Be Brilliant

Introduction

How do you feel about the future? Be honest … because most of us would agree that the mere thought is simply exhausting.

• It's exhausting trying to keep pace with technological changes.
• It's exhausting keeping on top of other people's lives: our teams, our families, our children, our friends.
• It's exhausting trying to keep up with work demands and the changing business landscape.
• It's exhausting having to conform to industry, societal and — let's be honest — social-media expectations of how to look, be and behave.
• It's exhausting trying to prove that we're good enough.
• It's exhausting trying to perform and play a bigger game.
• It's exhausting being human in today's busy world.

When everything external to us is moving so quickly, the risk is we enter a space of feeling out of control; we worry about what we don't have and seek out solutions to band-aid our perceived imperfections and doubts. We regress into a space of me, of self-protection, of ‘protect what I know, learn what I don't and until then I'll fake it till I make it'.

We look externally for options to invest in learning and programs to improve our skills and capabilities. We buy tools and expertise to improve performance. We spend hours researching the next big thing so we can be ahead of the curve. And we invest materially in external validations of success.

We want to be in demand, to be needed, to be relevant, to be seen as successful, so we spend a fortune on stuff, on shit, that we think will make ...