115: Building Systems for Winning at Work with Geoff Blades

Pete Mockaitis
Geoff, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Geoff Blades
Pete, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you have a particularly interesting background story, which we could probably talk about for maybe a couple of hours, but if could you give us the couple minutes version of the tale of your working at Kentucky Fried Chicken and went on to be a Vice President at Goldman Sachs. How did all that happen?

Geoff Blades
It’s a great question, and that is a couple hour conversation. The real short story is that I grew up very working class, or working-poor in Australia, and at a very early age my parents made it clear to me that if I wanted to live a better life – if I wanted to get my hair cut other than by my mother’s friend putting a bowl on my head – that I needed to earn my own money. And so that started very young for me, at kind of age 10 or what-not with paper rounds before and after school, and that led me to the heart of my career at Kentucky Fried Chicken when I was in high school and at university as well.
And coming out of that, Pete, were a lot of lessons for me, and one of which – the predominant one – was at some point, call it at age 16, I had this massive thundering realization that this was the time, that I was in the second last year of my high school, and that if I worked hard in those years, if I got an education, I could fundamentally transform my life. But if I kept selling my time by the hour working at KFC, my life would always be limited.
And that realization struck me so greatly, that at that point basically I shut down nearly everything else in my life other than school, and I dedicated myself to getting the best grades that I could from one of the worst public schools in my state. I topped the school – that led me to the business course that I wanted, and I spent 4 years there, again, just obsessed with getting the best results I could, and that led me to the only job that Goldman Sachs offered in Australia in my year. And so if there’s a short story, how did I rise from that? Working all the time, man. Working all the time. And studying all the time – I made it my obsession.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. And I guess it really sounds like it starts with that focus. It’s like you took a look around, got the lay of the land, realized this is the pathway, and therefore you were able to just pour yourself into it, full steam ahead.

Geoff Blades
Absolutely. That’s absolutely right. It was just an absolute knowing that if I got good grades in school, my life could only get better. And if I didn’t, I might be working at KFC for the rest of my life, or working in a factory. And the greatest motivators in our lives are fear. We like to think we’re motivated by pleasure, but we’re not. We’re mostly motivated away from pain. And that struck this massive amount of focus and motivation in me. Which by the way, then it kind of created something else, which is, it gave me this pool of, “Wow, I can really be good at this”, and I just wanted to do the best that I could. And that would always be my mantra, even at KFC, which is, “Hey, if I just do the best job that I can, then everything will work out the best that it can be.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. And so then you got to Goldman Sachs and then you rose, it seems, pretty quickly to having a VP spot. Was it the same sort of principles at work there?

Geoff Blades
Absolutely. Up until that point in my life, you could characterize my approach to success as “Put your head down and work hard.” I mean that’s the typical mantra you still hear in the workplace: “Put your head down and work hard.” The other phrase I used to use back then is “Success is a narrow focus and hard work.” Choose your focus, narrow what you’re focused on, and literally just pour all of yourself into it.
And Pete, look, back then – in high school, in university, and to a large extent early in my career at Goldman – success was very very simple, which is if I wasn’t working, I was wasting time. And I used that to motivate myself to work all the time. And quite simply, if you want to put a lot more hours into something than other people, then you’re probably going to get better results. But I’m sure where you’re headed, which is, “Okay, that’s true. What’s the ‘but’?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, your “but” is that you were pretty miserable, right? So tell us – how did you come to make that realization, or what were some of the early warning signs?

Geoff Blades
Well, really that is the “but”. And the “but” is broader than that, which is the “but” is I started at Goldman in Australia, I was promoted early, after two years, to an associate. I moved to Menlo Park, California, and it was 1999-2000. I loved Goldman Sachs, I loved the firm. To be very honest with you, working hard and working all the time never bothered me. Even today I still work basically all the time, 7 days a week. It’s just what I define as “work” is what I absolutely love doing.
And in 2000, the Internet bubble burst and Goldman fired half the office. And it was at that point, Pete, that everything changed for me. And it sounds a little strange, but what changed for me was that it no longer mattered in the ways that it used to. See, I was a very idealistic kid – I believed we were all in it together, I believed that this was a really special place where we were kind of all holding hands and going into battle every day.
And when that changed for me, honestly, a lot of my interest from the career fell away. And that was because at that point I just saw it as a job. And the reason that was such a huge shift for me was because when I just saw it as a job, it was no longer a mission. It was no longer this special thing that we were all in together. When I just saw it as a job, I started to look at it like selling time. I started to look at it like I looked at KFC.
And that’s when I drew up that pie chart. One of my famous lines in my book is, “I drew up this pie chart and I looked at that tiny sliver labeled ‘Not work’, and I began to ask what had happened to my life.” If this young kind from working class Melbourne, Australia, had this dream to create my most amazing life – that’s all I ever wanted, was to create my most amazing life – how did I end up 10 years later sitting at Goldman Sachs saying, “What am I doing with my life? What is my life? I work all the time. Is this what I even love? What do I love? What do I want? What truly matters to me?” And it was back then in 2000 that really started all the work that’s become my life today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s powerful pieces there. So, when it comes to this evaluation and these questions, can you share with us, both in your own story and experience and also in your teachings – what are those key questions that get you to the heart of the matter, in terms of what you should be doing?

Geoff Blades
It’s great question, Pete. It’s a really great question, and it’s also a very difficult question to answer. In fact, a notion that I think of as being a false question, and I’ll share with you what I mean by that. Which is that when we find ourselves at these transition points in life, we often ask these big questions. My question was, “What do I want?” And “What do I want?” is such a big question that if you don’t have an answer to it, you’re not going to get to an answer simply by asking the question again.
And in fact I met with a senior Wall Street guy last week who is already retired, spent a few years out of retirement, and he came to me because he said, “What do I want to do next? What really does matter to me? What’s something meaningful that I really want to do?” And the problem with these questions is that we ask ourselves these questions over and over again, and when we don’t have an answer we beat ourselves up for it. And I know that because I did it for kind of 10 years, and that’s how long it took me to really research all this stuff and then ultimately to leave Wall Street.
But for 10 years I asked myself questions like, “What do I want?”, believing that when I got what I wanted that I would somehow feel amazing. Or believing that when I figured out what I wanted, I’d wake up one morning and it would become so obvious to me that I would then be able to just go get it.
The other kind of illusory questions, if you will, are “Why?” I love Simon Sinek’s work, and the questions start with the “Why?” It’s a very very powerful question. Yet, if you can’t answer that question, then it’s not helpful to you. And that’s where we come around to what my work ultimately led to, which is these questions are very good to stimulate new ideas. But they become traps, they get us more stuck if we can’t answer them. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you, yes. So then what is the emerging system or process of getting to the answers?

Geoff Blades
Precisely, you just hit it – it’s a process. Which is convert the question to a process and allow the process to answer the question over time. So for instance, if you come back to that question that haunted me for so many years, Pete – “What do I want? I don’t know what I want. Well, you’ve got to figure it out. Okay, well, what do I want? I don’t know what I want. Well, you’ve got to figure it out.”
And instead of asking that question that you can’t answer, instead – change the question. See, I’ve asked this question for so long now that I just see it as bogus in so many ways: What do you want? In what context? What do you want now, or later? When do you want it? But why do you want it? And why do you want that?
The questions themselves often become bogus. So instead of asking “What do you want?”, instead convert it. If you can’t answer the question, convert it to a process that allows you to answer the question over time. So instead of asking “What do I want?”, ask, “Hey, what’s a process that I can build such that I can answer this question over time?” And when you do that, Pete, now you’re moving.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m very intrigued then. So what are some of the core components of this process?

Geoff Blades
Well, this goes down to a different rabbit hole, and I might pull us out of it in a moment, but ultimately if you think about that, we could brainstorm it together and for all your audience, which is: If you don’t know what you want today, what are some of the ways that you might figure it out? Well, the first thing to do is to start writing it down. So a lot of the time we ask these questions and they just jumble up in our head and we never make progress, yet when you sit down and start writing it down, now you’ve got thoughts that you can restructure, you’ve got ideas that you can start to play with.
The second part of it is, you need a search process. So what becomes your search process? So again, if you don’t know what you want, asking that question doesn’t solve it, so then you want to build a process to source the ideas that lead you to what you want. And the process by the way might be very simple – you might have 20 people that you go sit down with and you go ask them certain questions; now you start to generate new ideas. So before you might’ve been stuck at “What do I want?”; now you’re generating new ideas.
The third step to that process is, you need some form of mechanism to evaluate and assess all of your different options. And of course the last part is to take action and make a decision. But more generally what I’m saying is, take these questions that are too hard to answer and convert them to a process that naturally leads to an answer over time. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you, yes. And so, I guess now I’m thinking a bit about some of the steps here. When you’re writing it down, I guess that sounds like a pretty simple one – I’m just going to make sure I’m capturing it and not letting it float out of my head and get it into a centralized place so I can, as you said, restructure it, play with it, build off of it, and all that. So then when you talk about the search process, that second step there, and it could be a matter of asking 20 people some key questions, I’m wondering what sorts of people and what sorts of questions?

Geoff Blades
So again, I was simplifying it. If you want to get thorough on this, you take the first step and you say, turn it into a document. So just write it down. It’s literally created like you would create a business plan. Your business plan is, “What do I want or what am I going to go do next grade?” This is my living, breathing, document for assessing that question.
Two on that sourcing, the sourcing of opportunities could come in a lot of ways. One thing you might write down is, “I’m going to go to read these sorts of books.” Another thing you might write down is, “I’m going to go start to pick up these different types of hobbies or activities and interact with different types of people.” A third thing you might write down is what you just said, which is a list of people to go talk to.
Who might they be? Some of them might be mentors, people who you have known for a long time; some might be people from school or college; some people might be other people who’ve made career transitions before. And so even though, again, that whole process you just put in a bucket called “sourcing”, and that’s when you’ve got to put on your thinking cap and go figure out if you need to collect new information and reach new ideas, what are all the ways that you might do that?

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. And so then in terms of the evaluating and the assessing, could you give a bit more detail along those points, in terms of… I’m thinking of, when I hear that, criteria and maybe scoring or ranking or sort of “Yes/No” binary pieces, like “These opportunities have to have the following 7 things be true for them.” What are some approaches or angles on that side of things?

Geoff Blades
Absolutely, I’m with you 100%, which is for this sort of process that I’m talking to you about, I custom build these for my clients. And so I don’t have some generic checklist that I suggest people look at. What I suggest is what you just said, which is sit down and figure out what really truly matters to you, and why does it matter to you, and on what basis are you going to make this decision.
See, a lot of the time for instance if you take a very common question for people graduating from college, at least in our type of world, Pete, with our backgrounds, “Should I go into banking or consulting?” Okay, that sounds like a really complicated question if you’re in college, but 3 months after starting either one of those jobs, you know they’re radically different jobs.
And so, it’s the equivalent of saying, “Should I go into investment banking or become a trader?” Well, in college they might sound very similar, but they’re radically different jobs. And so the point that I’m making in that second category of “assess” is don’t look for an approach that’s ready-made for you, but that’s where you do your work. You figure out what does the job actually look like, what do I want, what matters to me, over what time frame, and all of that stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Geoff Blades
Well, what I might do, if you’re cool with it, is I might just kind of pop out of this topic and jump to the bigg er topic. And that bigger topic is the one that your podcast stands for, one that I’m really excited to talk about, which is how do you be awesome at your job. Because this system that we’re talking about, this specific topic, is one application of my work, which is how do you figure out what you want, and how do you get it. The broader system of my work – a system I call a system for doing what you want – is an end-to-end system on being awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m all in, so let’s hear what is that system for doing what you want and being awesome at your job?

Geoff Blades
Well, Pete, I’m so glad that you asked that. The question that I was noodling on by the way before we got on the phone was, expecting to come to this topic, which is: How do you get awesome at your job? You know the way that I thought about it was, flip it the other way: How do you not be awesome at your job? So what does it take to be mediocre at your job?
Well, it takes firstly, having no goals – so it’s just showing up every day, not really caring about where it’s getting you; having no idea how to win – literally just doing what you’re told or doing what other people have done or doing something to the best of your ability but without any reference to what does it actually take to be awesome at this; having no plan to actually get from where you started in your job to when you get to the back end of it – literally just showing up again every day; no skills development – so, you graduate from business school or college, you start your job and then you don’t read anymore books, you don’t develop any real skillfulness, you just keep showing up every day. And look, that’s 99% of careers right there. By the way, that’s the bulk of people at places like Goldman Sachs.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding!

Geoff Blades
No. How many people do you know from Bain who are reading books on personal development?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s a fair number. I would say, The personal development books, I would say it all depends on how broadly versus narrowly you define that term, but I’d say I saw a fair bit happening there at Bain.

Geoff Blades
So, I could tell you that it’s very rare at Goldman Sachs. If you take for instance a very classic book, Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People, don’t you think that everybody in professional services should just nail that book? That they should have it on their desk and become masters at it? They are in people business, so how are you every day getting better at building relationships with people?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think that is a corner stone kind of a book. And it’s funny, that was one of the key things I was going to say about being mediocre at your job. It’s like, don’t bother building any coalitions or alliances or relationships, and just kind of do your thing at your desk and your computer.

Geoff Blades
Absolutely, absolutely. Again, I think of Think and Grow Rich. Why isn’t everybody who’s in… Think about what we’re talking about – we’re talking about high-end professional careers where people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their undergraduate degree, they’d spend potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on their MBA, and then they get into their job and they won’t even spend $10 a month reading a great book that would make them a killer at what they do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Well I’m right on board there with you, in terms of that mindset and digging into that kind of stuff. So I guess I want to hear more about, in terms of… You talked about the dark side – having no plan and no idea how to win, and no skills development. And so, what would you say are some of the key steps for just getting smart? I guess in many ways they seem pretty simple and fundamental, as opposed to they’re some secret tricks, and maybe that’s kind of what you’re laying out for us right here.

Geoff Blades
Well, that’s exactly how I think about it, which is that the secret trick is how do you harness all of this stuff and specifically put it to work every day? You see, because the second way to not be awesome at your job is to read tons of books on personal development and to think that by virtue of reading those books that somehow you’re going to be better at what you do. And what I learned over years and years and years of doing this, was that the only thing that saved me in my process… Pete, I didn’t have any of figured out, man. I didn’t have this figured out. All I knew when I stepped back from my career was I need to find a different answer. So what did I do? I did what I’d done in school – I became a great student, and I literally went and just started reading.
And over the course of 5, 6 years I read whatever, 1,000 and something books. Over the course of 8 years I read thousands of books on this stuff, and I found myself even more stuck. Why? Because I had all this knowledge, I had all this information, but I didn’t have any way that I was specifically putting it to work. And so, a big mistake a lot of people make in the world of personal development is that they go out and they train with people, they learn from people, they read all these books, but they haven’t systematized it.
And so when I came back and reverse-engineered my process, I said if I was to start from scratch, what would I do? I would build a system upfront, and that system would incorporate all of the steps that you need to get what you want. So what are those 5 steps? We talked about the system for doing what you want a lot. What are the 5 steps?
First, you have to get absolutely clear on goals – I call this “define it”. Define your goals, but this is where it gets specific. Don’t define them as an outcome; define them as a process. So for instance, say that you are an associate at Bain and you want to be a partner. Okay, that’s a great goal. But the goal in itself is useless relative to, take that goal, design it and turn it into a process that you put to work every day. So systematize your goal.
So if you take the goal to make partner, the goal isn’t to make partner; the goal is to show up tomorrow and put in the work that keeps validating you as a partner. So the goal itself is only helpful if you can then take action on it every day. So that’s the first step.
The second step I call “getting it”. And this is the real crux I think of when you say “Be awesome at your career”. What’s the real crux of that to me is getting it. In every job they say, “That person gets it”, or, “That person doesn’t get it.” But what does it actually mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is a powerful question right there. I guess it varies firm by firm or office by office and profession to profession. But I’m thinking generally it means that they fundamentally understand what matters, what doesn’t matter, and they do sensible things to advance what matters.

Geoff Blades
Perfect, perfect. I just call, “Getting it is the intelligence inside the system.” So the system – the first step, define the goals. “Getting it” says what truly matters to winning at this. What truly matters to winning at basketball? What truly matters?

Pete Mockaitis
Putting a ball through a hoop more times than the other guy.

Geoff Blades
Right. And so if you were to break that down and model it, what would you say wins? Well, if you were the best dribbler in the world, you might be able to out-dribble everybody in the world, but you can’t shoot. Right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Geoff Blades
So what is “getting it” in basketball? Well, “getting it” better include being able to put the ball through the hoop. I’ll give you an example at Goldman, and we talked about it a little bit earlier in a different context, which is that when I first started at Goldman, I thought it was a deal business. I thought the job was to do transactions; I thought our job was to be investment bankers and do deals. That’s a great mindset when you’re a junior person, and if you become a senior person with that same mindset you won’t last very long, you’ll be fired very quickly. Why? Because “getting it” as a senior person in investment banking isn’t doing deals. It’s selling deals.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Geoff Blades
If you’re not driving revenue for the firm, then you’re no value to the firm. By the way, I’ve worked with many of these people, and that’s why they fail at the senior end. They fail because most people fail at the top. And they fail because they still think their job is to do deals. No, it’s not. Their job is to sell deals. If they’re not driving revenue, no one wants to pay them. It’s that simple.
And so what is “getting it” in investment banking – it’s recognizing… You might think that the skill set is being great at doing a merger deal, but the truth of it is that you’ll be a much more successful senior person if you truly get that your job is to sell business. So become an expert at selling. So “getting it” is to say, “Actually, wow, now I see it. The job here is to sell business. So I might be the best M&A banker in the world, and if I become an expert at selling – now I really get the profession.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. I’m with you. And this reminds me also – I had a friend who was a lawyer and he really loved the law and law school. And so, he got some early coaching in his career because he was all about crafting the most exceptional, beautiful, pristine motions and briefs and such. And they quickly told him, “Hey, this doesn’t really matter. In fact the client will be upset with you if you spend extra billable hours creating a masterpiece of a motion when a basic hack-together thing will get the job done for fewer hours than he’s paying for.”

Geoff Blades
Perfect. And the sad thing for most of us is that no one ever gives a set advice. Like another more real world example is a buddy of mine who’s a photographer in LA, and he was a fashion photographer when the industry was really hot, and his business was great. But when the business changed and it got much harder for him, he found himself really stuck, and he was really stuck because his craft was photography, but his business is the sale of photography services. So “getting it” in his business isn’t, “Be a great photographer.” “Getting it” in his business is, “Being a great photographer is a given. You better be a great photographer. But to build a great business, you better be great at selling it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, so we got the first two. And what’s the third step?

Geoff Blades
Well, that’s the second step of “getting it”, and what I was going to do with you, if you want, is to just chunk down to a different level and say, “Okay, so that’s all great in theory, but how do you figure this out for yourself?” So if you’re sitting at Bain, if you’re sitting at Goldman Sachs, if you’re sitting at a law firm, what is “getting it” and how do I figure that out? So what are some steps to figuring out how you actually become awesome at your job?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Geoff Blades
Do you want me to cover those real quick?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think it’s great and I guess the first thing that comes to mind is just pay attention – who is getting promoted, who do people look up to, admire, nod their head and listen to, and that’s someone who gets it. And then get inside their head.

Geoff Blades
Boom! You hit on it. So, for instance, in my book I lay out basically three big chunks, and these take up 100 pages. And that actually is the first category, which I just call “role models”. So if you want to know how to win in law, if you want to know how to win in tennis, if you want to know how to win in photography – go look at someone who’s winning at it, and model what they do. This is very basic stuff in my world – I call it “modeling”.
And you can do it at a very deep level, in terms of human behavior. But at a very high level in your career, it doesn’t take more than 10 minutes to look around your office and figure out who’s winning and who’s not. And then it doesn’t take more than an hour to then write down what does that person do that the other people don’t do?
So that’s the first step – role model – figure out what actually leads people to be awesome at your job. The first step I call “role models”; the second step I call “modeling your role”. And the reason it’s framed differently is because modeling your role means going deep into your job. So if we take a job as an analyst at an investment bank, if you model that role and say, “What does it take to really win as an analyst at an investment bank?” Are you ready for it, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m ready.

Geoff Blades
Be good at Excel.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Geoff Blades
And so, if you model the role and say, “What does it really take to win at it?” – well, be excellent and fast and accurate in Excel. Be really good at producing books, have a great attitude. When you model that role and you look around at other people in the same role, you don’t need to find great role models. You just need to figure out what actually wins in that role. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, got it.

Geoff Blades
The third is to understand the principles that lead you to win in your career. And the principles are always the highest-level ideas that generalize into everything else. And there are 5 principles that I break down in my book Do What You Want, that can be generalized to all professional careers. And by the way, we could all come up with different ones, but these are one I’ve seen over and over and over again. And these are the principles, meaning these aren’t, “Hey, go do these five specific things.” No, these are nail the principle and filter them into everything you do.
So the first principle is performance. You want to be awesome at your job – you’ve got to be a top performer. That seems to go without saying. But it doesn’t go without saying because most people aren’t top performers. So set that as the principle – what are the things that top performers do?
The second is process – become a master at process. No matter what it is that you do, it’s always about getting something from one end to another. So become excellent at knowing what holds you up in process, where do you get stuck, where do you procrastinate, where do you get something to a point and then you don’t want to finish it? Become a master process.
The third is people. Again, we talked about skills and people skills, which for the most part these are all people businesses. So become excellent with people. Not just good, and not just pretty good. Don’t just read Dale Carnegie’s book, but literally take the principles, put them on your desk and practice them every single day.
The fourth I call “control your destiny”. In any of these jobs if you don’t control your faith, if you don’t assert yourself, someone else will assert you, and it’s probably not going to end well for you. That’s just a simple fact in these tough careers; these are hard careers to win at. And the people who lead, the people who take control of their own destiny are far more likely to succeed.
And then the fifth is about feedback. And I saw some stuff actually from you that I thought was really cool on accountability. Feedback – how do you get really good at requesting feedback, at giving feedback, at responding to feedback? How do you just keep using it to get better and better?
And I think of those as the 5 principles. So if you think of those 3 steps, you’ve got your role models – who’s winning at this, who’s awesome at this that I can replicate, that I can emulate? How do I model my role so I know specifically how to be excellent at this job? Third, what are the principles that lead me to be awesome?
And then finally, Pete – this is where the rubber hits the road, and this is where it gets tricky – is you have to take all of that and build it into your own strategy, so that every day that you wake up and you go to work, you know your strategy for winning. It’s not what that other guy does, who’s really awesome at his job. He’s a different person. It’s what do you specifically do to be really awesome at your job?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is so good. I guess I’m thinking this stuff seems so good and so clear and so spot-on, it seems like yes, of course, we should all be doing that. And yet, we’re not. What would you say are some of the key hold-ups? I guess one of them is just about the clarity, in terms of just moving past the, “Do this, do that, do this, do that” noise of your environment and focusing in on these critical things that make the difference. But what would you say might be some other roadblocks or hindrances or reasons why every motivated employee isn’t digging in and doing this right now?

Geoff Blades
I’ll give you the number one reason; it’s not politically correct though.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, intriguing.

Geoff Blades
People have low standards, man. They have low standards – it’s that simple. Look, if you’re in a people business and you haven’t dedicated yourself to becoming excellent with people, then you’ve got low standards. If your job is to sell business on behalf of the firm, but you don’t even know that there’s a world of selling out there, that there are thousands of books on selling, that there are specific skills to selling, like agreement frames and conditional closes – if you don’t even know that, let alone you haven’t mastered that, then you’ve just got low standards.
And to be perfectly honest with you, I think that this comes about because of the way our education system works. Remember our education system has very little to do with become excellent and has everything to do with doing what you’re told. And so if no one’s telling you to become excellent at modeling your role and excellent at winning and excellent and being your best – if no one’s telling you to do that, no one’s every guided us there.
And so we live in a society that lives by very low standards. And if I give you a metaphor, which is think about sports that you like to watch. Say you’re really into basketball. After the game you’re going to sit there and assess the performance of your favorite players. You might say, “Well, he had a really crappy game, and he had a great game.” And the reality is to those athletes, that’s their job. Every day they’re showing up and they’re being assessed on whether they’re putting in their best, whether they’re delivering their best, whether they perform to the level that people are happy with them.
Man, imagine that everyone else assessed everyone else in their job every day. Imagine you’re assessed like a professional athlete on a basketball court, where it’s like, “Well, actually your game was about a 3 out of 10 today.” And to be very honest with you, I think most people’s games are probably about a 3 out of 10 most days.

Pete Mockaitis
I love what you’re saying and it’s really resonating talking about feedback. One of my best managers ever at Bain – his name is Blair – and whenever we took the taxi back from the airport, we would do exactly that. Blair would say, “Hey, here’s where I thought you did a great job this week. This meeting you made a lot of sense, those slides were really clear. That was a great idea, nobody else had it. Good work. And here’s where you could be improved. You seemed kind of nervous here; this didn’t instill a lot of confidence in that meeting.” And it was awesome; week after week I was getting better, and I knew that he genuinely cared about my growth and development.

Geoff Blades
That’s right. I think you hit on, by the way, the second point, which is, I think that sadly most people don’t care about people’s growth and development. They don’t. We keep saying these “apprenticeship business”; they’re not anymore. A lot of people don’t care about grooming people to work for them. They see people as a resource on their team. I’m not a resource; I’m a person. And shouldn’t you want to groom that person in the way that you wish you’d been groomed?
Again though, there’s a combination of all these things that quite simply leads to low level of performance. And to be honest with you, that’s what I believe leads to a lot of misery in the workplace. Most people are bored out of their brain. They’re bored because they’re not growing, they’re not challenged, they’re just going through the motions every day. And what you said about your example with Blair, I think it’s perfect actually to finish off the three final steps of the system.
The third step is “plan it”. So the first step – define what you want. Let’s just take your example. Let’s just use you at Bain for instance, Pete, which is you want to win, you want to be great at Bain, you want to keep being promoted – great.
The second step – getting it. Okay, I’m going to model Blair, I’m going to model all these people, I’m going to get all the feedback, I’m going to figure out how to be really great at this.
The third step – build a plan. Again, all my folks on Wall Street – hedge funds, private equity, investment banking, consultants are the same – they spend their entire lives walking into businesses, assessing other people’s businesses. Okay, so if your business is your career, let’s assess your career – where’s your plan for your career? Oh, you don’t have one? Wait, so you walk into a company and you say, “Where is your 30-day plan? What’s your revenue estimates for the year? Break down all your numbers in these millions of different ways. Okay, great. So where is your plan for your career? Where are you going to be 2 years from now? What’s your path to getting there? What are the specific things that you’re going to focus on to help you get there?
‘Cause you said it before – Blair gives you that feedback, but what matters most in having a system… This is why my approach is a system. What matters most in having a system of continuous improvement is not that he gives you the feedback; it’s then that you take that feedback and you integrate it into everything you do from that point forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Geoff, this is so good. I feel like this is just tough, straight talk that people don’t hear enough of, and it’s very appreciated and refreshing, so thank you for bringing it here.

Geoff Blades
Pete, seriously my book, the cover has a very… James put a quote on it, which I’m very thankful to James for. But the tagline of my book’s simple: Do What You Want: A Career Guide for Professionals Serious About Winning. Look, my work is for serious people. It’s not for the average person who wants to get at job at Morgan Stanley and just show up every day.
Look, that person must’ve been exceptional to have gotten the job. They must’ve gotten into a great school, they must’ve gotten great grades, they must’ve been really great to get the job. But then for most people it just goes downhill from there. They’re not serious about being their best, they’re not investing in themselves.
So third step is “plan it”, the fourth step is “execute it”. Become excellent at executing your plan. The fifth step, Pete, we’ve been talking about on and off. The fifth step is “getting skills”. And that’s where you develop for yourself a very specific plan of skills development. If you want to win more, get better.
I wrote a book on Donald Trump, which got me into some trouble. But the reason I wrote a book on Donald Trump was very simple. I’m not into politics, I’m not into Trump. I saw a guy who had better skills annihilate his entire competition, annihilate them with skills. And that’s the final step in my system.
The 5 steps: define what you want, get very clear at getting it, get very clear on what it takes to win, 3 – build a plan to win, 4 – execute it every day, 5 – become really serious about building the skills you need to win.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Well Geoff, this is so good. Can we shift gears and hear right quick some of your favorite things?

Geoff Blades
Yeah, you bet. Hit me.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Could you start us off with a favorite quote?

Geoff Blades
“Do not go where the path may lead, go where there is no path, and leave a trail.” And I’ll be honest with you, this has sat on a compass on my desk for about 15 years, and it’s a quote by Emerson. And when I stepped back from my career I thought I’d done everything that I possibly could to land at Goldman Sachs, and I’d done everything right. I’d gotten from working at air conditioner factories in the hot summertime making air conditioners to sitting at Goldman Sachs. And that path had only led me to that point, so I needed to find a new trail.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a piece of research?

Geoff Blades
Have you ever read the study called The Mundanity of Excellence?

Pete Mockaitis
I have not at all.

Geoff Blades
I was a study, I want to say in the ’70s or ’80s, and the author went and spent 18 months with professional swimmers – people coming up in swimming to ultimately become Olympic-level swimmers. And the piece that he wrote after that – The Mundanity of Excellence – to me is the definitive guide on being excellent. What does it say? Continuous improvement. The reason it’s called Mundanity of Excellence is because excellence should be boring, because excellence isn’t new and fun every day. Excellence is every single day you choose to get better. Every single day you just do what you did yesterday, but better. And if you can focus on that, to me – man, what can’t you succeed at in life?

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Geoff Blades
Think and Grow Rich.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And how about a favorite tool, whether that’s a product or service or app or thought framework?

Geoff Blades
You don’t want to hear this, but I’m going to give it to you anyway. Hypnosis.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding!

Geoff Blades
Like I said, I’m deep into hypnosis, because all I do is change people, right? My life is personal change and influence, and hypnosis is by far from now 17 years of research, I have not come across a better tool for getting what you want than learning to reprogram the way you think. And hypnosis is the tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. You are such a fresh voice. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that’s made you more awesome at your job?

Geoff Blades
Man, for me it’s just working out. I work out every day, and I don’t even do it for fitness; I do it for my mind. I do it for all these reasons. I believe that if we want to be at peak at whatever we do, we’ve got to keep driving the mind and the body into peak states. And working out – yeah, it’s about fitness, but it’s also about peak states. It’s about that running state, it’s about transforming the way that you think and feel.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if I could ask – if you’re primarily exercising for your brain and not your body, what’s your approach? Is it more cardio, more strength, more stretching, yoga, breathing? What’s the mix?

Geoff Blades
I like to fight. I box, muay thai, jiu-jitsu, I lift, I run. I do a little bit of everything, I like to mix it up a lot. But to me it is about both, I will say – it is about fitness and health, but it’s about that mental side of it as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular Geoff Blades original quote or articulation of your message that really just seems to resonate and connect with people, such that they’re nodding their heads, they’re taking notes, they’re highlighting in the Kindle version of your book? Any key phrases or quotes come to mind?

Geoff Blades
Yeah. “None of us started in these careers just to have a job.”

Pete Mockaitis
Word.

Geoff Blades
Think about that. How many people come out of college, we’re so eager, we’re so excited, we get these great jobs, these truly great jobs, and 10 years later nearly everybody who went and started there is basically mediocre.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. And what would you say is the best place or means of contacting you or get in touch and learn more about what you’re up to?

Geoff Blades
Best way, Pete, is my website – GeoffBlades.com. G-E-O-F-F Blades, as in razor blades, as my mom used to say.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a favorite challenge or call to action you’d issue forth to folks looking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Geoff Blades
I would come back to that same point that we started with earlier, which is, ask yourself where are your standards? So if you’re watching LeBron James be awesome at his job, what standard are you applying to him?

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well Geoff, this has been a real treat. Thanks so much for what you’re sharing, and best of luck with your coaching and your clients and everything you’re up to.

Geoff Blades
Thanks Pete! Really great to be on your show. Thanks for having me. I’m really just so fired up by the work you do, it’s really cool to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, thank you!

Geoff Blades
Thank you!