Lessons From 2017
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Orren Prunckun reflects on his personal and professional experiences throughout the year and shares insights on various aspects of life, health, wealth, and relationships. He emphasizes the importance of consistent reflection and planning for personal growth and success, categorizing lessons learned into internal and external factors. The document provides a candid discussion on human behavior, societal norms, and the significance of authentic relationships and effective strategy in both life and business.
Lessons From 2017
- 1. Lessons From 2017 Orren Prunckun
- 2. About Me I graduated from Flinders University of South Australia with a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws and Legal Practice and am admitted as a barrister and solicitor in the Supreme Court of South Australia.
- 3. About Me I won the Australia Day Citizen of the Year Award for Unley in 2015, was recognized as one of the “Top 50 Australian Startup Influencers” and “Mentors you should know in the startup space” by Startup Daily. Prunckun received an Honourable Mention in Australian Anthill's “30 Under 30” award.
- 4. About Me I am a member of the Unley Business and Economic Development Committee. I have spoken at Microsoft, BDO, Piper Alderman Lawyers, Flinders University, University of Adelaide, University of South Australia, The Inventors Association of Australia, Social Media Adelaide, Pecha Kucha and South Start Conference.
- 5. About Me I am a Director and President of Startup Adelaide Inc., a not-for-profit organisation that exists to foster and support Adelaide based technology startup sector. More at: http://orrenprunckun.com
- 6. Who Is This For? At the end of each calendar year, between Christmas and New Year, I sit down and spend a full day without distraction taking stock of the year that was and looking toward the year that will be. I have been doing this for almost 2 decades now and find the return-on-investment (not strictly financial) to be phenomenal.
- 7. Who Is This For? During that time I do the following: 1. Reflect on Lessons Learnt for the year across different 4 categories; 2. Reflect on what held me back for the year; 3. Capture a Word Cloud from various data points for long-term states of mind; 4. Capture health metrics across 10+ categories; 5. Account for goals for the past year;
- 8. Who Is This For? 6. Account for behaviours to maintain, start and stop (AKA resolutions) for the past year; 7. Plan goals for the upcoming year, the next 5 years and the next 10 years; 8. Plan behaviours to maintain, start and stop for the upcoming year; 9. Revise life purpose, vision, mission, personal brand promise, 50 year metrics for success; 10. And a few other things…
- 9. Who Is This For? This routine usually produces 25+ pages of insights and the process is a deeply personal exercise - for my eyes only, but I decided that the Lessons Learnt part may be useful to other people, so this presentation shows only a small sample of that yearly reflection and planning.
- 10. Who Is This For? The Lessons Learnt are divided into different 4 categories: 1. Life; 2. Health; 3. Wealth; and 4. Relationships.
- 11. Who Is This For? Just like I used “return-on-investment” before, I use these categories in the very board definitions of the terms. I also sub-divide the categories further into internal and external categories.
- 12. Who Is This For? For example, health is not just physical health (external), but emotional etc. health (internal). Wealth is not just financial wealth (external), but intellectual etc. wealth (internal).
- 13. Who Is This For? Relationships are not just capitalized “Relationships” – romantic, but any relation with another person etc. (external), and with myself etc. (internal) and so on. I strongly believe this categorization is important to be a balanced person.
- 14. Who Is This For? You may be thinking, how did this list come about? I simply captured things as they came up throughout the year to reflect upon or recall and ritualize the implementation of these rules.
- 15. Who Is This For? Many of them are not new realizations for me, but very good reminders on things to focus on. I hope you find it useful. To your success in 2018,
- 16. Life Most people are inherently lazy, but that’s okay, because if things were easy to achieve everyone would have them.
- 17. Life Most people want stuff for free, but that’s okay, free is a great brand building tool, and most of the time you only get what you pay for.
- 18. Life Content is one of the most scalable free forms of branding and brand awareness.
- 19. Life Most people are jealous, but that’s okay, what others think of you is totally reasonable and out of your control.
- 20. Life Most people are selfish - they ignore you until they need something from you, then forget/pretend they ignored you to get what they wanted. An elephant never forgets. This leads too…
- 21. Life Most people are stupid. The amount of people who are “intelligent” on paper, yet still believe in conspiracy theories and fake news astounds me.
- 22. Life Most people are incompetent. The amount of who are in “reputable” positions, despite their idiocy also astounds me.
- 23. Life Most people are full of shit, 100% to the top. The amount of embellishment I have witnessed, that is verifiable untrue, astounds me. Do people not know Google exists?
- 24. Life Social media makes it easy for posers and charlatans (both in terms of content and popularity) to exist. Again, the amount of exaggeration I see here is astounding.
- 25. Life Most people live very boring lives and are looking for any bit of excitement, which makes standing out quite easy.
- 26. Life Most people don’t have an informed opinion. This leads to…
- 27. Life If someone has an uninformed opinion, you don’t need to listen to them.
- 28. Life You should only consider taking advice from people who come from a respectful and loving place and add even more weight if they actually have expense in what they are talking about.
- 29. Life The bar for life is set exceedingly low and you don’t need to do much extra to stand out, sadly.
- 30. Life Most things are really easy to achieve or have, it’s the execution and behaviour change that is required for that is the hard part. Which leads too…
- 31. Life Turning up consistently is Archimedes lever for a lot of things.
- 33. Life You can be really efficient at implementation, but without an effective strategy you’re going nowhere new.
- 34. Life Likewise you can have a really effective strategy, but with inefficient implementation you’re also going nowhere new.
- 35. Life You price of price of admission is one of the most important things you can realize and articulate.
- 36. Life Most people don’t know what they want (specifically and in general), and if they do, they are terrible at articulating it.
- 37. Life When you reveal something about yourself, it tells one thing about you, but how someone responds tells you everything you need to know about them.
- 38. Life Incomplete information always creates false assumptions and making assumptions is dangerous.
- 39. Life Assumptions are usually wrong. There are things you know you know. There are things you know you don’t know and there are things you don’t know you don’t know – The latter two combined are limitless and assumptions live in there.
- 40. Life Reciprocity, that is where people are more inclined to return free support received, works every time.
- 42. Life Be the shit stirrer for change. The pebble in the shoe always wins.
- 43. Life Business and entrepreneurship probably has some of highest rates of sociopathy.
- 44. Life Playing with fire is fine if the house needs to be burn down.
- 45. Life If you make a promise, makes sure you deliver on it, or it’s very hard to gain trust again.
- 46. Life It’s also okay to not make a promise, too. You’ll get more respect because you can say no in a world of yes’s.
- 47. Life Some promises don’t make you happy so you need to make promises you can’t keep, this is very liberating.
- 48. Life Your subconscious desires will always win.
- 49. Life Cognitive biases have more power on use that we care to acknowledge.
- 50. Life Medical practitioners who hold the keys to a vault of useful information that the general population doesn’t have, need to give impartial medical advice based on medical fact and not based on their personal conscience.
- 51. Life Deferring your agency leaves you without power and if you defer your agency, you can’t have cake and eat it too in terms of results and accountability.
- 53. Life Your actions change as soon as if what you do/say/be was on the front page of the newspaper for the world to see.
- 54. Life If how you act in public is the same as how you act in private and also is consistent with who you want to be, they you will have unshakable confidence.
- 55. Life Put your authentic self out to the world, and the universe will deliver what you want.
- 56. Life No one wants to risk being the first.
- 57. Life Doing free work almost always pays off.
- 58. Life Strategy is about being effective.
- 59. Life Implementation is about being efficient.
- 60. Life It’s much harder to invent something new, than it is to copy: it’s usually more productive to be a fast follower than a leader.
- 61. Life If you want things you have never had, do things than never done.
- 62. Life Only dead fish follow the stream.
- 63. Life Feminism is about the ability to get what they want without the restriction of another deciding what their gender has to do with it.
- 64. Life For many universities, the Titanic has already sunk because they bit the hand that feeds.
- 65. Life Acting congruent with how something should be is a myth: if it’s common “knowledge,” it’s most likely not the efficient or effective way of being or doing.
- 66. Life If you feed the media monster and it may end up eating you.
- 67. Life Hindsight is amazing, yet totally impractical.
- 68. Life Virtual Reality will be the default tool for teaching empathy.
- 69. Life Life is a full contact sport, expect to get punched in the head when you are not looking.
- 70. Life The objective explanation and the subjective explanation are almost always different yet you believe the latter and not the former most of the time.
- 71. Life Every benefit has a cost.
- 72. Life “Someday” doesn’t exist and never will.
- 73. Life By creating a Strong Suit you make it hard to love yourself.
- 74. Life Live in constant expectation but don’t have expectations.
- 75. Life Nothing has inherent meaning, so create your own meaning.
- 76. Life A decision is based on past, a choice is based on the present and future.
- 77. Life “Rolling a dice” helps create new behaviours.
- 78. Health Food is a very emotional topic for people.
- 79. Health Most people over eat without realizing it.
- 80. Health It's impossible to out train over eating.
- 81. Health Effort to burn ration of cardio isn’t as effective as people think, relatively speaking.
- 82. Health Food before 1 is just for fun.
- 83. Wealth No one can pick winners, and if they say they can they full of shit, statistically.
- 84. Wealth People don’t recall your slogan as best you think they do.
- 85. Wealth Electing what your brand and embodying what that should be are two very different things.
- 86. Wealth On the promise end, that is marketing, brands say one thing, but on the delivery end, is a very different customer experience.
- 87. Wealth Far too many large organizations have a marketing budget and they spend it ALL on graphic design and advertising and confuse that for a brand.
- 88. Wealth Marketing needs to be congruent with the brand (whatever that maybe.)
- 89. Wealth Marketing and sales outcomes only come from embodying what you have elected.
- 90. Wealth Customer facing names should be different than internal facing names.
- 91. Wealth Put your marketing and sales language it in the language of your prospects, or risk losing sales.
- 92. Wealth Don’t make ads look like ads.
- 93. Wealth Native content builds trust.
- 94. Wealth Sometimes you have to market with restricted marketing channels or market commodity products: this is where marketing innovation starts.
- 95. Wealth Technology integrations give you more marketing reach.
- 96. Wealth You should be spending 2/3 of your day working on marketing and sales and 1/3 of your day working on products, product, services or solutions.
- 97. Wealth Most businesses concentrate on marketing & sales activities and outputs not outcomes, in the hope that doing activities (based on the wrong strategy) create outcomes. They don’t.
- 98. Wealth A confused prospect never buys.
- 99. Wealth A notable name is really important for your brand, especially a startup.
- 100. Wealth Click bait existed well before the internet.
- 101. Wealth Fake news existed well before the internet.
- 102. Wealth In fact everything that worked in marketing and sales worked well before the internet.
- 103. Wealth Internet based adult entertainment pioneered almost all digital marketing and sales tactics and tool.
- 104. Wealth The day you sign a client is the day you start losing them.
- 105. Wealth Owned media should trump paid and earned media, almost every time.
- 106. Wealth “Valuable content” is an overuse terms and really means the difference between the start and the end of the content.
- 107. Wealth Any time the client gives you compliments is a great time to ask for a referral.
- 108. Wealth There are more “currencies” than money and they have more leverage than money: there are plenty of millionaires who are miserable as hell.
- 109. Wealth Digital is a channel not a business model.
- 110. Wealth It ironic to see that the generations who endlessly berate millennials as being lazy, pissed their money away in their younger years and are now the biggest burden on the national budget (15%) and have been growing the burden year-in-year-out since 1999.
- 111. Wealth The block chain will change the way the world transacts.
- 112. Wealth Purchasing a house as a home is a lifestyle investment, not a financial one.*
- 113. Wealth Fees are a silent killer to financial wealth.*
- 114. Wealth You make money looking forward, not backwards. *
- 115. Wealth There is a lot of luck, more than most want to admit, in making financial wealth.*
- 116. Wealth There is a big difference between investing, speculating, trading, betting and gambling. Know the difference if you are going to “invest.” * And…
- 117. Wealth If you are going to “invest”, you should think heavily about risk tolerance, risk appetite, exit points, entry points, timeframes, liquidity, opportunity cost, psychological cost, investment temperament, control, objectives, allocation percentage and ROI.*
- 119. Relationships Every time you judge someone in their presence, the less you get told new things.
- 120. Relationships You can have someone or you can have your judgment of them, but you can’t have both.
- 121. Relationships No one perfect, so don’t settle.
- 122. Relationships There is no settling down, without settling for.
- 123. Relationships There is no one person out there that will give you everything, and if you think there is, you have unrealistic expectations of people and will be disappointed each and every time.
- 124. Relationships You are not Chemotherapy: you can't fix people.
- 125. Relationships You can’t change people who don't want to change, but you can change (swap) people, by screening for alignment at the start.
- 126. Relationships Yet crucible style events change people, which you can replicate without the trauma.
- 127. Relationships There is no “The One,” there is the 0.67 that you round up to 1.
- 128. Relationships Anyone can leave at any time for any reason.
- 129. Relationships Every relationship ends until you find one that doesn’t, and you only know which one that is once you’re dead, even then you won’t know because you’re still dead, so quit stressing about forever, ever-after etc.
- 130. Relationships Promises aren’t a magic pill that make people stay around.
- 131. Relationships People who choose to be there despite any formal promise that much more authentic.
- 132. Relationships Length of time has no correlation to giving or receiving value, and in many cases decreases both due to unrealistic expectations.
- 133. Relationships Be good, giving and game.
- 134. Relationships Present all your attributes as an added bonus not cancer.
- 135. Relationships Most people don’t like most people.
- 136. Relationships Insecurities don’t matter: people like who they like and don’t like who they don’t like and neither is correlated to who you reciprocally like.
- 137. Relationships Relationships aren’t depositions and you aren’t sworn under oath. Which leads too…
- 138. Relationships Relationships are stories you tell yourself and survive on white lies.
- 139. Relationships Relationships are public, what happens within them is not.
- 140. Relationships Only those involved in relationships know what they are. None of us can speculate on that, especially the press. And what people want and do their life, doesn't make it less ethical than others.
- 141. Relationships You have your biological and logical family, neither overlap and you should choose you latter if the former sucks.
- 143. Relationships The Karmic Rule of Honesty says if you reject an honest person, you will be stuck with a dishonest person.
- 144. Relationships Leave people in better shape than you found them for the next person that comes along.
- 145. Relationships Tea And Sympathy Rule says that if no harm was done in the past, then you will do no harm in the future either.
- 146. Relationships Emotional attachment is a blessing and curse and closely follows the Cycle of Addiction model.
- 147. Relationships “Marketing and sales” is the blueprint to getting what you want out of life with others.
- 148. Relationships Qualifying people is the force multiplier and one of the most important things you can do, not just the mechanics of it, but the harder part, of not caring what the outcome of it is.
- 149. Relationships Be honest in your intentions, there are plenty of people out there looking for that exact intention.
- 150. Relationships If you know what you want and you can articulate it, you are ahead of most people and by default will be great at qualifying for compatibility.
- 151. Relationships Look for those who are looking for you.
- 152. Relationships The only power you have is to put yourself, who you are and what you want out to the world and see who responds to that in kind.
- 153. Relationships Most people don’t identify with negative qualities (regardless of objectivity), so qualifying on this is useless.
- 154. Relationships Most people are passive aggressive as they don’t know how to be assertive. This comes from a fear of rejection.
- 155. Relationships Most people fear being upfront about what they want and need, because of potential rejection. Rejection is a positive thing, it separates incompatibility really fast.
- 156. Relationships If you are being rejected, it’s likely that people ae responding to their context of you, not actually you.
- 157. Relationships Most people don’t want to meet new people, especially in Adelaide.
- 158. Relationships Most people are not assertive. Ghosting is a shitty move and says more about them than it does you. They are creating future awkwardness for themselves: this is Adelaide and they’ll run into you again.
- 159. Relationships Rapport is important and is the foundation for hard conversations and loyalty.
- 160. Relationships Setting boundaries and parameters important.
- 161. Relationships Facilitating a psychological space where people can be themselves is rewarding for all.
- 162. Relationships Personality types matter with communication.
- 163. Relationships Information as intended from a Communicator to a Receiver is never 100% accuracy, 100% of the time.
- 164. Relationships Communication is always is conceptual: a photo of a car is not actually a car.
- 165. Relationships There is no perfect way to get rid of miscommunication.
- 166. Relationships Context matters: it’s provides the difference in responses from the same words.
- 167. Relationships More information and more trust gets you through conversational blockages.
- 168. Relationships You have zero right to tell others what to think about you.
- 169. Relationships Unless you have experience as a reference point for someone else experience, you can only understand them at a certain level: their description of the experience makes sense, but that is about it.
- 170. Relationships There can be no reward without agreement and no agreement without a request and no request without a possible rejection.
- 171. Relationships Just like a vampire cannot enter a house unless they have been invited in, you can only take what has been given to you, nothing more.
- 173. Relationships If you are to call people out for shitty behaviour, do it in real time, not after the fact or you come across as manipulative.
- 174. Relationships If someone is trying to get you to do something for their self interest in the guise of giving you “advice” you can ignore it.
- 175. Relationships The energy in story telling is what matters, not the story content.
- 176. Relationships Story telling is the Trojan horse for changing people.
- 177. Relationships What can be said with words is better said with visuals.
- 178. Relationships Demonstrations are more effective than claims.
- 179. Relationships Networking is about meeting people and how you can help them, not selling to people or seeing what you can get from them: it’s all swings and roundabouts and karma always wins.
- 180. Relationships Always merge groups if you can.
- 181. Relationships Community building is about adding and consolidating value based on shared values.
- 182. Relationships Communities are not stagnant.
- 183. Relationships A community isn’t an ecosystem, and vice versa.
- 184. Relationships Coming from the known is always better than coming from the unknown.
- 185. Relationships People do things for those they know, like and trust.
- 186. Relationships People emotional willingness drops due to basic physiological factors or unusually circumstances.
- 187. Relationships Game mechanics are great way to incentivize people.
- 188. Relationships “Please do XYZ for me” is not a request that will work.
- 189. Relationships People can second guess your intentions, but don’t need to spend the time explaining it to everyone.
- 190. Relationships There are two sides to every story, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
- 191. Relationships Social media is just like stand-up comedy, you don’t need to respond to every troll or heckler.
- 192. Relationships Dimming someone else light doesn't make yours shine any brighter.
- 193. Relationships Resentment occurs with familiarity.
- 194. Relationships Getting a yes is always better than avoiding a no.
- 195. Relationships Berating people because you didn’t get what you wanted, will still never get what you want.
- 196. Relationships If you are going to ask something, be prepared to reciprocate or lose trust.
- 197. To Your Success In 2018… Contact me at http://orrenprunckun.com