets in the way. Win the mornings, win the day. So what's been very cool about going through all the mental fitness coaching and taking a real interest in neuroscience, and now having my daughter feel comfortable sharing a bit about her journey is a super simplified version of the learning attention or absorption threshold. If you can imagine, the black line is our attention. The blue line represents a horizontal line that when we go above it, we are engaged, we're learning, we're absorbing information and we are interacting. And I like to look at this in terms of when a plane takes off and gains altitude. It's similar. They burn a stack of fuel to get up as high as they can, as fast as they can, and they actually coast with minimal fuel for the rest of their journey, taking into account the curvature of the earth and so on. So it takes a lot of effort to get our energy above the line. Naturally, as we work, we get tired and this is kind of an uninterrupted workflow. Down the bottom is the way the attention altitude line works for a kid with adhd. Up and down, up and down, up and down. Below the line, nothing is happening. I'd explained to my daughter before she was diagnosed and it was this period of time we were just going to nuts at this poor kid, where I'd say to her, okay, sweetie, you know, brush your teeth, make your bed, put on his clothes, bring your shoes to the kitchen along with your bag so we can pack your lunch. And she'd go, yep, cool. And one of four things would happen. One is I'd walk in there and she'd just be looking out the window, but got her shoes in her hand, but still in her pajamas. The second was she'd walk into the kitchen with her lunchbox and her shoes and still in her pajamas. The third one would be she'd possibly put her shoes in her school bag and she'd sort of be handing it all over going, I don't think this is quite right, literally what she heard. But what I was getting angry at her for is she was hearing, okay, sweetie, shoes, kitchen. Because she was literally dropping in and out of attention in between. It was one of the most confronting things I understood because those of us who have got kids will constantly feel like they don't Listen. And those of us who remember being kids is we actively went out of our way not to listen because seriously, what could our parents possibly have to tell us? But in this context, I was getting angry at her for things she actually had not heard because her mind wasn't engaged at the moments it needed to be. That line of inattention where you drop down and then you burn that energy to get back up again. Just gets harder and harder as the day goes on, that line of attention and the blue line is exactly the same as someone who checks Instagram every half an hour, who has their mobile phone next to them and goes, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Because every ding adds noise and every ding takes our attention away and puts us on Outlook notifications in meetings. If you've got a client here and your outlook notifications keep coming up, it's another way of saying, oh, everything else is more important than this. The time I've got with you while we're going through this presentation. But literally, it's the same little mental attention graph. So we now fly through a little bit of this. So good planning starts somewhere like on a Sunday night. Sit down, look at the week ahead, do your homework, planning, work out what's going in life, be realistically optimistic on what can get done. But it's not just looking at work and work progress projects. It's looking at the things you want to do, the things you have to do to give you the optimum chance of being the best version of yourself. So when we look at our planning or we look at the swim lanes, it's not just work. It's social time, it's breath work, it's diet work, it's movement. It's all of the things that neuroscience shows leads to the best version of ourselves. And what it's all about is creating the maximum opportunity to work in the most productive way possible, which is the pomodoro method. So I think a few people here know what that is. You have a timer 25 to 40 minutes on. You work and you just work and you just do that one work task. Timer goes off and you exercise the same discipline and you step away because that's your refresh time. So the breaks in between the pomodoro is how we de stress, declutter our mind, refresh and go again. And it's been shown to be, over a period of a few hours, the most productive way of getting stuff done. The first 40 minutes flies and you're like, well, they don't need a break. We don't now, but you're a little bit thirsty, but you don't yet know it. So it's the best time to have a break. And the key is that when you do take a break, they need to refresh you. They can't involve Instagram because that actually stresses your brain, raises cortisol levels at overexposure gauges. The blue lights just gives you a dopamine kick. The dopamine kick just means you need more of it later on. That probably won't come from work. So your really good breaks is where you do that bit of exercise. You go outside and maybe just put your feet in the grass for a little bit or go up to the roof, or go and stand at the back of the Zen lab and stretch, whatever it is to take you out of that headspace for a period of time, breathe, have a drink, get back and do the next pomodoro, give or take. All things balanced out. They say that after four pomodoros we fat fatigue pretty substantially. It's like an induced flow state and it's exhausting. But you get so much done. But you need to find three hour blocks in the day to get your pomodoro work done. So a perfect day might look something like this, where Friday is a meeting day and the other day is you've got two big pomodoro links done and you know you're going to get about eight days of work done by using this program. Problem is, the only time I ever had a diary that was that flexible and that control controllable was throughout 2020 and 2021. And no matter how much I do love productivity in the agile life, I will not wish back for those perfectly controllable working days ever again in my life, if you don't mind. Problem is that a lot of my working weeks begin to look like this. So when I started coaching, you put up your calendarly thing and you say to people, okay, now book a slot. I've got two hours here, two hours there. So these are literally mostly meetings now. Meetings. You meet with someone, you come to a decision, you define a work schedule, you go and do the work before the next meeting. I'm not getting any work done there. I'm just having like, I think there was 18 coaching sessions that week. And they're great, but with half an hour between, it's literally you finish up, you take your notes, you go to the toilet, you get a drink, you know, you sort of check a quick email, then you're back into the next Call. But none of those are doing real work. So these sorts of days are best to be avoided because unless all you do is have meetings, because all you can do is have more meetings. So you begin to reorganize your time a little bit and shuffle things about a little bit so that you create these blocks of time and you block them out. This is my Pomodoro time. What's the problem with this one up here? Any takers? You, sir, you love the way I'm going to simulate that. Out of the 768 people in front of me, someone's answering the question for me. Thursdays and Fridays are not particularly productive days. The most productive days of the week are Tuesday, Wednesday, a bit of Thursday, but not Monday or Friday. Monday you're mostly gaining altitude. Friday you are mostly dropping off the productivity work train. So a more realistic week is going to look something like this. And this is actually what works for me on the Wednesday I put in each easier jobs, meetings, maybe some pleasurable stuff. It might be when I do some creative work. It might be when my daughter's going to be home from school one day and I'm helping her with homework, which might be an interruption every 10 minutes or it might be no interruptions at all. So that will be the day that I pay the bills, do the accounting, go through the database spreadsheets, those two minute focus jobs. And the other ones are where I put my pomodoro times together. And so again, taking into account that that Pomodoro Friday afternoon might actually be some social time with a friend or coaching or a yoga class or doing that course that I'm doing that I really like that whilst it's hard, Friday afternoon is a great time to do it because I'm really looking forward to doing it because to get there, I've done the things I have to do, so I have time to do the thing I want to do. So once you've worked out, when you can do your work, you work out what you've got to do. Most people like lists. Now what was kind of weird about this one is I did a presentation at Stuba, which is the company that I used to be a shareholder in and CIO of the other week and was looking for picture of a whiteboard in amongst my photographs to put up. And this is actually sprint 23 of 25 in the cloud transformation project during 2020. So this is, I think it's might be 22 the last week in July, heading into the first couple of weeks in August Underlined is all the main things going on in life. There's actually some stuff in there about research, pleasure, heavy project areas, priorities and so on with the key dates that are happening in there these days. I love a good mind map. So this mind map here is a little bit more evolved. Every square indicates how many pomodoros I think a bit of work is going to take. The numbers next to it signify how hard it's going to be or my priority for the day. So I do this normally about 5 or 6pm the day before every other day ahead. So branching out from the center and I don't call it to do, I call it progress because to do means I haven't done it yet. Progress is something that I'm always doing. It's always a bit of a mental thing but I've got down there what I've got to do when I'm going to do it. There's a section called life and then there's a few other bits and pieces around there. Presentation outline Preparing the five keynotes to come to India with. So then what I do is I look at what the days involve. So this is a Monday. So my daughter has rowing, Jess has rowing on Monday afternoons after school. So at 16:30 that means I pick her up, come home for dinner but it means that between five and seven I've got three blocks of work that I can nail in that two hour period and I actually go quite hard in those because then I've got between 7 and 9:30 making breakfast, doing the home stuff, running to the gym, coming home for an ice bath, then getting into my next bit of work. And you'll see as importantly I cross this things off as my day goes along. There's some circles there you can see what some coaching sessions put in, some other meetings put in. Dinner is circled because that's a non negotiable meeting for the day. That's when we sit and connect. Something I learned from India the importance of spending time with your family to connect at the end of the days which doesn't happen as much the thing later on cards that's knowing that I've got a meeting with my daughter to give her a final service summary piece of homework which is the flashcards. Is she remembering the stuff that we did in biology as we go along a bit more these are the way the average days and my pages of the notebook begin to look center in the middle. Sometimes I have little messages or motivational things to my at the top AFD on the left Actually on the right as well. Alcohol free day 7pm only I have to finish by 7pm him because it's Monday and whilst I'll feel really fresh on a Monday I'll be crap on a Tuesday because Tuesdays are up at five Go to rowing, make two breakfasts, take it to rowing, come home and work. Then I teach karate and then I actually was doing some training on those evenings which is a bit hardcore but it really is as simple as optimizing your blocks of time to do the work, working out to do the things you need to get done, working out when you can do them, then prioritizing the hardest stuff to get that done first before everything else. And what's really cool is to go back. I realized when I first built this presentation you kind of leave people hanging. You say you know there's this learning difficulty with my daughter and people go then what happens? So when she's diagnosed you go to a gp, you get a referral, you go to see a pediatric psychotherapist a battery of tests to determine is it dyslexia, is it any number of things that happen in that portion of the brain and at the end of it they say something like don't worry Mark, she'll probably still lead a really satisfying life even though she'll be in the bottom 10% of the IQ scale didn't really like that because A I figured a lot of parents probably just gave in so statistically speaking we would give it a crack and see what we could do. Now she hasn't read from the Book of Five Rings but Musashi but he understood in 1643 when he wrote this book that all people of all types need balance and he said it is said the warriors is the twofold way of pen and sword and he should have a taste for both ways. Even if a man has no natural ability he can be a warrior by sticking assiduously to both divisions of the way. Now I might have shown my daughter the work, the framework, how to work, how to do it but she still had to do the work. And one of the things about the agile, sorry the elevate education program is they say look, don't focus on results, don't worry if they get A's, B's or C's it doesn't matter focus on when they do well in doing the work. So if she studies really well and gets a bad mark that is fine because the only way to get anything meaningful done in life is to work hard, consistently and self improving over a period of time. So if you can show her that skill, even if academically she never quite cuts it in life, she will have learned one of the greatest lessons that is quite hard to get on top of Kaizen. Learn, grow and transcend. And so over time, her grades slow, slowly improved. You know, zeros in tests became 50%, the odd C here and there. And then in one of my favorite parenting moments of all times is this year she got her very first A in maths. And it goes to show that literally hard work can bring about an awful lot of what we do. It's one of the best moments I've ever seen. Secondly, one of my favorite similar to that was with her rowing. So Jess is about yea tall. Modern kids who are into things like rowing are all ye tall and these are 16 year old girls and they're Amazonian women. So Jess busts her gut, but she didn't quite pull the time to get into one of the good crews. Came home super disappointed. After training all summer with me, then going to the preseason training, then going to the training four mornings a week and she's missed the cut by this much. I was like, darl, just hang in there. You know, you just got to keep going. You never know what will happen. Just keep going to training. Don't give up, don't give up. Honour the work you've put into this point in time. So sure enough, she goes to training the next morning and she's standing next to the coach waiting for the boat to load and the coach gets a message saying one of the girls in the crew, two years above Jess in the super seniors crew, has injured herself and can't row on the weekends. And this guy turns and goes, how'd you like to row in one of the seniors crews? So Jess and the other girls get in the boat and they're on the water and they're in this regatta and they're going for it and they're coming forth and there's four boats and it's tough and it's not looking good, but they're still out there and I'm kind of proud of her. She's giving it a go and then you see them start to get faster and suddenly the oars synchronize in their boat and they begin making ground on the third boat. But they're some way away from the others. Out of nowhere, the boat coming first by a long way, they crab, which means the oar goes under the boat and gets caught and the boat just veers off to the side. They're out of contention. The second crew sees this and goes, and they just blow out their energy and they're gone, and they just sort of start crawling along. Not only do they haul in that crew and the crew that was coming third, but they win the race to get in the final. So we're going bonkers because it's not often you actually get that return so fast, you know, that do the work and get the result. And so I'm videoing and I zoom in on the boat as they get there, and they do this thing where they row and they have to be really sure they cross the line. So they cross it, and Jess looks to the left and she looks to the right, and then she vomits everywhere from the effort of keeping up with these kids. I'm glad you've lasted, because the last two times I've told that story in presentations, people look at me like I'm weird. Because it is strange that one of my proudest parenting moments was when my daughter chucked up, but she did it from the sheer force of the effort. And it's just awesome to see your kids believing in themselves and doing those things and doing what they need to do. But right now, we are in one of the most fascinating times as technologists, because AI is already changing the world and changing it in ways we can't possibly imagine. But at a time when we're already tired from change and for those who choose not to adjust are going to be the first to lose their jobs. And yes, there might be more jobs, but then what? Then what? Because the robots and the machines will get better. But for the small few that see this as opportunity to take the chance to put in the work, to reinvent themselves, people who are the new citizens of the world that we are going to be sharing with the robots, it's an insane opportunity to begin designing and living the life that they want as they step back and they put in the work, man, you know, like, anything that is worth doing, it will be hard. It's always been hard to do tough things. And that's the whole point of it. Anything worth doing is meant to be tough. It'll take people with the courage to run towards the fire or when everyone else is running away, packing. And as we step into that changing unknown of the future, we still have time. And you can choose to do it if you want to. You have time now. But if you don't take advantage of it, time will have you. And so, in my final closing remarks, there to thrive beyond, to survive and to make your ordinary remarkable. Today I've shown you the how. And it is simply by living a life based on the same principles that you've been working for years, but building your life into that same methodology. And so I say to you, is it going to be a colorful life where you paint your masterpiece or something that's a bit poo brown and a bit shit? It quite literally is your choice. Anyone who's listening in today and taking the time I'm pretty certain is going to take the red pill and aim for an exciting future. So thank you very much and I invite some questions. Anyone at home. So you guys, it's like they've muted the sound because there's like thousands of them back there clapping. So are there any questions? Is there any statements? Yes, kind sir. Oh, no, sorry. If you're at home, they're doing the whole audio awkward thing again. If you like my. Yeah, there we go. Clap some more emoticons on the screen, it'd be great. Come on, you're not going to yell and cheer. So there. One set of clapping hands, two set of clapping hands is not good enough. Get creative. Geez, don't do that. There we go. Yes. The question, the question at the back.

There, I, I completely agree with the fact that it's only. The only way to build resilience is to push yourself, you know, every time to challenge yourself more.

Yeah, yeah.

But there's another part of me that's very wary of doing that is because we need to calibrate and identify where your limit is. And sometimes you should give up.

It's.

It's a fool's idea. Keep doing something that is probably not working out. And I want to understand from you how you calibrate. How is it, what metrics do you use on which basis you're going to take a mind. Okay, I have given.

No, yeah, yeah, look, that is, I think you've actually answered the question in your question. And the aim is that if you do pull out later on not to regret it because you realize actually you didn't quite do everything. So by giving it your all and then a little bit more. That's the bit how when six months later you reflect, you go, I actually really, I can't think of anything else I could have done. And that allows you to move on. And that perception of what was a failure, that's what liberates all the lessons because it's from those really traumatic failures that we get up from is the fertile ground from which we learn. How do we know when to do that. That's wisdom. I think we only know that by having mentors around us who we really trust or being an old fart like me who's just screwed up so many things over time, like, yeah, no, I'm going to make a mess of that again. The other day someone explained it to me as after a while you learn to pick up the signals. And this person had a great job, they're getting micromanaged and they hated it. They left, they got another job, they started getting the micromanaging signals, they had a look around and they went, I really need the job right now. I'm going to leave it after six weeks because I know where this job goes and it's not where I want to go go. And I think that comes with wisdom and a bit of self confidence. But yeah, but you actually know, you really do know. In the moment when you come to make that crucial decision, it's hard to explain, but if you cut out the noise and give yourself some time to have clarity, it does get clear pretty.

Quickly and it is inconsistent. Like I've had those moments.

Yeah.

But then again there's this fleeting thought that okay, maybe I could have done something else.

You don't want to have the. Maybe I could have. You want to have. I tried it and it didn't work. Not obviously you don't want to spend years doing it. So you go to a mentor, you go to someone, you have a break, you step back and you go, why? What's going on here? Why not? Why not? And you work it out and the more you try it, the better you get. Next question. 766 more to go. Yes. Simran, pick me, pick me, pick me.

So question here. You talk a lot about working backwards from the perfect moment.

Yes.

So I really like the Latin, but I want to know about what happens when it doesn't work out. It takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of time. So how do you deal with the fear of failure?

Ah, so a couple of things there. So yeah, that is one of my sort of favorite thoughts is plan backwards from the moment you know the perfect moment. The first one is it won't be a perfect moment, but by aiming for perfection we might be excellent. And so aim for perfection, knowing it doesn't happen. And that's fine, but that's what we aim for. And then fear of failure in itself is a really tough one. That comes with confidence. And I'll come back to it, it. I've done some really cool Study in all of these different philosophies around the world, from the Bhagavad Gita through to the Stoics, through the Japanese stuff through to the neuroscience. Talks a lot about focus on the process, focus on our actions and have a realistic optimism of what we hope the outcomes might be. Because like I've seen from my own life time and time again, you do the literally get there and go, perfect preparation. You know, you get to the moment just before that pressure beat and you go, there's actually nothing else I could do. And you just go, so it's actually really good to be in this critical, pivotal moment. Yeah. I find then fear of failure. Nassim Nicholas Taleb says plan to do something that if it turns out to be a mistake, you can recover from it because and then work out the value of the lesson you'll get would actually be. Be more valuable than the pain of the failure that goes with it. So for mine, that was that bit in the, in the pandemic and it was just kind of, you know, realistically speaking, I can't control any of the outcomes if I do bet the second half of the house against what might happen next. And so it was just sort of, if I get that wrong, we wouldn't have recovered from that. But if I stuck it out for another couple of weeks, well, maybe I would have left. Learns a bit more, for example. And so it's making the price of the failure lower than the knowledge you might gain from it as an experience. And then anyone who's a bit older will know that as you build this stuff over time, that's how we become who we are is from our lessons in life, which always come from the things that went really badly. We never get good at what we're already good at. You know, we can't get good at the thing we don't do if we don't try it. Trying it for the first time always means we're going to mess it up and laughing at it. Right.

So recently I heard from someone about how you should learn how to achieve your failures. Have you had any similar experiences?

How to achieve your failures, Achieve inside your failures? I think it's that same context of here's what I'm going to try looks pretty good. Everything says it should work. If it doesn't work, what will I get out of this? Well, I learned not only did that not work, but will I know what I might do next? Or if it doesn't work, will what I have as a result of that take me forward. So I haven't heard that specific saying, but does that sound maybe like what they were saying?

Pretty much.

Cool.

Can you tell us some of your experiences that are similar?

Well, I think I've told you some of the ones with Jess, which is the persistence and the persistence part of it. I certainly think by getting to this point of being in this business that I'm at now on the, you know, having now got money in my bank account from coaching people, which was a decision made in March 2023, that that's what I was going to do, even though it was a bit petrifying because I'd had three failures in a row and two of the failures that had happened in those pivots had been by doing things that I knew we shouldn't have done, but the decisions weren't mine. So, for example, I was involved in a project where they had ultra cheap labour from northern India. And my experience was that if someone is charging 20% of what extension charges, whether or not extension is an expensive or a cheap value proposition for code, that wasn't going to work. And so I sat down with them and said, look, I've been involved in these other projects, they're this cheap because they're being subsidised because they're a startup. Later found out it was daddy had given the son a business and so they didn't have to make money, they just had to land clients to look good in society. The long story short was my lesson in that from before was going to the investors and going, guys, I'll absolve my hand not of the project, but responsibility if we go forward, because these guys will not deliver. They just can't. They've all got nine months experience, not five years, four months. Delays miss our window of opportunity when things got frustrating for them. So I'd just like to show you this email from eight months ago, that sort of thing. And the whole journey of getting to this point in time with this coaching business was a series of doing new things for the first time and probably two out of three worked. And then secondly, the format of the business that I'm running now is entirely different from what I decided back then that I would be doing. But that came from trying something and going, nope, didn't quite work, so I'll try this instead. That seems a bit better. And it literally is that jagged back and forth, back and forth from mistakes. And never once did I bet everything in the bank account I worked out, yeah, gonna spend money, but I'll spend it in A way that will always be learning as we go along. And so it's hard to be specific on that, but my entire career is nothing like I thought it would be be when I started university because I studied chem and biochem. So we just progress from one chronic score up to the next. And if we keep getting up, then we keep getting better, I think. Anyone else? Comments, queries? Anyone at home? Any of you? Well, I think there's 857 people logged in as well. Do any of you. Is there anything coming?

Oh, Sundar, a few comments. So, adhd.

Yes.

I like the way you perspective on adhd. It's not deficit, but it is excess.

And this is actually the new version of the book, that original of the people who originally wrote the seminal text on what ADHD is. They've sort of gone. We. We got the definition wrong. So it's actually. Yeah, it's a science event.

Yesterday's conversation of mine with you. So I was sharing with Mark about my Shiloh, how normal it was. You know, I was never subject to any physical abuse or sexual abuse or any of those thoughts, which are quite common nowadays. And I said, mark, I've got a very normal life. So Mark made a comment saying, it's not. It's not a normal life, it's normal life you have. Yeah, that's the comment you made yesterday. So it is pretty much resonates with what you said, that it is not deficit, but it is excess. So definitions have changed over a period of time. So that. That's one comment I wanted to share.

Yeah, so. And the, the one of the great comments at the moment, you know. You know, like my grandfather said, you should be grateful, Mark. I walked to school barefoot in the snow and it's like, sure he did, granddad. Turns out he did for the whole. Till he was 13 when he left school. You know, my mum would tell stories about their childhood the same way that I'll tell the story, same boring stories to my. Yet everyone's nodding the same sort of thing. But you look at what made great people great. Or, you know, the comment being that life is too easy now, that there's not enough challenge, that we can just Uber in a Big Mac. We don't even have to get off of our fat asses and go and buy one anymore. We can just go, oh, Big Mac, it's here. And that's the suggestion. It's getting easy. And that's the challenge of us needing to rise to the AI challenge. And the AI opportunity is we need to step up, but we may be a bit tired or maybe we can't be bothered doing the work. Go. Gentleman behind you. But Sunda, you turned out fine. You had challenges. Everyone has challenges. Hi, mom.

First of all, I'd like to say thank you.

Thank you.

I really appreciate the stories that you shared about your personal life and I think, you know, the absolute insight as to, you know, a lot of lessons I think were buried in there. And I also saw the progression of your own career, you know, from A to B to C, so to speak.

Yeah.

The question that I have is along those lines, if there's something that you really love and you're passionate about, but your mind or your common sense tells you that it's not a good idea.

Yeah.

But you're really passionate about it and.

You know, you can't stop thinking about it. Yeah.

And there's this very practical side to it which, let's say, you know, dissuades you from taking that next step or fully coming into it. I sense that through your journey there are times that you felt that as well.

Yeah.

And what gave you that push or that impression is to say, this is something that I should fully come.

Earlier on in the career was just sort of. It literally was my boss at the time, time going, mark up. So I was. I've been producing digital video since 1996. The first video capture cards where you plug them into an analog camera and hopefully captured at 640 by 280 or something like that, or 480 for 15 frames a second to produce a digital video file that then most computers couldn't play because they didn't have the prerequisite 512 kilobytes of RAM to end it up on the screen. And he literally said, mark, you're really good at all this presentation computer stuff. You should start an IT company one day. And I went, yeah. And I did. And I gave notice like a month later. He said, what do you mean? I said, well, yeah, I think you're right. He said, you don't know anything about it. And I sort of. I'm 26, I know everything. And then along the way there is that whole gut feel that comes on. And there was also that at the very start ages and so on was probably too much self belief in myself, unhealthy at times. So that had significant downfalls along the way. But then it was just sort of, you know, those sayings, you know, think of this, think of your goal, then think of the stretch goal, then think of the thing that terrifies you that you would love to do now, if you come on Wednesday with specifically work on how do we define the thing that scares us? Because that's probably where we should aim. The problem is, first of all, if we don't try and pursue those dreams or investigate them. And I've had mentored and business coach a number of people over the past year, similarly, some who went on to start their businesses. One who tried for two years and thinks he failed because he's now gone and got a job. And my message to him was, dude, you had to get that stone out of your shoe or it was going to bug you forever if you didn't try. And you know what? You did try. Most people would have gotten a 50 and would have gone, I really wish I gave it a go. I was like, you know, doesn't mean because you got it wrong today, you'll get it wrong in a year or five years. What you've learned. You won't know the value of what you learned from that experience until much later on. You know that the value of that lesson. I think I probably just run out of battery or something. It doesn't matter. I'll yell loud. And so what I would do is I'd really write it down, like, journal the crap out of it. Here's what I want to do. Forget the fears. Forget the realities. Forget the dreams. Get rid of the limiting beliefs. Oh, my daughter Jessica. Lucky's on. Hang on. We've got a question coming from my daughter Jess. Boo. Hi, sweetie. Hang on. Hi, sweetie. So my daughter's asking a question in a moment, so this could be terrible concern. Someone vet it? Yeah. No, no, no, no, don't. No, no, don't read it out yet because I need to check it first before I go answering it. Oh, the battery's come back on. And I think you've got to take the chance. You've got to ride it out. Remove the fear, remove the limiting beliefs and just go, okay, with that crazy dream. If I was going to do it, what would I need? Because, you know, build a house, you go brick by brick. Yeah. And you make it significantly less daunting by just doing those little bits and pieces. Because the dream to where you are now, you can then do a gap analysis. What do I need from here to there to fulfill that life? I really want to lead to that scary thing. And then if you make each one of those steps. Okay, so I'd have to do this. Okay. Well, if I did that and I didn't go Onto the dream. Would that still be a valuable learning experience? Well, yes, it would be. What is the loss in trying that step up and then you get to it and you suddenly got a better view and you go, do I still want to do that? Yeah. Okay, what next? Do this. If I do that, will that still be of value? Totally. Okay, great. Nothing to lose. And before you know it, you build this success momentum and this positivity. Write it down, get it. You know, just dream the dream, then tell people. And when you tell people, they won't knock you down. They'll go, what a dream. And they'll try and help you. It's fascinating. All right, now we get scary and we answer my daughter's question. She's back at home. You should be in bed. No, she shouldn't. It's quarter past seven.

So the question is, what advice would.

You give fathers to bond or connect.

With their teenage daughters?

So Jess has just earned the next $50 of pocket money with her. What advice did I give? Well, Jess already knows. Knows the answer to this, which means that my wife's possibly sitting next to her, prompting the question. She's typing. She didn't do that, did she? What do I think you should do to bond? I think you be involved. You don't sit opposite them when you're discussing awkward things. You try and sit next to them. You try and remember that the best job in the world is being a dad or being a parent. The most important and valuable and exciting job in the world that. That you'll make the most mistakes doing, because there is no storybook. But the best way to bond is to be involved, to be home, to be part of their life, and to cherish every moment, which I do as I say to others. You know, now my little girl is becoming a woman. You know, I'm getting grayer, so we have less to relate to. And she's going to grow up in a different world to me, to all of us.