Chapter 3
The future is informal

We've already established that the number of careers requiring formal validation can be listed in a short paragraph, so it's worth taking a look at how the informal market is starting to shape our world economically. People with something to offer and a risk-is-good attitude are starting to get noticed and finally gaining respect in our world. Let's take one of the world's most famous living artists — Banksy. For the uninitiated, Banksy is a street artist from the UK. Given that much of Banksy's art has been created illicitly (he has commonly been accused of trespass and vandalism, for example), he has chosen to keep his true identity closely guarded. But ask someone on the street about him and at least they'll know who he is, which probably cannot be said for Gerhard Richter. There's something special about what Banksy does that can offer us clues as to where the world is going. We are quickly moving from a world where the formal hierarchy rules to one where you can pick your own rules.

Surprisingly, Banksy makes the list of the top 100 living artists (based on the total value of works sold), sitting comfortably at number 84 on the list.⁶ Unlike most of his fellow artists, however, Banksy wasn't ‘chosen' or legitimised by anyone as an artist — he picked himself. He didn't rise up through traditional channels of art appreciation. Starting out as a streetwise graffiti artist with something to say, a bit of humour and a rebellious determination, he would come to culture jam one of the most exclusionary businesses of all, showing us that there is more than one path to respect. His tool of choice was a spray can, something anyone can afford, his canvas the concrete walls and buildings of backstreet Bristol. He discovered early that by using stencils he could work much faster when ‘improving' public property. He uses templates of other people's work then mashes them up to create his own provocative interpretations.

Banksy is reinventing an industry that hasn't changed all that much since the Renaissance. He's changed the location, the tools and the rules, and even subverted the idea of the price or value of art. While some of his art has fetched huge sums in secondary markets, a lot of his work is given away for free to the public, wherever the public happens to be.

If you look closely you find parallels between what Banksy does and the way the web has altered our mindset of how to do pretty much anything. Banksy is a model of tomorrow — a self-starting, self-selecting entrepreneur, embracing some basic tools to make something the market values. This isn't just some sideshow either. Melbourne, Australia, where I live, has such a strong culture of graffiti-style street art that we have allocated a number of inner-city laneways where street artists are encouraged to pursue their craft. The cool part is that street art is building its own micro-economy. Something that was once regarded as about as useful as a broken window, a cost to society with no redeeming up side, has turned out to be the opposite. Melbourne's back alleys have become an international tourist destination. Any day of the week you can see scores of tour guides showing visitors the multi-coloured delights that were once bleak brick and concrete walls. The cafés and bars in the district are thriving, and it's not uncommon to see wedding parties using this unique urban backdrop for their photo shoots. The district now challenges the National Gallery of Victoria as the busiest art destination of the city. Previously disenfranchised youth have a calling, and fringe dwellers have found a way to the front line. There's every chance that you too will have non-traditional skills that could become an economic engine for your life.

Discover the entrepreneur within

Looking deep into where things come from can help us understand what is possible. It's too easy for us to assume the people or communities we revere started out with some kind of special talent or unfair advantage that gave them the edge, when often they just bothered to try when we didn't. Today, Silicon Valley is viewed as the epicentre of modern entrepreneurship, and in many ways it feels like a realm beyond the reach of mere mortals. Variously driven by Stanford University alumni, the military industrial complex, venture capital and the birth of the micro-processor, it feels as though the pedigree of its inhabitants, past and present, places it out of our league. While all these factors were and are genuine influences, there's a less discussed factor that drives the entrepreneurial ethic in that economy.

In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, author Fred Turner uncovers a deeper story behind how Silicon Valley emerged as the centre of the digital revolution. Many of the digital denizens who started the first online collectives were born out of the sixties hippie culture, a culture in which sharing and collaborative structures were valued above hierarchical and formal ones. They believed that the tools of the evil cold war institutions could be used for very different, altruistic purposes that would, in effect, subvert the interests of those who actually built much of the technology.

These utopian visionaries also had a deeply ingrained entrepreneurial mindset. Being outsiders without financial backers, they had to ‘bootstrap' their own organisations. Many of them had spent time in communes and on the land where they had embraced the principles of self-sufficiency, cooperatives, mini supply chains, building off the grid, growing organic food, and selling and marketing their own wares. They also had a deep understanding of media and how to generate attention for alternative views; they had meetups and events where they recruited like minds. They were, without realising it, entrepreneurs in training.

Out of this unique confluence of ingredients something completely new would emerge. And while it was decades in the making, the mindset of not accepting the status quo, using emerging tools in new and interesting ways, and enthusiastically launching new projects created the perfect storm whose effects we see today in and around San Francisco. It was much more than the technology — it was the attitude of those who first accessed it.

Stewart Brand first published the iconic counterculture compendium the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, modelling it on his and others' ideas of new collaborative social structures from the commune scene. In 1984 he produced an online version, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (the WELL), which was perhaps the first open-source, available-to-anyone internet forum. It offered a discussion board where people could share information and knowledge in a way the world had never seen. It was, in real terms, the precursor to the hyperlinked World Wide Web. Brand famously declared that the computer was ‘the new LSD' and a ‘tool for transformation'. In a way he was right. We can use it to open our minds to possibilities in unimaginable ways. The connection to knowledge our devices provide offers an unmatched opportunity for anyone wishing to reshape their life — without having to ask anyone for permission. No one ever has had the opportunity we have today to invent our own future, but we need the courage to find the entrepreneur buried deep inside of us.

Self-reliance needs a comeback

‘People have careers; companies have jobs.' A colleague once told me this during my linear corporate years when I was feeling on the outer with my manager at the time. Before this insight I had always had a false idea that we had a career with a company, that the all-powerful organisation held our petty little future in their hands. I finally worked out why many of us worry so much about how we are perceived in the marketplace. It's because the entrepreneurial spirit has been stolen from our hearts. Sometime during the process of becoming structured industrial automatons, we lost the art of self-reliance.

WE ARE BORN NATURAL ENTREPRENEURS WITH A CREATIVE, ARTISTIC AND SALES MINDSET, THEN SCHOOL INVESTS 12 YEARS IN DELIBERATELY ERASING IT.

Before we left the farms and villages to pursue the relative prosperity of factory labour, most of us were independent workers. We were craftspeople, smiths, carpenters, share farmers. We had trades, mostly worked outside of an organisational construct and belonged to workers' guilds. We were independent workers who traded our skills for payment. We didn't draw a wage or a salary; we had customers. I'm not talking about the customers who walk into a retail store, who discover you through search engine optimisation or who you call with the name of a big brand behind you to sell them something they already buy. I'm talking about the real ones you have to win and serve yourself.

When we build up a stock of personal customers, we find our financial survival relies on an additional skill set. We become small business people, micro-preneurs able to turn our hand to much more than any course could teach us. We need to be able to sell direct, manage cash flows, balance the books, manage the supply chain of raw materials, invest time and money in upskilling ourselves, and master new tools as they arrive. When things go sour and business is not doing well, we need to be able to spot it ourselves and react fast. We must be self-reliant from end to end. We'll notice a poor crop yield or a drop-off in the number of customers as it is occurring. A fall in our personal income from the farm or craft shop would inspire us to take action, to change. We manage our own situation pre-emptively to fix things, to fill in skill gaps, to pivot to other sources of income. There is no leave without pay, no redundancy. There's only self-reliance. In the real world, everyone doesn't get a trophy.

Maybe the loss of these skills explains why so many people have such low financial literacy, why their personal finances are a mess. When we add to this the marketing chicanery practised by most financial institutions to trick consumers, it's no wonder we live in such a debt-laden society.

Before the industrial revolution a very small percentage of people were waged or salaried employees. While reliable statistics are difficult to find, some reports suggest a figure as low as 10 per cent. Today the numbers are reversed. In Australia a little over 10 per cent of those undertaking paid employment work for themselves. There are, however, some signs that this trend is starting to turn, with more people seeking out independent income sources again. This could be because people are struggling to find reliable employment, or it could be that new freelance and startup opportunities are being driven by technology. A recent study⁷ found that self-employment is at its highest rate in the UK for the past 40 years, at 15 per cent. For context, the figure reached a low of 8.7 per cent in 1975, when the country was at the peak of its industrial power before low-cost labour markets and Asian manufacturing started to undermine its manufacturing sector. If there was ever a time to shift your focus towards leveraging your own resources and unique skill set, then that time is now. You will be early and ahead of the curve, but for the observant the trend can already be recognised.

The pace of change is super-radical

As we make the shift from being people of the book to people of the screen (you're probably reading this on a screen or listening to it on a device), the pace of change continues to accelerate. I'm not talking about the explosion of technology or computing power; here I'm referring to the liquidity of information. It seems as though everything we even think these days is published almost immediately, exchanged in the marketplace of liquid information. Pixels stream down into our devices, which overnight can change what was true yesterday. Those who want to know about a technical innovation or research finding can do so almost instantly. Our ability to connect means information transfers at the speed of light, and this has another impact.

Being connected means we have access to more cognitive ingredients more quickly. As these ideas are exchanged, every iteration happens faster, and this causes a problem for formal education providers. It is difficult for any syllabus in a structured environment simply to keep up. To be truly informed, we have to seek out the informal. We have to be at the meetups where those inventing the future hang out. We have to be curious enough about the work we choose to seek out those reshaping it. We have to look to the fringe. But more importantly, we need to be curious enough to explore seemingly unrelated pieces of information from divergent spaces. The spaces we care about, which may at first seem unrelated, can now be put together in new and interesting ways. Our unique experience and perspective on life will create our own personal economic advantage.

No one has the unique set of collective experiences you have, and the way you bring those to the market is where the gold lies. In a digital world, we all engage with the same factors of production, the 1's and 0's of the digital world, but we don't share the same life pattern. The particular path that got each of us here is our unique value proposition. It's vital we embrace our ability to learn informally and to match that learning with what we experience. In the real world there is no red pen to tell us we're wrong and remind us of the mistakes that are best avoided. In the real world we don't have to attribute our ideas to their original sources, as we did in school.

It's time to just make stuff up again

Watch a five-year-old kid play for half a day and you'll see levels of creativity that'll blow your mind. They have an incredible ability to ‘make things up'. And they gain immediate feedback from the market — the other kids they're playing with, who will soon let them know if they like the ideas or games they are proposing. But as adults we have it back to front. We've convinced ourselves that our ideas and opinions don't matter much. I remember being told when writing essays at school that I had to quote from other people's work, and how weird that felt. Why couldn't I just write what I thought? Why did the ideas and views I expressed, in any area other than science, still have to be drawn from someone else's? Why did what others thought matter more than what I thought? To be taken seriously we are expected to reference where we get our ideas from, whether it's another person's work or some research proving things are the way we say they are. While this is important in science, it's generally not true for making a living. The opposite is true: everything of value is being created by us now, today. So long as what we do is in the bounds of legality, we should be literally ‘making up' as much stuff as possible.

The trick they pulled on us, persuading us to not conceive of original ideas, to not create anything new and to keep our opinions to ourselves, is rapidly losing its power. And this gets me excited.

WE ALL STILL HAVE THE ABILITY TO JUST ‘MAKE THINGS UP'. NOW WE HAVE ACCESS TO THE TOOLS TO CREATE ANYTHING; NOW THE ECONOMY IS BEING TOTALLY REDESIGNED, WE JUST NEED TO FORGET WHAT WE WERE TOLD AND TO START FORMING OUR OWN OPINIONS AND CREATING SOMETHING NEW.

And when someone says, ‘That's cool. Where'd you get the idea for that?' you can proudly reply, ‘I just made it up'. Find the child inside.

The formal institutions really don't get it

When I was bootstrapping my first dotcom startup, I was living skinny on minimal income. I was investing a fair amount of time and money in it, and needed some supplementary income, so I wanted to get some extra paid work that wouldn't interfere with my entrepreneurial endeavours. I found out that you don't have to have a PhD to lecture at a university; all you need is a bachelor's degree and experience in the area you want to teach in. So I got this gig tutoring various marketing subjects. With no formal training as a teacher, I just put my heart into it. I took what I knew about doing real marketing and the principles I studied at university, and I made it up. Sure, I stuck to the syllabus, but I made up what I thought would be a good way to pass on what the kids needed to know. I took examples from the real world, and gave them homework they could relate to, with brands they knew well. Many students later told me it was the best class they had taken in their three years of study.

For four years I tutored a number of marketing-related subjects to first-, second- and third-year students. I really enjoyed it and wanted to be the best at it. I've always loved the idea of teaching, but I never liked how little teachers earn — firstly, because it's among the most important jobs there is in our society; and secondly, because it is very difficult to do well. I was desperate to get a gig doing some lectures as well. This was largely the domain of the PhDs and permanent staff, but I did get some opportunities. I would do fill-in jobs on a semi-regular basis, and again I smashed it. I'd have a crowd around me after every lecture.

All this is not to impress you, but so what I'm about to tell you makes sense. You need to understand that the people making decisions about your future in your company or industry, or whatever walk of life you happen to play in economically, don't know nearly as much as you think they do. In fact, if you're good, or have potential, they are probably scared you may disrupt their way of life. They may see you as some kind of threat, especially if you're not ‘one of them', if you didn't progress through the formal channels or come from their world.

So after I'd been getting paid by the university for a number of years, delivering incredible service to their customers — the students — I found out they were going to offer a new unit, Entrepreneurialism, in which students would learn how to get a startup up and running. This was when universities around the world were starting to look seriously at the area. I was pumped, convinced it was the perfect subject for me to take a lead on. I've always enjoyed talking, sharing ideas and holding an audience's attention. I really love teaching. There is nothing more wonderful than sharing ideas with others — it's a pure gift for both parties. So I set up a meeting with the decision maker on who the lecturer would be. The university knew I was generating a real buzz among the students.

I made my pitch on why I should take on the new subject, how I'd develop the course content and deliver the lectures and tutorials to leave the kids totally inspired. I went through my history as an entrepreneur: my first startup at age 11 — an organic egg farm; two successful exits where I had sold my own companies; and the past few years studying and comparing startups and big companies. I was at that time building a web startup that had become a local media darling. I was a living, breathing entrepreneur with something to give. Here is what they told me.

‘I know you can do it. I know you'd be the best possible teacher of this subject for our students. But I can't let you do it. I have to give it to one of my “researchers”.'

I found it curious that they used the word researcher instead of teacher or lecturer. They told me these days it was all about getting papers published. I later found out that the lecturer they chose had never run a startup and was a career academic. It was pretty much like learning from a scientist who had never been in a lab. I can still see the decision maker's face, and the comments are carved inside my brain for ever. It's actually kind of cathartic writing it here. I'm not saying it was anyone's fault. Organisations have their own processes and objectives, and often people are constrained to make decisions based on what their superiors want. I've worked in enough large companies to know that.

So, a great reminder for anyone who ever had a door closed in their face: there's a very good chance it isn't about your ability. It's absolutely vital we don't let it kill our spirit when it happens to us. Don't ever let anyone block you from doing what you want to do. Just keep forging ahead and knocking on doors until they open. And if you keep knocking they will open in the end, and when they do, the person inside will appreciate your work and effort more than those who didn't want you. Just think of it as a process of self-selection, of finding the right people for you.

I did end up getting a quasi-lecturing job — actually one that's much better than the position at the university would have been. On the back of my previous book, The Great Fragmentation, I am often invited to do keynote speeches on the future of business and technology. I get paid extremely well to do it and those who hire me (mostly large corporations facing disruption) appreciate the real-world experience I have in the startup sector, as well as the stuff I've literally made up. And it comes with a number of bonuses the university could never have provided, including travel around the world and enough free time to continue to write and to build new startup businesses, both of which ensure that my lectures only get better as I generate new ideas and fresh content. It's a kind of virtuous circle, another reminder that it's vital we know and believe that the ‘No's' often lead to better ‘Yes's' later.

Definitions really matter

How smart do you have to be successful? Before we can answer this question it's important we define a couple of these words, because quite frankly most people are walking around with incorrect definitions of both ‘successful' and ‘smart'.

Success is an internal measure. It's something we have to define for ourselves, based on personal desires and goals; it's a relative measure of where we want to end up as against where we started. This is why I get frustrated when I hear people talk about someone else's success. They see an ex-colleague drive past in a Porsche, or appear on TV, and say, ‘Gee, he's really successful!' My initial response is ‘How do you know?' We can only ever measure success against the objectives we set for ourselves. Certain financial rewards may spell success to them, but they may not. There is nothing wrong with wanting money or fame, but they are just two possible measures of success from an infinite list. They may have other objectives they have yet to reach. They may be miserable, for all we know. While fame and perceived financial wealth are archetypal measures of success that society would have us believe in, the truly smart people in our society understand that happiness is the ultimate success, and there are many paths to achieving it. If anything, fame and fortune are more likely to find us when our goals are not limited to those two measures.

Success is a choice

Here's the best definition of success I've ever heard, from Earl Nightingale in 1956: ‘Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.' There is just so much gold in that short sentence that it is worth breaking it down.

• Progressive: It's a path, an undertaking. It may be a destination but isn't necessarily one. It's the start that really matters. It reminds us that the having is in the doing.
• Realization: We don't give up. We keep on trying until we get there.
• Worthy: The goal itself isn't enough. It's got to deserve our time and effort, to be something worth doing, for ourselves and hopefully for our community or society. It should take us forward emotionally and even morally. If generating money is one of the objectives, fine, and in a modern economy that certainly matters, but we don't limit ourselves to that.

It turns out success is more about effort than anything else; we all know this intuitively. We know how good anything feels when we really have tried our best; it can be more satisfying than a victory that comes too easily or for which we just got lucky. It's the undertaking that nourishes the soul. This is why when we think back to the great things we've experienced in our life they are generally moments and not things. The times we spent with people, the laughter, the meetings, the travel, the pride after completing a project. Even when we bought that expensive ‘thing' we wanted as an adult or even as a teenager, the reason it felt so good was we probably had to work hard to get it. It is the satisfaction we value; the thing is really just a reflection of what we've done. It's okay to chase money, but the why is always more important, the driver that makes it all worth it. Money for money's sake is often a false flag.

When it comes to the financial side of success there is a simple rule I follow that helps me sleep at night: it is okay to accumulate money so long as it is done in the service of the many and not at the expense of the many. This is a great sense test of what we are doing. It makes it so easy to recognise if the project is ‘worthy' of pursuing. Once we pass this little mental challenge, we can have our financial cake and eat it too.

You're smarter than you think

Now we know the true meaning of success, let's have a look at smart. The usual, incorrect definition relates it to ‘intellectual horsepower'. As you can probably guess, my definition has little to do with the intellectual gymnastics we get judged on at school. It isn't about our mind's raw potential. I can't even capture it in a sentence, as I did with success, but I can provide some guidance to what makes someone smart. The easiest way to do this is first to give you a list of things that do not show how smart someone is.

So let's start with the old-school favourite: IQ, which quite frankly is a terrible measure of smarts. IQ tests are really only good at determining how good someone is at taking IQ tests. The fact that they can be gamed in order to improve your score is very telling. I once bought a book on how to improve my IQ. It contained a number of exercises to practise to get your score up. I managed to lift mine up 25 points, which illustrates that IQ is really a kind of intellectual sprint. With practice we can improve it, but a high IQ matters little in life unless you're pursuing a particular intellectual endeavour.

Another thing we can cross off the list is how fast we can do things. Sure, it's nice to be able to work something out quickly, put together pieces and make sense of something ahead of others, but it's not often a necessity of life. This is again that finish-line, time-based ethic from the factory coming in to influence our definitions. Let's take the three-hour exam. Now when did you ever do anything in life, outside of a sporting competition or time-based test, where the time mattered that much.

PEOPLE SO OFTEN CONFUSE DAILY DEADLINES AND FORGETTABLE TASKS WITH SLOW, CONSISTENT BEHAVIOURS, WHICH HAVE A BIGGER IMPACT ON IMPROVING OUR LIVES.

Everything important I've ever done took days, months, even years to complete. We need to remove completion time from our definition of smarts. All that mentality will do for us is provide false comparisons that may lead us to quit sooner than we should.

Here I'll add something to the list that smart people don't do: they don't waste opportunity. They don't waste things like the various natural talents they have, and everyone has natural gifts. They don't waste the opportunities offered by their direct environment. They don't waste the time they have. Time is one of life's great equalisers. No matter how much time someone feels they need, by any measure they'll never find more than 24 hours in a day. How they use it is what's important. Smart people don't waste money either. Money ought to be spent, enjoyed, shared and invested, but not in a careless fashion. Smart people use their money in a considered way. All money is allocated somewhere, so the choices we make are important, and anyone can learn to do this better than 90 per cent of the population. More on this in Part II, ‘Revenue'.

Smart people choose to use all their abilities, including their natural gifts. Smart people take advantage of the small advantages they have and build on them, step by step, as if they are making advantage deposits that will compound over time. Smart people are lifelong learners. Smart people know how to combine what they've learned; whether the source of the lessons is books, work or life, they aren't afraid to mash them up into something that just makes sense for them. Above all, they are practical. Smart people are long-game players, not sprinters. Even if their core skills have some kind of fast-twitch capacity to them, they know to focus on leveraging them for long-term advantage. I've met very bright people who for some reason are not interested in using their potential. On the flipside, I've met many people of average intelligence who have done amazing things that you might assume could only be done by a brilliant person. It turns out that brilliance is about using what you have, which is usually enough, to do something really bright.

Smart people generally display the qualities we value in humans: honesty, integrity, kindness, generosity, empathy and good humour, to name a few.

Finally, being smart is about using what's available to you to achieve your own objectives in life, not someone else's. Your worthy ideal can be as simple or as complex as you please.

Smarts are relative. They depend on how we use the potential we've been given to achieve personal objectives. They're about utilisation. In the end, we all know that being less than we can be chips away at the soul.

So here's my attempt at a definition:

BEING SMART MEANS USING YOUR ABILITIES TO MAXIMISE THE POTENTIAL FOR HAPPINESS FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS.

My school report

Now here's a glimpse of a variety of my own school reports from secondary school (see figure 3.1). Yes, there are some embarrassing truths about me, but my aim here is simply to demonstrate how little our formal school results matter, and how average people can do well in our world.

As you can see I'm no scholar. Anyone with an average intellectual capability — for our purposes, let's define that as the ability to read and comprehend — can become smart enough to build an extraordinary life.

Everything important I know in life, everything that created and shaped my living today (excluding the ability to read and write), I have taught myself. It's important we follow the advice of Mark Twain (channelling an earlier novelist, Grant Allen) and ‘don't let schooling interfere with our education'. The etymology of the word education has all the clues we need: the Latin verb educare means to draw out, bring up or rear. As we would a child. Our education is about our ability to learn and grow, to be able to deduce things from the world around us. It's not about how long we've spent sitting at a desk in a room among rows of other obedient, often bored fellow students.