Get the inside out

I believe it’s a fantastic campaign, well thought out and of course a massively important topic. Helping people who have mental health issues with their money issues or indeed the other way around.

I for one have been affected by money possibly my whole life. My Dad used to regularly say that there was never enough money and if any of the kids wanted to money he used to point to his back and ask if we saw any money growing on it. What makes it worse, my Dad used to work for the Bank of America. He ended up being an AVP (assistant vice president), not badly paid I would have said. Actually we never went without when we were young, although I do remember a very long period of my life when I was wearing 2nd hand clothes and some of them were great.

“Graffiti on an old brick wall reads “until debt tear us apart”” by Alice Pasqual on Unsplash

This didn’t set me up very well for my relationship with money. Basically when I had money, I spent it. When I look back now how much money I wasted, it makes me feel sick.

Only now, in the past 6 months when I have been enlightened by The Minimalists, has my relationship with money started to change.

[embed]https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/lloyds-bank-get-inside-out-adam-eve-ddb/1455976[/embed]

But, when I saw the advert by Lloyds promoting a brilliant campaign highlighting the need for acceptance of mental health and it’s often financial impact, I felt sick when at the end they showed the prancing horse with the slogan, ‘Lloyds, by your side’.

The reason I felt sick is that in the end, although I applaud the campaign, Lloyds did this for their own profit, to show that they care and therefore we should bank with them. In actual fact all my banking is with them, which makes it even worse!

Corporations are in it for the profit Michael, they’re not in it to be nice to their customers or even nice to people with mental health, they only care about their shareholders. Oh blast, what a load of charlatans they all are.

Happy banking!

Michael de Groot

Don’t be Evil

The ‘Don’t be Evil’ motto was coined by Google around 2000 and was dropped by Alphabet in 2015 and replaced by ‘Do the right thing’.

The human brain doesn’t hear the word ‘not’ when used as part of the verb doing. So instead of hearing ‘don’t’ we hear ‘do’.

Don’t believe me? Try it out with a child. I once walked into a party and it was a summer party in the daytime so kids were allowed to attend. One of the kids had a ‘bored moment’ going on.

This young boy was opening and closing the living room door with his full force, making a real noise and potentially damaging the door or maybe the doorframe. His Dad was shouting at him ‘don’t close the door, don’t close the door and he repeated the mantra without success. It was both annoying to the guests and of course the Dad and his son.

So I intervened and simply said; ‘Stop closing the door’.

Guess what? Yes indeed he stopped doing it.

“A smiling Guy Fawkes mask in shadow against a black background” by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

With Google’s motto ‘Don’t be Evil’, of course the internet has been evil and I’m sure there’ve been a lot of ‘evil’ goings on even inside Google.

One such an example is YouTube autoplays, which literally create patterns of addiction in our brains by allowing YouTube (owned by Google) to tell us which video we should be watching next.

And of course because they are queuing up the next video, it will also include those annoying ads, which pre-play and allow to skip or as is often the case these days no option to skip. (YUK!).

YouTube, (Google) prey on our psychology for their own profit, as do many others on the Internet.

Happy browsing!

Michael de Groot

Grayscale

Listening to Tristan Harris recently during a live (recorded) Wisdom 2.0 conference, he recommended that we can do a couple of things to reduce our addiction to our smart phones. If you haven’t seen his TED Talk, you will enjoy it. WARNING: After watching his talk you will seriously change your habits in connection with your technology.

1. Switch off all notifications. By the way I’ve done that for the past couple of years and it’s made a huge difference in my attention and being present in the moment.
2. Switch the colours on your phone to ‘grayscale’. Now this one I didn’t know about and you can find it in your accessibility section. For the iPhone go to general>accessibility>display accommodations>colour filters and there make sure you switch colour filters to on.

I like this hack a lot. Not seeing the colours of those apps they become meaningless in your life and you will switch your attention to the useful apps that you need to use, instead of the mindless apps that you don’t need, like social media apps.

I have to say it looks weird, but I’m getting used to it.

The other tip that worked for me is to remove the Facebook app from my iPhone and iPad. Now I can only access Facebook by going to a browser on my iPad or my Mac. This is a major game changer, I’ve also paused my activity on Facebook altogether.

Happy graying out!

Michael de Groot

[embed]https://youtu.be/nAmhPGnstK8[/embed]

Injustice

It’s in the eye of the beholder right?

Whether it’s religion, politics, money or status in society we all have a perception of the injustice that’s bestowed upon us.

We rarely think of the injustice that’s been bestowed on others, nations or communities.

We have a saying at home;
‘If you believe that others are thinking about you, think again’.

We do have to only think of ourselves, nobody will spend the time thinking about us. Even if we perform charity work we are meeting a need inside of ourselves. It’s called survival. We do things to survive the hardships we experience, whether physical or emotional, we experience them as some sort of injustice by society.

“Black and white photograph of the back view of street protesters in a rally in Washington.” by Jerry Kiesewetter on Unsplash

And they say we are the creators of our own reality, we create our reality one thought at a time.

If that’s the case why do we believe there’s an injustice being bestowed upon us? It could be your family, your employer or the state and I guarantee you that you believe the injustices that exist around you are directed at you.

That very belief, that directed thinking is what holds us back.

Happy thinking!

Michael de Groot

Pause

I’m not being anti-social, maybe just anti-Facebook.
I’ve decided to put Facebook on pause for a while. How long? I have no idea. I had already removed the app from my mobile devices and I can truly say I haven’t missed it.

I’m not rage quitting or culling my connections. I value all of them hugely and hope they will continue to benefit from their activities on Facebook. I know some of them have managed to be hugely successful as a result, long may it continue.

My decision to put things on pause here have not been decided overnight, I reflected on it for a quite a while. Basically I no longer enjoy the experience here and by learning more about Facebook’s practices to program us has meant that I don’t value the organisation and what they stand for.

Therefore instead of moaning about it, I prefer to move away from them for a while. My views may change, who knows, for now though, cheerio to my Facebook connections and some, maybe half a dozen, friends.

You can catch me on LinkedIn and Medium for any meaningful conversations.

Happy Facebooking!

Michael de Groot

Greed

After watching ‘Saving Capitalism’ https://www.netflix.com/title/80127558 with Robert Reich, former US secretary of labor (1993–1997) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich, I realised a number of things.

1. The big US corporates are as corrupt as you can possibly imagine. They buy legislation through their donations to politicians. And it’s all been made legal by the way.
2. We fund this. Yes you and me, we are the ones that are buying the produce made by these big global corporates and from their massive profits they buy favours (favors) from the US political system.
3. Simple then, stop buying from them. I know, I know, we have to buy our fuel, our utilities, our food, (our healthcare in the case of the US) and our homes, but even then we also know we are paying over the odds, we are over-consuming all the time. Just start cutting back, REDUCE!

Michael de Groot

There’s no point protesting as nobody really ever wins via that route, the only voice they will hear is when you hit them where it hurts. Their profits, the bonuses, the big pay-packets and stop them from being able to buy those favours from Washington, London and maybe every major city in the world.

We actually have the biggest voice and we are not using it.

Happy protesting!

Michael de Groot

50%

A not so common known fact is that 50% of the population will not agree with you. This doesn’t always sit comfortably with most of us. We believe of course that we are right and everyone else is wrong.

You only need to look at the evidence of the US presidential election and the Brexit referendum. Both of those events were miss judged by the media and politicians alike. The polls gave us the wrong data and nobody expected the results.

Pretty much the votes were 50/50.

Now take this into your own life, your work and community and you will experience the same even in your own family.

In my family there are 4 kids, now of course adults. 2 of them don’t agree with the other 2 and as a consequence don’t speak to each other. When my parents were alive you could split the family unit exactly into 2. 50% of the unit were predisposed to be mostly negative and 50% were predisposed to be mostly positive.

If you are regularly commenting on Social Media, you will definitely have 50% of your readers that will disagree with you, unless they know you very well, in which case they probably keep quiet.

Recently I made a comment on LinkedIn on a post by one of my connections. I noticed a few days later they had disconnected from me. Interesting.

Everyone has an opinion, just because you think you are right, it doesn’t make the other person wrong.

Happy judging!

Michael de Groot

Internet Crooks

I’ve received several calls over the years from a foreign country trying to get me to allow them to log in to my computer. Of course I know what they are trying to do, I’m not stupid but I also know that many people who are not aware have had thousands of pounds or dollars stolen from them.

I had such a call again on 14th February, 2018. We had a bit of warning, the number had been trying to get hold of us for days, but every time we answered we stayed quiet and the call rang off automatically. This time I said hello and as these auto callers respond to voice it connected me to an agent (scammer), who started their scam routine.

Over the years I’ve recorded the calls and shared them on the web and even with the right authorities. I also recorded this latest call and the scam was different, they have invented a new approach. The sound quality was terrible, so I’ve had to increase the volume, which may sound a bit scratchy on your devices. Anyway be warned they may contact you or a family member, so please warn them, send them the video/audio for them to hear what their scam is.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDDVLGO-T-I[/embed]

Happy crook catching.

Michael de Groot

Reduce

Reduce is my word for 2018. Whether it’s reducing my time on social, reducing my spending habits or reducing the stuff that I own.

In September 2017, my dear friend Petros Kkolas suggested I watch a documentary on Netflix, titled ‘Minimalism’.

I was hooked, converted, a believer and probably recognised that I’ve always been a minimalist all my life and now I knew for sure.

Doesn’t mean that I behaved like one throughout my life, oh no! I was a shopaholic for most of my life, especially via the internet and of course the seductress Amazon. It’s interesting actually, I asked them if I could see my total spend from when I first started buying from Amazon and guess what? They can’t supply that figure, they said you have to go through each year on your profile and add it up manually.

Not many folks will do that right?!

Well I did and you can see the chart below. Total spend for my lifetime with Amazon is £5555.27. Now you would have thought that my spend in 2017 would be less compared to previous years because I had found Minimalism (September 2017) and yet it is higher compared to the previous 9 years. Oops!

Michael de Groot’s Amazon Spend

Well that was mainly due to some technology spend and it included a scanner, which will assist me in reducing my paperwork by scanning most of it and saving it to the cloud.

If I discount the scanner and some microphone kit for making videos on my smartphone, the spend for 2017 would have amounted to just £74.00, 2nd lowest in the past 9 years.

Anyway on target to beat that during 2018.

Happy reducing!

Michael de Groot

Notifications

For a number of years now, I don’t receive any app notifications on my phone, none. The only exception is the text message app and of course the phone when it rings. Just like we had in the old days, when we didn’t have a smartphone.

So what, you might be thinking?

Well, those fabulous tech people have been so clever in conditioning our brain that are neurons have literally been hardwired to ensure that we pick up our phone at least 150 times per day to check it. Checking for emails, messages, social media activity, likes, comments and shares.

Every time we check we’re looking for dopamine hits, the same hits that a cocaine addict may get.

You are literally addicted to your smartphone, except it’s not so smart. By being addicted you believe that you have less time in your life, that you’re always busy and when you don’t have your phone with you, you feel like you have lost something. The feelings are very very real.

As I’m writing this on my iPad, my phone is upstairs in my office on charge and I have no desire to have it with me and I’m not missing it. Sure the same apps are on my iPad and because I don’t receive any notifications here either there is no desire for me to even look.

I have conditioned my brain to stop looking any longer. I may look when I’m on my desktop if I even remember. It’s a very liberating feeling.

Happy recovery!

Michael de Groot

Crooks

Just been watching the Netflix mini-series ‘Dirty Money’. Wow I was astounded how many so called legal crooks steal money from us.

Of course most of it covers companies in the USA, but Britain didn’t come off scot-free with the HSBC money laundering on behalf of Mexican drug cartels and terrorist organisations. They only got a $2 billion fine and nobody went to jail, despite the fact that thousands of innocent people died, either by being killed or died because of drugs.

Each episode basically told the same story, which is our greed for money.

Photo by Pepi Stojanovski on Unsplash

Millions and Billions of dollars are changing hands on this planet illegally and most of us are the victims. In essence if we are kept poor and needy, sick and in fear, we won’t make any noise. This is exactly where governments want us.

So ensure that companies always need to strive for growth, which means they have to continue to sell to us consumers, who need to keep buying and stay in debt. That way they can continue to exercise control over us.

Conspiracy theory? Oh yes indeed…

Happy buying!

Michael de Groot

AI

So where am I seeing AI in my day to day dealings on the web?

Well I use LinkedIn and here is why I have experienced the most. Actually LinkedIn promised us a very long time ago that they would be introducing AI (Artificial Intelligence) in their messaging system. It’s only just being put into practice now at the kind of level I had anticipated at the start.

Obviously they needed to work on this for a while. I’m noticing that they are quite accurately suggesting ‘one tap’ responses to messages in my inbox. At first they used to have just very limited suggested responses, like ‘thanks’ and now the suggested responses are becoming far more sophisticated.

The other place where I’ve noticed AI is Facebook. Not in their messenger but in the fact that I’ve been less active there and they’ve started emailing me with a trick email, suggesting that I had been trying to log-in to their platform and they noticed ai was having problems, supplying me with a one click button to log back in.

They obviously noticed that I had not been active and they need to uphold their active users figure, so giving me a one-button login on my email means that when I click that, I get straight back in and boom I’m included in the active users figure for that day/week/month.

So now all my excitement about AI has just been delivered a terrible blow.

Keep intelligent!

Michael de Groot

Awards

It’s that time of year when the award ceremonies are taking place in the world of celebrities. The Baftas, The Grammys, The Oscars etc.

But we also have awards closer to home. Business awards, County awards, Industry awards in every single industry sector and of course then there are personal awards, awards given out by The Queen.

And really what does it actually all mean?

Does your popularity rise?

Do you earn more money?

Are you able to get a table faster at your favourite restaurant?

Will you be admired by your peers, who may aspire to be like you instead of themselves?

And what about the losers? The ones that were nominated to keep the suspense alive, but missed out on the night. What about them? Are they any less worthy?

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

I have been invited to many award ceremonies in Birmingham, I’ve even been given free tickets and apart from when something genuinely came up, I have avoided them all. I was even nominated for one and still didn’t go.

I feel that it creates a divide in society, it shows us that some in society are actually better than you, have achieved more than you. It doesn’t mean that the awarded individual or organisation is bad, of course they are not, but do they really need the award to make them feel better about themselves?

Is it proof that they are more worthy of recognition compared to the ones who were nominated but lost out? We never remember those that were nominated and still some of those will include this statistic on their profiles, their websites and in their bios.

‘Nominated for blogger of the year’.

Nominated means you lost, so why even promote it! Well, you were in the running so that’s also special. It means your peers who were never in the running are the real losers. They might as well pack up and go home, because they never stood a chance anyway.

Happy awarding!

Michael de Groot

Discussion

I often hear people at networking events suggest that there’s no substitute for having a proper discussion.

So my question today is, why are we having so many micro-moments on social media that are not proper discussions at all, they are just sound bites, that interrupt people’s thinking and their ability to focus on the very topic you want them to focus on.

We are just interested in either liking and moving on or we may if we know the person well, feel compelled to write something that has flown into our brain in response to a quote, a video message, an article, a controversial point or comment.

We’re not entering into any discussion at all actually, we may feel as if our readers are, but they rarely are discussing our message.

They just haven’t got the time. We’re all too busy writing our own stuff instead of discussing other people’s stuff.

So what about a new platform, which is just audio only. The article is audio and the responses are audio too. I think Medium might be moving in that direction actually. They already have audio articles, so the natural extension of that would be audio responses? Well for me it would be and I believe it would add more value to the discussion and the ability to hear people’s views by hearing their voices is more powerful right?

Happy discussing.

Michael de Groot

Scam

The latest algorithm scam is running riot on Facebook at the moment.

If you are asking your connections to like or comment on your post, you are obviously ensuring that they will see more of your posts in their newsfeed. The more you engage with someone’s content the more, in theory, content of theirs you will see.

I appreciate you know and understand this, so when you are posting messages like the one below, you are a scammer. You are trying to dupe your connections in believing that more of their content will be visible to you. That’s a massive untruth!

Latest Facebook scam text:

So this would explain why I now rarely see posts from so many close buddies… Not that I don’t totally love ‘the same 25 people (I do see) over and over,’ but I miss seeing everyone else too… So please please please can I ask you to do as the message below suggests (which I’ve just copied and pasted), so then hopefully we can see more of each other and I will remain smiley 😬💗.

Some wonder why our news feed seems so different recently: we only see posts from the same 25 people over and over. We only see 10 % at all. Yes, Facebook has a new algorithm! So, I’m asking you, could you do me a quick favour? If you read this post, leave me a quick “hi”, like, leave a comment, so more friends will be posted in my news feed. Otherwise Facebook chooses who I see and I don’t need FB to choose my friends! Don’t hesitate to copy and paste this message on your wall so you can have more interaction with your friends too! Please do this I want to see what you’re up to!

Either you are being duped by your connections, following their actions like a sheep 🐑 or you are scamming on purpose, which is it going to be?

Stop scamming!

Michael de Groot

Myself

More and more I am realising that my only focus should be on myself. When I focus on others, whether it’s judging them, observing them, wanting them to change, I go backwards. I go backwards in my goals, in my health and my general wellbeing.

It really is not difficult to focus on just yourself. I am not talking here about being selfish, more about noticing what you’re doing, what you’re thinking and how you’re showing up for yourself.

I know it is an overused analogy, but it’s the easiest one to relate to. If there’s an emergency on an airplane and you’re with a young child, who should you place the oxygen mask on first? Yourself, correct!

Well, when we look after ourselves first, we will be so much better placed to look after our family, our friends and colleagues.

I know the answers, I’ve known them for over 14 years, but it’s harder to tell yourself, so whilst being treated by an accupuncturist for some eczema on my lower legs that have been there for nearly 12 months, she shared with me some wisdom that I already knew but I wasn’t able to hear myself speak. It’s as if the brain doesn’t process it unless you hear someone tell you what needs to be done.

I believe I now know what I need to do, it’s not difficult I have done it before.

Happy caring!

Michael de Groot

Over-egging

Over-egging means trying too hard to improve something and thereby spoiling it. The meaning has been derived from over-egging the pudding. Trying to improve the pudding by using too many eggs I guess?

It also means embellishing or exaggerating.

For me this is the meaning that I understand it to be, especially the embellishing part.

We all know that we are guilty of doing this, whether it is on CV’s (Resumés) or on our LinkedIn profiles. #OMG, I see so many LinkedIn profiles these days that are so obviously over-egged.

I just wonder why? Are we also desperate for approval, fear of not being accepted, we are trying to come across as more experienced, more established, more impressive compared to our neighbours on LinkedIn? It looks so obvious, I’m so surprised folks do not recognise this phenomena in themselves.

You know if they taught this stuff in schools, maybe we would have better looking profiles on LinkedIn, instead of all those lookalike profiles that sound the same and have no distinctive features whatsoever.

It could be of course that most of us are suffering from that good old ‘limiting beliefs syndrome’, something that I am noticing in my network more and more. Our parents and teachers do have a lot to answer for.

Happy over-egging!

Michael de Groot

Big Brother

Another celebrity version of reality show Big Brother, here in the UK, has finished. Phew, I’m glad that’s over. I always wonder how I would fair being locked up in a house for a month with complete strangers who would eventually get on my nerves.

I guess it’s no different to working with your colleagues, who are at the end of the day complete strangers and usually when you work in an office together you have to find a way to get on.

They say you spend more time with your work colleagues then you do with your family, that is if you work in an office and not from home of course.

But very few companies invest in getting strangers who are thrown together to perform well together.

I was part of a team building exercise, doing some freelancing. All I had to do was facilitate some in-door team building games.

Within seconds I would witness how participants would forget about all their inhibitions and start accusing colleagues for not playing the game correctly. When the going gets tough we return to type and think of our own survival.

Whether it’s Big Brother or working in teams, we can all be a little more considerate of working with and interacting with others who are not family.

Happy interacting!

Michael de Groot

Facebook

So Facebook have changed their algorithm again and the world is up in arms. Regular users are raising their arms in celebration and those with business pages are raising their arms in anger.

All of us who have business pages were promised a free business page to promote our business to followers for free.

And then things slowly changed for the worst.

Slowly our business posts stopped appearing on our followers newsfeeds. But all the trainers out there suggested that as followers rarely will go back to the business page, we must keep active and post at least once per day.

What a crock of s..t, that turned out to be.

My motto with Social Media is ‘expect the unexpected’, the fake news debate has given Facebook the best excuse ever.

Right, they said, let’s reduce the amount of business page posts to newsfeeds in case it contains fake news and that way we can tell owners of business pages that the only way they can have visibility is to pay for our bargain basement adverts.

Let’s change the forecast for Facebook ad revenue by 2020, which was $60 billion, just mobile ads by the way, to $90 billion.

The only winner for this change of algorithm is Facebook.

DUH, who else did you think was going to benefit, you?

Happy Facebooking!

Michael de Groot

Human Rights

I am not sure we all really know what’s contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I don’t remember being taught this at school, do you?

And as a human walking on this planet, I should know right? It should be part of my education to understand this declaration and know what my rights are, indeed the rights of my fellow human being too.

In fact I believe it is fundamentally the most important document we should all have in our possession and we don’t!

How can this be correct? Is it only the domain of lawyers, judges and maybe governments who should understand this?

I would suggest that governments do not. I never hear anyone speaking about it, our locally elected member of parliament doesn’t speak about it, surely anyone in government should take an oath to say that they will abide by it?

You can download it here.
http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Read it, understand it, know your rights, after all you are human.

Here’s a shortened version by Amnesty International.

Know your rights!

Michael de Groot