Wealth Club

How will the UK manage its public finances in the decades ahead? With great difficulty, is the answer. Its public sector balance sheet and long-term fiscal outlook are in poor shape. The implications are also clear: in addition to managing the public sector balance sheet as wisely as possible, the country will have to increase taxes. But that will be impossible to do without courage, both intellectual and political. Will this happen? I fear not.

According to the International Monetary Fund’s latest Fiscal Monitor, the UK’s public sector net worth is minus 125 per cent of gross domestic product, second-worst (after Portugal) of the 31 countries analysed. French public sector net worth was minus 42 per cent, Germany’s minus 20 per cent and that of the US minus 17 per cent. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s Fiscal Sustainability Report of July 2018 predicts that the picture will get worse. On current policies, the primary fiscal deficit (before interest payments) and debt would be 8.6 per cent and 283 per cent of GDP, respectively, 50 years hence.

Huge uncertainties exist around such forecasts. Nonetheless, the underlying reality is clear. The UK is an ageing country with politically compelling commitments to spending on health, education and social welfare. These commitments were cut to the bone after 2010. Gavin Kelly of the Resolution Trust makes this point powerfully in a recent article. Even Theresa May recognised this reality in the case of the National Health Service, making a huge unfunded commitment last June.

The prime minister also claimed that this would be funded by a “Brexit dividend”. Those without her sense of humour know that either some other spending must be cut or taxes must rise. The politics and long-term forecasts, together, make clear it must mainly be the latter. This challenge would exist whatever happens over Brexit. That merely makes the fiscal challenge bigger, because Brexit seems sure to have a sizeable negative effect on the economy and tax revenue over the long term.

Can the additional revenue be raised and, if so, how? That ought to be a focal point of serious political debate.

The answer to the first question is a clear “yes”. A large number of countries are both substantially richer than the UK, while also raising significantly greater revenue as a share of GDP. According to the IMF, Germany’s real GDP per head, for example, is 16 per cent higher than the UK’s, while revenue is 45 per cent of GDP against the UK’s 37 per cent. So raising revenue, without destroying the economy, is quite possible in principle. At the same time, it is obviously difficult to do so: the UK’s ratio of revenue to GDP has not been above 42 per cent since the early 1950s and has not risen above 40 per cent in the past 35 years.

The evidence of history suggests, therefore, that there is great resistance to turning the UK into a country with taxes comparable to those of successful northern European welfare states. The important question, then, is whether it would be possible to raise revenue in a way that does little, if any, economic damage (or even brings benefits), while also being politically sustainable.

The preliminary answer is an encouraging one. The UK tax system is such an incoherent mess that it would not be at all difficult in theory to raise taxes while improving economic efficiency and the distribution of income. Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, made this point in the Financial Times last year. He focused on the unreasonably light taxation of capital and wealth and the way in which this benefits the prosperous elderly. I would stress the need to focus on the taxation of rents, not just from land, as Henry George recommended, but elsewhere, as Paul Collier argues in his recent book, The Future of Capitalism. Taxation of rents and “bads”, such as pollution, must be the start.

Unfortunately, the victims of new taxes are always far louder in opposition than beneficiaries are in support. Moreover, a new tax often seems offensive. That makes reform difficult in almost all circumstances, but even more so when the aim is to raise, rather than lower, the overall tax burden. This creates a form of Catch-22 in current politics. A big reason for reforming the tax system is to make it less costly to fund higher spending over the decades ahead. But the fact that the reforms will be designed to raise revenue will make them more politically unpalatable than they would otherwise be.

Is there a way out? No easy one exists. But the starting point must be with a debate on what the country wants and how to fund it. The pressures will not vanish. Politics has to find an answer.

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The Congress claimed that Gujarat BJP leaders, under the guidance of party president Amit Shah and Rupani, were actively instigating and provoking violence against migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in order to divert people's attention from burning issues like unemployment, tumbling rupee and a sinking economy.

"On back foot for its continued failures in containing skyrocketing petrol-diesel prices, a historically devalued rupee, rampant joblessness and a sinking economy, BJP and its government in the state are acting in tandem to target poor people," Congress spokesperson Shaktisinh Gohil told the media here.

"Cornered on its massive failures, fascist BJP is resorting to its tried and tested formula of divide and rule," he said, claiming that there has been a mass exodus of north Indian migrants from Gujarat owing to incessant attacks on them and their livelihood.

Gohil demanded the immediate sacking of Rupani as the Chief Minister and asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take the moral responsibility of BJP's acts and apologise to the people.

Referring to Rupani's assertions of bringing in a law to ensure industries provide 80 per cent jobs to Gujaratis, Gohil accused the Chief Minister of "fanning the sentiment of xenophobia and inciting hatred".

He also shared a video of Himmatnagar BJP MLA Rajendra Chavda to substantiate his claims that BJP leaders were fanning violence.

"Chavda can be seen in the video exhorting BJP workers to drive away north Indians and says he is ready for violent agitation if locals don't get all the jobs.

"This is not only an open threat to people from north Indian states, but a well-planned strategy to evict such people working in Gujarat," said Gohil.

The Congress asked the Rupani government to restore law and order and book the BJP leaders responsible for the violence.

“Jet Airways and Air India had favoured this expansion from the Indian side and said that they would get passengers from flights of French carriers,” said a person aware of the matter, who did not wish to be identified.

This will help Jet Airways garner extra passengers and revenue since it has an enhanced cooperation agreement with Air France-KLM. French carriers are currently allowed to operate code-share flights to Ahmedabad, Goa, Amritsar and Kochi. Following the government’s go-ahead, the number of destinations will increase to 19 in the first phase and another 10 in the second phase, the person said.

Allowing code-share flights would enable Air France-KLM to sell tickets up to destinations in India where the French carrier does not fly but its Indian code-share partner flies. The pact between Jet Airways and Air France-KLM, signed in November 2017, gave the Mumbai-based carrier wider access to Europe and North America. The partnership significantly boosted Air France-KLM’s access to the Indian market, which is among the world’s fastest-growing.

KLM CEO Pieter Elbers had in September said that the airline was looking at expanding its alliance with Jet Airways to “the next level in terms of customer interface”. As part of the agreement, Indian carriers will get routing flexibility at French airports. “Routing flexibility would allow Indian carriers to transfer their passengers to a partner airline for onward flights beyond the airports in France, which may include those in the US and Canada,” said the person cited earlier.

If this happens, Jet Airways stands to gain as it can use the network of the US carrier Delta Air Lines to transfer its passengers to onward flights to the US. However, the French authorities rejected the Indian government’s request for “open skies” with India. Such an arrangement would have allowed French carriers to add unlimited number of flights to six key destinations in India.

The current bilateral agreement for flying rights between the two countries allows carriers to launch 35 weekly services each. While Indian carriers — Air India (7 services) and Jet Airways (21services) — operate 28 services a week, French carriers operate 19 services a week.

DGCA CLEARS JET’S FLIGHT SCHEDULE
Aviation regulator DGCA has approved the flight schedule of Jet Airways for five months, according to a senior official. Grappling with financial woes, the carrier has delayed salary payments to its staff; and on Sunday, it cancelled flights after some of the pilots reported “sick” over nonpayment of their dues.

Responding to queries about Jet, the official at the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said on Wednesday that approval has been given for the airline’s flight schedule for five months, including December. This clearance was given in mid-November, he added. The winter schedule for airlines is from last Sunday of October till last Saturday of March. The watchdog monitors operations of an airline through a systematic procedure of surveillance, regulatory audits and spot checks.

Jet Airways Group operates around 124 aircrafts, including Boeing 777-300 ERs, Airbus 330-200/ 300 and Boeing 737 Max 8. The airline is working on ways to reduce costs as well as raise funds. Last month, Jet Airways CEO Vinay Dube said the airline was in active discussions with various investors to secure sustainable financing and cost optimisation efforts that have resulted in savings worth `500 crore in the first half of the current fiscal.

It’s been a strange summer for Steam. Since the implementation of the Steam Direct program last year, the service has seen a tidal wave of new, largely unfiltered content, much of which has proved to be controversial, in poor taste, or in a couple of cases, malware. Steam’s moves to curate its new releases have been unfocused, inconsistent, and/or simply nonexistent, finally settling on the principle, as they stated in a blog post in June, that they “shouldn’t be the ones to decide this.”

In the same blog post, Steam’s representatives promised that new tools were in the works to help users filter their experience in the storefront, and to help cut down on trolls, scammers, and other bad-faith users of the Steam publication process. This included a rework to how the Steam Trading Cards system worked, where games would no longer automatically receive card sets until they reached a certain degree of actual player involvement. This addressed an exploit where players would generate “fake” games in order to farm them for trading cards with bot accounts, which could then be redeemed for badges, coupons, and other items, many of which could be traded for real money on the Steam Marketplace.

This week, Valve provided a progress report to the community. The company has introduced a number of methods to make it easier for users to explore Steam, such as dedicated homepages for developers and publishers, a rework (in July) to how its list of upcoming games worked, and provided more and better options for you to filter the types of content you can see when randomly browsing the store.

One big change here is that you can now tick a series of boxes in your account settings that determines what you are and are not willing to see on Steam, based upon not only the general age rating, but the type of content involved. For example, I unchecked the box on my personal Steam account for nudity and sexual content, so now, when I go to search for Funcom’s survival game Conan Exiles, which is notorious in certain circles for not only frequent but intensely customizable nudity, I simply can’t see its store page at all.

Steam now also requires publishers of games that feature mature content to go into detail about the type and context of that content (i.e. Left 4 Dead 2 being listed as featuring not just explicit violence, but “decapitation and dismemberment of zombie-like creatures”), in order to assist players in determining whether or not a game is suitable for them. Previously, a game’s Steam page would typically only hint at whatever the game might actually contain, through marketing copy and a handful of keywords; now, a consumer should know exactly what they’re in for before they purchase a game.

What’s likely going to be the most controversial part of these changes, however, is Steam’s ongoing attempts to remove “bad actors” from its storefront. They describe a relatively small population of would-be developers that are simply out to release titles with which to troll Steam’s userbase, but then remain vague on what precisely fits their internal definition of trolling.

“Our review of something that may be ‘a troll game’ is a deep assessment that actually begins with the developer,” Valve wrote on its blog. “We investigate who this developer is, what they’ve done in the past, their behavior on Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking information, developers they associate with, and more. All of this is done to answer the question ‘who are we partnering with and why do they want to sell this game?’ We get as much context around the creation and creator of the game and then make an assessment. A trend we’re seeing is that we often ban these people from Steam altogether instead of cherry-picking through their individual game submissions. In the words of someone here in the office: ‘it really does seem like bad games are made by bad people.'”

In other words, they know trolls when they see them. It’s an open-ended declaration that seems guaranteed to cause some problems, just as soon as a given issue comes down to a matter of interpretation.

As for the issue of sales bloat and a lack of curation on Steam, Valve currently remains quiet. The new systems they announced are in place on Steam accounts as of this writing, but the store is still flooded with new games every week, and Valve still considers it, for the time being, the community’s job to police their storefront.

Before Mahershala Ali read the script for Green Book, he had never heard of Don Shirley, the classical/jazz pianist he portrays in the film. But now, a part of Shirley lives within him. 

“I was blown away by some of the things he accomplished and by hearing his music and how much talent he had, his capacity for language, his passion for education. There’s a part of him that’s just naturally part of me that the character has allowed me to come more to terms with. I can be fairly meticulous about certain things and Don Shirley certainly has that quality. I know that we share that quality, that’s something that I’m even more aware of now,” he tells Billboard with a laugh. 

The Peter Farrelly-directed film, which opens on Thanksgiving Day, tells the true story of the elegant, refined Shirley, who lived in a lush apartment above Carnegie Hall, and coarse New York City bouncer Tony Vallelonga (played by Viggo Mortensen), whom Shirley hired in the early '60s to drive him on a concert tour through the Deep South. The buddy picture from Participant Media/DreamWorks takes its name from a travel guide for lodging and dining options for African Americans during the time of segregation with Jim Crow laws still in effect. As the trip progresses, Vallelonga turns from racist to ally and the pair build a friendship that lasted until their deaths a few months apart in 2013. 

Farrelly, best known for making such blockbuster comedies with his brother as There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber, developed the story based on interviews Vallelonga’s son had conducted with his father about his time with Shirley and on the 117 love letters the senior Vallelonga wrote to his wife while he was on the road. “It’s the easiest script I’ve ever written because of all the material we had,” Farrelly says. “We moved things around. We took some dramatic license. We had to make up the dialogue. But some of it is actual quotes from Tony and some stuff we we pulled right out of the letters.” 

In telling the story, it was essential that Ali’s performances seemed effortless. Though the film’s composer Kris Bowers pulled double duty -- not only scoring the film, but also playing the majority of Shirley’s music in the film and all of it on the soundtrack -- he and Ali worked together for months on Ali’s technique. “The focus for me in doing that was to not to take away from the experience of the audience,” Ali says. “For them to be able to watch the film and they can watch and still be in the flow of believing and going on this journey with these characters.”

Ali’s first weekly lesson with Bowers was slated for an hour at a Steinway showroom but lasted three. “He just played the C-major scale for three hours,” Bowers says. “He was so focused.”

“Anything I do, I’m always going to try to commit myself to learning as much as I can about it, because you just need to know how that’s going to inform and affect your work,” Ali says. “The dexterity and the focus and the precision that it takes to play the piano and play on that level was something that I spent my time in those three months working to understand. It definitely served and influenced and affected the performance, for sure,” he says.

A diligent and talented student, by the second month Ali was ready for Bowers to begin teaching him some of Shirley’s easier musical passages, “so that he might be able to get it under his fingers,” Bowers says. By month three, Ali could play well enough that in the movie he plays the piano in some scenes. “It was really important for Peter to be able to use as much of me as possible,” Ali says. “It’s essentially a composite of Kris and me and we have to approach it like doing a stunt. You just want to make sure they can use as much of the principal actor as possible.”

The Academy Award-winning actor not only practiced playing, he picked up mannerisms from Bowers and studied his body movements, even frequently correcting Bowers on his technique. “Don Shirley carried himself more like a classical pianist,” Bowers says. “I’ve developed so many bad habits as a jazz pianist. I never had to worry about my posture like a classical pianist and Mahershala would come over and tell me to straighten up my back. I look like Schroeder when I play, head down, shoulders hunched.”

Ali bursts into laughter when reminded of his stern words for Bowers: “I did tell him, ‘Man, Kris, you’ve got to sit up a bit because the footage I have of Don Shirley, he was sitting really straight up -- almost like if you can imagine a ballet dancer sitting down at a piano.”

To make the musical scenes even more realistic, the actors rounding out The Don Shirley Trio, Dimiter D. Marinov and Mike Hatton, are playing their cello and bass, respectively. “I only read people who played the instruments,” Farrelly says. “I had my hands full with the piano, so I needed the other guys to be OK.”

All involved hope the movie shines a light on Shirley and he claims his rightful place among the leading jazz artists of the time. “He was a great man, a great musician,” Farrelly says. “He was an original. There was no one like him. He was a brave guy. He was doing these concert tours at a time the you were taking your life into your hands. He wasn’t a revolutionary [but] he knew what he was doing was making a difference.” 

The race for state attorney general certainly has the real estate industry's attention.

Sources inform Crain's that Jim Whelan, executive vice president and chief lobbyist for the Real Estate Board of New York, has made a recent spate of calls to encourage players in the industry to stuff the coffers of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney's campaign to become the state's top law-enforcement officer.

Maloney faces Public Advocate Letitia James, Fordham University professor Zephyr Teachout and former Port Authority commissioner Leecia Eve in the Democratic primary Thursday. It is unclear what impact donations so near to the vote will have, except to ingratiate Whelan and his trade group's membership to Maloney.

The victor in the Democratic contest is heavily favored to defeat Republican lawyer Keith Wofford in November.

REBNY has so far split its own donations in the race. Its political action committee has contributed $25,000 to both Maloney and James, including $10,000 for each in the final days of August. It also kicked $5,000 to Eve's bid in early July. Teachout has pointedly refused money from landlords and business entities.

Whelan's new fundraising push on behalf of Maloney may be a response to the Siena College poll released earlier this week showing the congressman leading his rivals by a slight margin.

One source described the industry's position as as "A.B.Z.—anybody but Zephyr." Politico reported on Monday that Steve Ross of Related Companies, a major Maloney donor, has financed a $100,000 independent ad campaign attacking Teachout.

Maloney, a centrist with private-sector experience who represents a swath of the Hudson Valley, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For the last few years, every mobile marketing trends piece seems to include the words “AI” and “mobile pay” somewhere. Admittedly those are always trending and new possibilities are entering those respective arenas, hence their constant inclusion. But to avoid getting off on the wrong foot with this trends article, let’s get those two out of the way quickly: AI will be a trend line for the remainder of 2018 and into 2019, but largely by way of AI-powered ads. Mobile pay is probably 10 years away from “mass market” — at least in the eyes of Apple executives — but with Chase, CVS, and other major brands/retailers on board now, you’ll increasingly see the option as part of mobile marketing campaigns, in-app purchasing, etc.

OK, with the “big two” out of the way, what other trends can we expect for the back half of 2018?

Increasing awareness of fraud protection

Fraud is beginning to creep its way into App Store Optimization (ASO) processes, and with 2016-2017 being a period where there were a lot of news stories about hacks, breaches, data being compromised, etc. — mobile users want to know they’re safe. We’re arriving at a place psychologically where users are OK giving up their information because they know it could lead to more targeted offers, but they absolutely want to make sure that information is kept safe aside from a few push notifications about sweet new sneakers. The problem in this space right now is that the “attack surface” — how someone can exploit a mobile network, in other words — increases almost hourly, but security staffing (the number of employees a company hires to police their networks) has almost flat-lined. Automated security will probably eventually be the answer, but will that require a lengthy, tedious verification process for a simple install, thus corrupting user experience?

Focus on the broader ecosystem

Mobile is more than just ads and apps. An overly-myopic focus there can be problematic, especially in an era when many CMOs/marketing teams are being asked to own “customer engagement” as well as conventional marketing metrics.

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Chatbots

This trend has been on the rise for a few years, but by late 2019/early 2020 it might be to “scale.” The most interesting application of chatbots are probably within the recruiting/hiring space — increasing communication, transparency, etc. — but within mobile marketing they can help automate parts of the process and, when the tech is a bit more advanced, even help with cross-sells and upsells in-app. The hurdle here has always been (and remains) how natural/organic the process feels. If a user feels as if they’re talking to a bot, they may not engage as fully, opting to move to a real person. Until that “human touch” quality is there, chatbots will be a nice to have within apps and general mobile marketing processes; once that human connection is determinable, they become a “need to have.”

Improved targeting

Snap recently worked with Nielsen on this, and with good measure — effective audience targeting is the Holy Grail of mobile. Without it, you’re pushing fluff. As some mobile marketing suites become more nuanced (a trend you’ll also increasingly see), marketers should spend time looking at what their partner platforms offer. How can you segment? What groups are dynamic? How can you better target based on past activity? Sometimes as marketers we get obsessed with the shiny new tools, as opposed to sitting down with a pen and paper and thinking through all the steps of who we are, what we offer, and how to effectively get that in front of people.

What other trends do you expect to see before the conclusion of 2018?

How I made $3M in 15 weeks with a brand new business.

And how video game theory made me a multi-millionaire…

First, let me clarify – this isn’t my first company, but that shouldn’t distract you from the true and honest reality that you can replicate what I am about to teach you.

Yet before I lay out a strategy, let me warn you, if you have never played an RPG video game, like Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo II™, then the following will likely fly right over your head and you should download any RPG game that has a SKILL TREE and here is why…

In life everything you do, unlocks new opportunities, yet every single business strategy, project management system, and business framework I have seen, fail to incorporate this fundamental reality into their daily business operations.

And this is where game theory and specifically the importance of understanding how skill trees in popular RPG video games play a critical role in my past success and soon to be yours.

Every game ever, shows you the ENTIRE skill tree, and allows for you to see the end destination and the beginning of the decision you are about to make.

You put a skill point into “Firebolt” and then level it up to say level 5, and you unlock “Firewall”, repeat, and you unlock “Meteor” and so on and so forth, but because you can see the entire skill tree, you know where to put your skill points in order to unlock the most powerful skills as early as possible.

Now for those of you that are lost in all this video game jargon, essentially in video games, as you level up through quests or fighting monsters you gain experience, similar to how you do in real life reading books and reading or watching “How To” videos and articles on the internet to learn about a new skill, industry, or craft like marketing or copywriting for instance.

The more time you invest, the greater your experience and hopefully your skill, and just like how in real life your resume builds up, you unlock higher and higher paying jobs based on your skill level and accolades; In video games, specifically RPG games, it is the exact same.

This entire methodology however is simplified for children of all ages to play, and that is where the genius of game theory applies to building easy to execute business plans that anyone can follow to achieve wealth and rapid growth, while at the same time avoiding many of the pit falls and traps that kill motivation and businesses before they have a chance to truly thrive in the world.

So what is so genius about this “game theory” I keep referring to?

It is the very categorization by gaming companies and how they layout objectives in such a simple and intuitive way that a child as young as 6 years old, can recognize and make not only the correct decision, but also achieve taking the shortest path to success if they know only the starting point and the desired end result – that is so absolutely genius.

“The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.” – Albert Einstein

As Albert Einstein says, genius is in the simplest of practices, but the irony is that many are mislead by gurus pushing complex solutions to create the illusion of authority and prestige, and as a consequence (even those of you reading this) will overlook simple executable systems that all age ranges and backgrounds can follow, because their simplicity makes you so wary and cautious of their efficacy because of your prior conditioning to look for complex solutions over those that simply and directly solve your problems.

This symptom of being conditioned to only give attention to complex solutions, is a corrosive dogmatic ideology that has created a disease I like to call “analysis paralysis” amongst every day people and especially entrepreneurs and business executives of whom I coach with great frequency, to help recover from this metaphorical paralysis that can cost millions or worse – their business.

So in order to help you now, to help you understand the value of the solution I am about to outline below, you have to consciously make a single commitment to me while reading this, you have to take a deep breath and blink three times.

Right now!

And while I could go into the psychology as to why this will help you remember what I am about to say, I will keep it short – you have been reading this long article of text, straining your eyes, while constantly both consciously and subconsciously connecting different phrases and key points made above against your wealth of personal life experiences to determine how well they either do or do not relate to you. You do this in order to determine if you can exact true actionable value in this post that will help you get ahead or solve a problem – all actions which naturally stress you out and lessen your attention span.

We, humans are natural problem solvers with an innate desire to win.

So by a simple micro-commitment to your future, such as blinking three times to give your eyes a short break and taking a deep breath (which you may or may not have noticed you have decreased the frequency and depth of your breathing when you started focusing on this article,) will all help combat the stress chemical (cortisol) in the brain, and increase overall retention. After all, the classes you were likely best at in high school and perhaps college (if you attended), were the classes you had the most fun in. Where you smiled and laughed the most, both two textbook reactions that release serotonin and dopamine (the happy chemicals) that kill cortisol (the stress chemical) and help you not only narrow in your focus, but also greatly retain more information.

Fascinating, right? Now STOP!

Pay attention or everything you have read to this point will vanish and be forgotten in the void a thousand new experiences, you are bound to experience today. HOWEVER, if you are committed to making a positive change in your life, if you are committed towards your future success, get closer to the screen, stop skimming the text and read WORD by WORD, for I fear if you do anything else, you may miss the simplicity of the solution I am about to provide by your haste to get to the end.

Each word I use from here on out is carefully crafted and I implore you to re-read not only the following section but the entirety of this article again, and then in the company of friends, to thoroughly retain and then talk over the strategy covered until YOU fully understand – this is for YOU – not THEM.

Step 1 – Start with the end in mind, but leap with clear conscious where others misguidedly step

In game theory and in this article, I gave you a glimpse about the depth of the topic we would dive into at the start in order to prepare you for the next set of information and the next and so on. In game theory, this is no different than you having a basic skill such as typing on a keyboard, which aids you in being able to complete more complex tasks such as navigating the internet, blogging, copywriting, and more. Every bit of prior information and experience, unlocks the next opportunity.

For those of you feeling numbed by the common sense above, thinking “of course you need to know how to type before you can navigate the internet” you have already failed this lesson. For you could never type and instead use speech or any variety of inputs such as a simple computer mouse to complete the task… and this is where you need to kill past prejudice about the simplicity of things, to allow for the genius of game theory come to life.

Having a firm and CLEAR understanding of where your starting point is (where you currently are now in your life at the time of reading this), and the resources that are available to you like money, time, and assets in the form of experience or relationships that you can withdraw from ( know that every relationship is like a bank account that can go bankrupt ) for any of the prior mentioned resources, and MAPPING all of these resources out before you, is the single most IMPORTANT action you can EVER do because…

It allows you to identify your ORIGIN, ground zero, your base, the lowest point at which you will ever be if you are truly investing in yourself and have already started taking notes with a pen and paper by this point of the article.

You need to write down, all of the resources I mentioned above, how you spend your time, your income, the valuable assets you have from the device you are reading this on, to your car and any other miscellaneous valuable things in your possession including junk which could be repurposed ( this list will be LONG ) and any valuable connections, etc.

STOP! Remember how I said genius is in simplicity?

Why are you falling into the SAME TRAP of pursuing complex solutions?

Consider for a moment, how can you know what is valuable or what you should write down when you DO NOT EVEN KNOW YOUR GOAL?!

I gave you a NEW PROBLEM disguised as a solution that you believed would advance you closer to your GOALS, without giving any context as to what is considered valuable. Subconsciously in your innate desire to win and solve the problem, you already started thinking of things – or worse, already committed to writing them down without knowing the END GOAL of why you are writing anything down to begin with.

Again, and this is the last time I will test you, as any room for future confusion will only hurt your ability to learn what you need to from this experience, you need to LISTEN and become a student. Kill any and all form of ego, pride, and status you believe you have – only through abandoning those distractions will you reveal your ORIGIN and with complete and total CLARITY, understand that you are truly at the STARTING point and no closer nor farther away.

It is incredibly important that for the purpose of the remainder of this article you think about nothing else but YOURSELF and reflect on everything I will say in the context of where YOU want to go with YOUR LIFE in the context of the two following questions :

What fulfills YOU, makes you HAPPY?

Who do YOU want to be in the FUTURE?

Take your time to answer both of these before continuing to read the remaining steps to understanding the genius of game theory and how to apply it in the context of YOUR LIFE, because any LACK OF CLARITY will cause you to misstep, instead of take the actions that will progress you by LEAPS and bounds closer towards your goal.

Once you have a CLEAR idea of what the answer to both of these questions is, write them down. It doesn’t have to be organized in any way, it doesn’t need to be even in complete sentences or even words at all, it can be in any form that makes sense to YOU. Remember, this is not for others, this is for YOU and how YOU hit your life goals.

Once you have your answers written down, a FUTURE is created. Now we can get to work – as you now have both pieces that are NECESSARY to successfully utilize game theory to it’s fullest extent as I have to achieve success.

You have an ORIGIN and a DESTINATION, the two points that even a 6 year old can connect the dots between to find the shortest path.

Remember how I said ego, pride, and the status you believe you have would only serve to distract you?

Do any of those things truly matter if a 6 year old is on the same playing field as you at being able to connect the dots between two points?

That is why I told you, to be a student, a BLANK SLATE, as are children who are still eager to learn how the world works.

Now get ready for the GAME part of the theory.

Final Step – Work Backwards From Failure

This is how NASA put a man on the moon, they used game theory, defining the two points above, to discover their ORIGIN and their END POINT, and then proceeded to work backwards from failure.

Luckily, achieving your goals is likely easier than putting a man on the moon. If what you are about to read is properly followed, you will learn the system by which even NASA and the billionaire elite operate, as well as 6 year old children who all realize that FAILURE is only the temporary status of a MISUNDERSTOOD dependency of SUCCESS.

Consider for a moment, you have both the INPUT and OUTPUT of a PROBLEM, does it matter what you put in-between as long as the ORIGIN equals the DESTINATION in the end?

If I have a desire to make 382.18 equal 3,000,000 does it matter whether I use multiplication, division, addition, subtraction or any other process in-between to make the numbers equal one another in the end?

NO!

And when you realize how powerful that concept is, you will have fully grasped the power of game theory and how anything becomes possible for anyone with the willingness to UNDERSTAND that FAILURE is only a TEMPORARY status of a MISUNDERSTOOD dependency of SUCCESS.

To put it plainly, the secret to success is not wealth, money, status, or power – it is through finding fulfillment through understanding failure.

It may take you a few years to fully grasp that last statement, but if you know the ORIGIN and the desired DESTINATION of any given problem, then all that’s left is to work backwards from failure.

Pay special attention to what I am about to say next.

Most people when they start a project, they just dive in and try to build as they go versus looking at the entire landscape to see where the points of resistance, obstacles, and death traps are.

DO NOT BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE!

Furthermore, most business owners and consultants tend to create roadmaps for businesses from the ORIGIN, however this is an incredibly TOXIC and limiting approach to scaling any company.

Why?

Consider this, if I asked you how to build a $100M million dollar company right now, would you know which questions to ask yourself and which actions you should do first in order to have the GREATEST IMPACT for the LEAST amount of capital or resources?

No, because you are thinking from the BOTTOM UP, you essentially are forced to think small because you are likely looking at your available resources and going “what can I initially build with X tiny budget to make more money so I can afford the next step”.

And just that question alone, can create “analysis paralysis” where you are so caught up in trying to make the right decision with what little funds or resources you may have, that you unintentionally stress yourself out as a result, and make rash emotionally clouded decisions.

However, if you follow game theory and instead worked BACKWARDS from your DESTINATION/GOAL, and repeatedly asked yourself the question of, “What ways can I achieve this?”, then instead of having to constantly try and figure out what the next step is or even beat yourself up whether you are asking the right question, all you have to do is continuously list actions that are necessary to achieve the last step.

You solve for failure.

To achieve this GOAL, I can do A, B, or C action to get there, and to A,B, or C action, these are the things I need to do in order to make sure those happen, and so on and so forth. You KEEP DOING THIS until you can not break down the dependencies (requirements) of any one action any further.

And without you even knowing it, you will have discovered that the actions that are all listed at the very bottom of what will look like an upside down tree, have become so granular and simple, that any one of them have become STARTING points, that all lead to your DESTINATION.

Do not be afraid to spend a week or more doing this, it is by far a lot more efficient and smarter to spend a day to sharpen your axe to cut down a tree in a few short swings, than spend an entire day hacking away at a tree with a blunt axe.

By the time you get done, it should look like a really large triangle of sorts, with rows that have the least amount of steps at the top and dozens if not hundreds of steps or actions on the very bottom row.

Now, you might consider you are done and that you have the most thought out business plan in the world and there is no possible way you could fail, and while you will certainly out perform others who do not plan, still have skipped an incredibly important step.

You haven’t written down what any of these actions will COST you in terms of time and money.

You likely don’t want to retire and start living your dream life at 65, when you’re so old that you can break a hip riding a jet ski. So now the question becomes, which path will get you to your DESTINATION the fastest for the least amount of time, money, and effort?

Right now, just by looking at the web of possible futures you have created for yourself there is no context or way of telling which path is the easiest and which one will cost you the most or stress you out the most.

What you will read next, is the MOST IMPORTANT step of game theory, and if followed incorrectly will render everything you have done up until this point useless.

In order to add context to this massive web of possible actions and steps before you and to make the entire thing so easy to understand that even a 6 year old can answer the question of “Where do we start?”, we need to add two values.

The first, the time it will take to find and have SOMEONE ELSE do that task.

The second, the amount of money it will cost to have SOMEONE ELSE do that task.

Consider for a moment, what is the #1 trap you hear most entrepreneurs and business owners falling into?

That they get so caught up IN their business instead of ON it, right?

So why would I have you write down the amount of time or money it would cost YOU to do any of the tasks that you have written out?

If you don’t know the time or cost it would take to do a task on your decision tree, ask someone who would know, utilize your network. If you do not have someone in your network, jump on LinkedIn and look up people who are in positions at companies who can.

Make educated estimates, but do not GUESS.

The goal of game theory is to give you the shortest executable path to achieve your end DESTINATION/GOAL and to answer the question that has probably been nagging in the back of your mind of “Where do I start?”.

Once you have filled out the answers to these two questions above for every action you have in your decision tree, have likely made all of your friends feel like you’ve fallen off the deep end and become some mad genius – the real fun starts.

It is time to find the shortest path to success.

You have thousands of ways you can succeed, thousands of ways you can solve the problem of how to get from where you are now to where you want to be, and there is NO WRONG ANSWER, just a series of shorter and longer paths that will get you there.

It’s time to get out a blank notepad and a calculator and get to work. Start adding up which path will take the LEAST AMOUNT OF TIME AND MONEY to get you to your desired end DESTINATION.

Sound like a lot of work? Work smarter, not harder.

Do not calculate paths from the bottom up, start from your DESTINATION and then work backwards yet again. Only follow the path that has the SMALLEST time and monetary commitments, and repeat until you get to the end.

I suggest that you highlight this path as you go in green, as this is the SHORTEST possible path. When you reach the very last action at the bottom, which should be the easiest action you can do today to start on the path of SUCCESS, you have officially found your point of ORIGIN.

In doing everything above, you have literally created a roadmap and system so simple, that if you were to show a 6 year old, they would be able to follow it, and in doing so you have freed yourself from every possible entrepreneurial trap and mental block that would ever get in-between you and the future you are trying to create.

As a consultant, public speaker, and as a serial entrepreneur myself, the greatest barrier I have found that prohibits people from achieving any form of success, is that they (especially business owners and executives) mistake action for progress.

By following game theory and the exercise above, you’ve fundamentally done what 99.9% of people in this world have failed to do. You have predicted the future.

It sounds wild, but in life nearly every person you meet, never considers the consequences of their actions beyond any immediate sense.

That is why 99.9% of people happily exchange time for money, they wake up and go to work because the immediate result is money.

They are too distracted or stressed by relationships, money, how they look and what people think of them, that they never take a moment to step back and consider if the actions they are doing each and every day lead to any true progress. That is the cause of every major world problem.

There isn’t a single school in the nation that teaches you to THINK like this article does. They all teach you to REACT, instead of carefully predict each move you make with calculated precision.

Following the traditional way of thinking will make your life progress no differently than if you were to have a single bow and arrow and fire it with all your might, only to then spend time chasing down the arrow (the direction of your life) to fire it again, only to end up wherever it is that you end up.

Whereas game theory and methodology that I have explained above will allow for you to accomplish each and every desire you ever have in this life.

It is like having that same bow and arrow, but having a clear and defined target to aim for. Instead of exerting all of your effort and strength into aimless progress, your life becomes a series of precise and calculated accomplishments, that all line up to the culmination of the ultimate goal in life – fulfillment.

Whatever you seek in life, whether you seek to create multiple multi-million dollar businesses as I have, to travel the world, to be present with friends and family, or to press the boundaries of human ability or imagination, the drive you have to achieve that goal, the thing you are seeking is called fulfillment.

No book, nor article, nor advice by any “guru” has ever come as close to answering how to achieve the true success or fulfillment as well as game theory does.

This is not just a theory, it is act, the dedicated craft of predictive thinking that is not taught in universities or schools, nor by the internet’s most followed influencers nor business gurus, but the one trend you will find amongst all billionaires and top performers of any industry or craft, is that they all do it.

None of their actions are by chance. Each decision is carefully crafted to set themselves up in the best possible position to achieve the next goal.

If I can give any more of my parting wisdom in this post than I have already, it is that anything easily earned is never truly valued. Our goals are our goals in life because they are hard, because they are worth earning. If they were easily obtained, we wouldn’t task ourselves with trying to accomplish them for they would have no value to us.

The true secret of success, is that success isn’t about having a lot of money, it is about finding fulfillment, a sense of purpose and meaning and pride, in every action you do.

How could you not be happy with a life like that?

A life where you never regret any decision?

That is the true meaning of success, the pursuit of happiness.

Utilizing this way of predictive thinking as I have outlined in the article above, will help you diagnose any problem you have in your life, allow for you to achieve anything you can imagine, and the only limitation of what you can achieve or become in this life, is the belief that you can.

This is the very process I go through with all of my clients, business partners, managers within my companies, and entrepreneurs and executives I coach at private masterminds that I frequently host.

Now that you have the keys to success, and the very blueprint for what has helped me become a multi-millionaire and hit $3M in 15 weeks with my latest company (as was the original title and reason why you clicked on this article), what will you do with it?

Will you study this article and use it to achieve your dreams?

Or will you let life’s distractions distract you from this little gem and will everything you read fade away in time with life’s every day events?

You decide.

Nobody in this world will ever care about your dreams coming true, so if you don’t make them real, who will?

Thanks for reading!

I can’t wait to see how you apply game theory and this model of predictive thinking in your own life, and if you understand the importance of immersing yourself in the right environment and people, and want to immerse yourself deeper in a culture of select people who think this way, then you can use this very theory to figure out how to get ahold of me and become part of the community of people I surround myself with.

Don’t worry it’s not that many steps to achieve success there � I’m pretty easy to get ahold of…