Kiaran Finn Life Matters BLOG

How important is TALENT to your success? In my field of sporting endeavour I was 9% deficient of the Usain Bolt's of the world and no amount of hard work would compensate. That 9% really mattered. In non physical pursuits such as the business arena we ply our respective trades the talent gene plays a lesser role. Let's play the "in a parallel universe" game. In this Universe you can do whatever you choose to but 25% better, faster. What's your #1 12 month goal? In this world It can be done in 8 months. What's your personal/business financial target for 12 months? Multiply it by 25%. Your current workload can achieve the same results in 25% less time. Let's return from this great alternate reality. It's unlikely we have an IQ 25% lower than the smartest peers in our world, yet some are outperforming us tenfold, perhaps a hundredfold. It's unlikely that you earn 5% of the richest business player in your city, are they really 20 times mor

What's your #1 life lesson? I'm not talking 'life philosophy', more along the lines of waking up 10-20 years in your past knowing what you know today and whispering the lesson in your ear. For me there's a clear winner. Just FAIL sooner, more often and care less. To fail you need to START. I'd start competing before I was ready. I'd start SELLING before I knew what I was doing. I'd go bust younger. I'd make a fool of myself because of my naivety more often and not care. I'd hero worship less. (Admire? Yes, but to hero worship is to relegate your own identity to the 'I'm not worthy' category.) There are NO failures in life, there are RESULTS/outcomes of action and inaction. Failure represents the gap between a first step and a desired destination. Without a first step there can be no journey. Connect on LINKEDIN if you like.

Fearing disapproval is a mugs game. It will handbrake your business, your life. Playing it safe with eyes always fixed on the safety net instead of the VISION is not how breakthroughs show up. Make decisions and let the market gravitate toward or away from you.  Declare the world is round in an eco-system where this is absurd. Embrace your #outlier status and risk failure. Show up! Ask for what you want. offer your value. Shift your fulcrum and find new #tipping points. There's more content out there than you can consume in a million lifetimes. More information is NOT the key to your success. Self belief (delusion to others), creative thinking (unpopular), and execution (risk of failure) gets my thumbs up! Connect on LINKEDIN if you like.

Be honest, are you a language snob? The first rule of communication is to be understood.  The layers and nuances thereafter are reflective of where we sit on the educational hierarchy.  I had a school teacher who was adamant that there were rigid black and white rules to pronunciation. Some of his crazy beliefs still permeate and I find myself becoming irritated when I hear a commentator pronounce advertisement the 'wrong' way. You can decide which of the two most obvious enunciations rock your world, but it serves to highlight the power of our biases regarding peer credibility. Elocution  was a thing during my youth, again another crazy notion, obviously in my opinion as every key stroke reflects my thoughts. The idea that an accent somehow confers a status that we buy into is a little puerile and yet.... Those of us over the age of 25 or perhaps 30 work ourselves into an internal hissy fit when we stumble onto forums where the language is economic in t

Truth, Beliefs and Fairytales - It’s all Nonsense. All beliefs are fairy tales. All beliefs are cultural.  The universe doesn’t care what we believe; we occupy an infinitely minute moment in eternity and seem designed to search for meaning where there is none.  We have just enough intelligence to contemplate our filtered reality but not enough to ever know anything. On any scale of measurement fathomable by any human who’s ever lived our existence is impossible.  Go back two generations and our 2 parents and 4 grandparents had to conceive at the exact moment they did for us to exist. Travel back a mere 27 generations, or about 600 years, and the family tree exceeds 2500000.  Extending the nonsense of trying to grasp the odds of following this lineage back 4 billion years doesn’t scratch the surface. Our planet is one of innumerable billions in a galaxy that is one of billions in a universe that may itself be one of innumerable billions. 100 people die per minute