ROSS DAWSON | Thriving on Overload

· Podcast Episodes
Thriving on Overload The 5 Powers of Success in a World of Exponential Information. Ross Dawson - Futurist, author, speaker

We live in a world with an abundance of valuable information at our fingertips. But the downside is exhaustion from dizzying information overload and a 24-hour news cycle that makes it overwhelming to sift through and process. In fact, in early 2020, 66% of Americans reported being “worn out” by the amount of news.

In Thriving on Overload: The Five Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information (McGraw Hill, 9/6/22), futurist and entrepreneur Ross Dawson contends that the capacity to thrive on limitless information is now the single most important capability for success, yielding not just powerful insight, world-leading expertise, and better decisions, but also improved wellbeing. Ross draws on the experiences of his world-class clients, which include Citibank, Coca-Cola, Google, KPMG, Microsoft, News Limited, Oracle, Procter & Gamble, PwC, and Walmart. He shows how to make information overload something to capitalize on instead of run from—and how this can improve your career (in any field), ventures, investments and life. Doing so just takes 5 connected powers:

  1. Purpose: understanding why you engage with information enables a healthier
    relationship that generates success and balance in your life;
  2. Framing: creating frameworks that connects information into meaningful patterns builds
    deep knowledge, insight, and world-class expertise;
  3. Filtering: discerning what information serves us, using an intelligent portfolio of
    information sources, helps surface valuable signals among pervasive noise;
  4. Attention: allocating your awareness with intent, including laser-like focus and
    serendipitous discovery, maximizes productivity and outcomes;
  5. Synthesis: expanding our unique capacity to integrate a universe of ideas yields
    powerful insight, the ability to see opportunities first, and better decisions.

Once you master these powers, you’ll learn how to use information overload for your own empowermentand advantage. This book will train your brain to optimize its development and get the most out of theinformation that truly counts.

“I'd say the default response to this overload of information is that people just get sucked up on the irrelevant. And you can just look around you on public transport or you around see people scrolling through information, which is probably not going to serve their lives very much. And so the default of our brain, we, our brains are geared to the novel, to the new, to the spectacular, to the horror, horrific whatever. So we get sucked into it. However, we have a choice. We don't need to follow those sort of, you know, basic instincts of just sort of going down these rabbit holes.”

Ross Dawson is a world-leading futurist, entrepreneur, and keynote speaker. He is Founding Chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies group of companies, with clients including industry leaders such as Citibank, Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, News Limited, Procter & Gamble, PwC, and Walmart. Dawson is in strong demand globally, having delivered keynote speeches and strategy workshops to business and government leaders in over 30 countries. He appears frequently in media such as ABC TV, BBC, The Guardian, New York Times, VICE, and many others.

“I think one of the foundation of a large proportion of investment errors is this idea of sunk cost. All right, I have made an investment, it's gone to half of its value. The fact that it's gone to half of its value is absolutely irrelevant. The point is, this is where it is now. Is it gonna go up from now or down from now? And wanting to get your money back that you invested into it is absolutely irrelevant. The point is, that's where it is now. Is it gonna go down? Is it gonna go up? And that hope of regaining your money is just an emotion, which is absolutely misleading and, and terribly destructive in investment.”

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS BRIEF MESSAGE

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chloe (1s):
Shares for Beginners.

Ross (4s):
I think you wanna say, I want to build for myself my own investment thesis. I don't want to be looking at, you know, various online, online stock recommendation platforms and just sort of say, Oh look, they recommend this, I gotta buy that. Well, okay, maybe that's one piece of input for you. Want be taking some other piece of input as well, and for yourself feeling in your own decisions by being able to build that structure and the frameworks of what it is that you know is, makes you comfortable with your particular investment.

Phil (36s):
Hi, I'm welcome back to Shares for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. Are you mentally overloaded? How much information can you fully process and retain?k Is the weight of the world on your shoulders? My guest today believes that you can not only cope, but indeed thrive in our information rich world. Hello Ross.

Ross (56s):
Hi. Great to be with you.

Phil (57s):
Ross Dawson is the author of Thriving On Overload, the Five Powers for Success in a world of exponential information. He's a world leading futurist, entrepreneur and keynote speaker. He's the founding chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies group of companies with clients like Citibank, Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft News Limited, Proctor and Gamble, PWC and Walmart. Ross has delivered keynote speeches and strategy workshops to business and government leaders in over 30 countries. So what was it that you were noticing in the world that led you to write this book? Thriving on Overload?

Ross (1m 32s):
Well, the story goes back a long way. So 25 years or more really. And it's stem, in fact from my work in financial markets and capital markets. So I was, I worked for Merrill Lynch then for Thompson Financial, finally as the global director of Capital Markets. And what I saw was that there were people in the financial markets who were more immersed in information than anyone else. And what they were doing was using their brains to be able to work out what were the right information, what was the most relevant to them, what they could use to be able to make better decisions. Yet this was a skill which the best people at this had of developed for themselves.

Ross (2m 18s):
This was not something they'd been educated in, either at school or university, or even in their organizations. So we saw this opportunity not just for people in financial markets, but also far beyond to be able to develop those capabilities. So in fact, 25 years ago I was running for the first offering of my first company was providing investment banks and, you know, their people with training on how to be better at taking a world of information and to be able to make sense of that. So it's been quite a journey since then. I've, I've written a number of other books on more around organizations and so on, but it's coming back. This has just been the right moment to be able to distill these ideas.

Ross (3m 2s):
Ones which I've developed a lot further over these last 25 years, is working as a futurist and being myself immersed in a world of overload to distill these ideas into something which is useful and practical and pragmatic for people to, in a world of unlimited information, to be able to discern what is useful to them, pull that together and to be able to make better decisions, including, of course, in their investments.

Phil (3m 30s):
So at what point do you think the world changed? Was there information like overload say in the nineties or was there a kind of like a, a finite kind of amount of information that the human brain was able to deal with in financial markets?

Ross (3m 43s):
Well, well I'd say just more broadly that's, you know, the basic parameter is we have finite cognition in a world of infinite information. And the, the that's basically applied just as much 20, 30 years ago as is today. It's just that there is far, far more information, which makes it far more difficult to be able to discern the signal amongst the noise. So I did write an article called Information Overload Problem or Opportunity, literally 25 years ago. And there I, you know, really that was already the situation then. Now it is simply more accentuated and that it is harder and harder as there is more and more information to be able to define what is useful and relevant to us compared with what is not useful and not relevant to us.

Ross (4m 30s):
So it's not as if there's sudden threshold. This has always been the case, or as long as all of us have been alive, I would imagine, Oh, certainly since the advent of the internet. But now it is more and more pointed, more and more challenging, but also I would say more and more opportunity because there's, we all have all the information that we can possibly need.

Phil (4m 48s):
Oh, so you, you, you're optimistic about this. There is opportunity in all of this.

Ross (4m 52s):
There's what I, in a way I see that there's a dividing society and this division between individuals. Now, I'd say the default response to this overload of information is that people just get sucked up on the irrelevant. And you can just look around you on public transport or you around see people scrolling through information, which is probably not going to serve their lives very much. And so the default of our brain, we, our brains are geared to the novel, to the new, to the spectacular, to the horror, horrific whatever. So we get sucked into it. However, we have a choice. We don't need to follow those sort of, you know, basic instincts of just sort of going down these rabbit holes.

Ross (5m 35s):
We can take a step back, we can say, this is all right, this is what I want to achieve, This is what I want to know. This is the decision I need to make, This is the information that will serve me. This is the place I'll find this information, this is how I'll organize this. So I think we are already seeing more and more the division between those who are getting sucked down these rabbit holes and just getting lost in the morass oer information and those who are exceeding and outperforming and succeeding on extraordinary scales because they are simply doing this better than everyone else.

Phil (6m 9s):
I've always loved the term doom scrolling.

Ross (6m 11s):
Yeah, that's, well that's the term was actually only scrolled in 2018. The Macquarie dictionary named it the Word of the Year in 2020. And so, and you, I gotta say that I was, there are times in March, April, 2020 when I was pretty hard to come back to keep away from saying, Well, what's going on here? Yeah. And how bad is it? It's, it is a natural flow. If we can't sort of say, Oh, tomorrow I'm going to check in and see where things are at. But it is something which we can transcend and we can, it's not something which we need to be indulging in every day. And doom scrolling is a reflection of our natural human propensity, but it is something which is destructive.

Ross (6m 57s):
Destructive to our emotions, destructive to the time which we have, you know, destructive in so many ways. So we do need to recognize that and we can take a step back in order to be more effective in how it is we deal with information.

Phil (7m 10s):
Honey, I can't go to bed yet. There's still someone wrong on the internet.

Ross (7m 14s):
Yes, yes indeed.

Phil (7m 16s):
So what are the mistakes that people make in dealing with the tsunami of available data? You, you've referred to a couple of points there, but I'm sure you have more to discuss on this.

Ross (7m 24s):
Well, well I think rather than pointing to what goes wrong, it's better to point what goes right, what should we do? So there's, you know, in your real ways in which we can sort of get, just get lost in the maras you, that's, that's easy. It's easy to get misled by information. So what's more interesting is how it is we can do that that well. And the first starting point is understanding your purpose. And so, you know, there's fi five powers that I point to in the, the book. And the first one is purpose, as in what is it that you want? Why are you looking at information at all in the first place? How does that serve you? What is the, what is it that you want to achieve?

Ross (8m 7s):
And I think you do need to take a pretty big frame around your life, you know, what it is you want to achieve. But also just pulling down to some more specific things in terms of be they, you know, financial or be they in terms of your relationships or be they in terms of your impact or your achievements. And so these start to frame what, why am I engaging with information? What is it that I want from that information? And I think there is also, this frame is what is the relationship with information that I want? Because we have a relationship with information just as, as we have a relationship with money, we have a relationship with our health, we have a relationship with the people around us, we have a relationship with society.

Ross (8m 50s):
And so our relationship with information can be destructive or enabling, you know, we can have a, you know, just as we can have a, a bad relationship with money. And I think that that's actually quite a strong analogy. You know, people can have an attitude towards money, which is, you know, worrying and destructive. Or we can also have a relationship with money, which is very enabling in terms of saying, well this is the way that's role in my life and in terms of giving me the things which I wanted. This is the way in which I will treat that in a similar way with information where we can have a relationship where it feels like we are abused, it's an abusive relationship, we abuse information, the information abuses us, or we can have a very constructive relationship, a loving relationship where we love information and it gives us what we want in return because we treat it the right way.

Ross (9m 43s):
And so this real, that's really the starting point is this idea of purpose, the why of our information and building a positive relationship with information so that it's something that gives us joy rather than worrying us or distressing us or taking our time and making us worried.

Phil (10m 8s):
It sounds to me like self-examination is a major part in dealing with the information overload rather than the information itself.

Ross (10m 18s):
Absolutely. Because it's a relationship with you, you know, and your relationship with information is gonna be different from someone else's relationship with information. Cuz there's different things which they want. You can't prescribe, I can't say to you Phil or anyone else, you know, these are, this is the information you should be looking at because that's you to work out what it is you want and what the sources are and how that best serves you. And we that, so yes, absolutely, this is something where we do need to be starting again, that purpose, that why for me is not the same as for you or for anyone else. And so it does, it is a reflective process. So

Phil (10m 52s):
Tell us a little bit more about the five powers then.

Ross (10m 55s):
So the five powers are, first is purpose, the, the why, the information. The second is framing, and this is building frameworks for our knowledge where we, instead of just having lots of bits of information, we're saying how do these fit together? What is the framework, which is the foundation for the knowledge and the understanding of, of what it is that I'm looking at. Third is filtering, understanding, you know, being better and better at discerning between the information that serves us and the information that doesn't serve us and the sources that we use to be able to achieve that. The fourth is attention where we are, It's not about whether we are focused or not focused.

Ross (11m 39s):
They're saying there are many different types of attention that we could have, which includes just scanning information, assimilating that, taking that in. That's a different attention mode. Exploring for information, you know, deep diving to sort of build knowledge or understanding. And one of the other critical attention modes is regenerating so that we can, you know, rebuild our attention. So working out scheduling how it is we spend our time and our attention. And the fifth one, and arguably the, the master power of humans is synthesis where we pull all of this together to build a understanding of the whole, the way everything fits together. And this is really the master skill today in a world where machine capabilities are advancing all the time.

Ross (12m 26s):
So analysis is breaking things down into their pieces, It's slicing and dicing. And that is the foundation of our intellectual education. You know, when we go to university, it's all about the slicing, the dicing, the analysis, the synthesis is the pulling together of all of the pieces literally, or everything we've experienced in our lifetimes. You know, not just one particular argument, but saying, well how does what mc now in the markets relate to what I saw when I was driving along the bus the other day to this thought I saw in this book, the other, the day to, you know, the conversation they had. And aha, I can see the sense, I can see the ways in which this fits together.

Ross (13m 10s):
So famously, you know, Charlie Munger, the partner of Warren Buffet, talks about our mental models and our mental models. The way I frame that is really all the distillation of all of our experience in the ways in which we shape our decisions. And in fact, in an investment context, one of the interesting ways of thinking about that is our emotional experiences with investment as in our successes and our failures and our response to that, the patterns that we've seen along that. And a lot of this is at a unconscious level. So the analysis is at a conscious level, the synthesis, and that's the real capability of our brains are still yet not fully explored capabilities of our minds is that unconscious level of pulling together all of the pieces that we have experienced and we've seen to be able to understand the whole.

Ross (14m 6s):
And the reality is that the better investors are the ones who have been able to pull together that sense, that understanding of all of the fragments to, and to be able to essentially make better decisions through not just the, you know, the numbers or the thing, the analysis they have right on front of their plate when looking at a particular potential investment. But that full context of markets, market behaviors, industries, shifts, timeframes, perspectives, human behavior, fear, and the things which shift that Yes, absolutely.

Phil (14m 46s):
And fearing incredibly because that's, that's one of the things, one of the most controlling emotions that people have in investment markets, especially at the moment.

Ross (14m 55s):
Yes. And that, that requires where we, you know, probably recognize our own fear, but also the fear in others which shapes markets. And this is something where our synthesis is pulling together that, that all of the pieces that we are seeing in a particular decision to make sense of the whole, of whether this, you know, whether the essentially the value, future value exceeds current price and whether that all of the, the world universe of interface we're taken in through our lives pull together to be able to inform a better decision.

Phil (15m 34s):
Artificial intelligence is now taking a bigger role in organizing and systematizing information on our behalf. What do you see as the future of work and the impact of ai?

Ross (15m 46s):
The, so machine learning and artificial intelligence advancing an incredible pace and machine learning is always domain specific. So the very nature of machine learning is it is using training data and that training data that comes from a set with defined parameters. So we've already seen across an extraordinary array of domains, including just about every game devised, and also many work functions such as approving credit loans or recognizing potential cancerous growths in images and so on, that machines are exceeding human performance.

Ross (16m 26s):
But that is always in a specific domain now when we go out. So this idea that's in a way the analysis when we're looking at particular data and for the foreseeable future, we can't see the ways in which machine learning will be able to transcend those domains. So this capability of synthesis to be able to go across domains is a uniquely human capability for the foreseeable future. So if you look at the future of work, there will be, amongst other things, work done anywhere around the world, anyone, anywhere will be able to be participate in work. And there's obviously billions of people who relatively recently have access to the internet and unlimited free learning and becoming part of that landscape.

Ross (17m 13s):
And we also have machines that will increasingly are and will very rapidly become more and more part of our work processes. But where humans will continue to excel is that capability of synthesis, the pulling together of the, the higher order view to be able to combine that analysis and synthesis or the, essentially the, the un pattern recognition together with the explicit pattern recognition to be able to make better decisions, to see opportunities where others have not seen opportunities before to be able to perceive the whole, to understand the frame. So, you know, so the future of work is one where humans will be pushed more and more to these faculties of synthesis, these creative domains, ones of relationships of developing that expertise in really understanding how a whole domain fits together.

Ross (18m 5s):
So

Phil (18m 5s):
Investors who are just approaching markets for the first time in their lives, how can they use the skills described in your book to become better investors?

Ross (18m 16s):
So one of the first things is to be able to frame areas where they will to be developing their expertise. And as long as if anybody can be an expert in everything in the markets. So rather than trying to be an expert in everything, or to defer your judgment to other experts, one of the first steps is to say, this is an specific area in which I will develop expertise. It will be a industry sector, will be a type of analysis, will be a specific set of companies. It will be, yeah. And part of it is also coming back and to be able to set, you know, timeframes for investment and be able to think that and saying, these are areas where I will develop my expertise.

Ross (19m 6s):
So rather than trying to know everything, which you can't, and there is nobody in, you know, even the, the longest people been in the market the longest, they're not experts in everything because they have focus, they would develop expertise in particular domains. So first thing is to be able to, from your purpose, to be able to choose where it is, you will begin to develop expertise. And once you develop expertise in one domain of the markets, you'll more readily be able to build on expertise in other areas of the markets. Be they sectors or types of, you know, investment classes or in terms of, you know, types of investment or types of analysis. So that's the first step.

Ross (19m 46s):
And then to start to regularly have consistently the set of behavior saying, these are the sources that I will use, this is the ways in which I will take those in. And one of the key things of course for any investor is developing investment thesis. You know, this is my investment thesis that this will come to pass this period of time. And you know, and this, you know, for example, you might say there's an industry sector which I think will grow, and these are the, the stocks within that. This is the, my, my thesis is that this is a sector that will grow. This is a stock which will grow within that.

Ross (20m 27s):
So when that investment thesis, you are trying to look at both confirming and contradictory information. So you're looking for who is most knowledgeable, one of the first things you build a set of sources, These are the people that are most knowledgeable about this domain of my investment thesis. Then be able to, from that investment thesis to look at what are the different opinions, what is the foundation of those different opinions to unpick that, to be able to start to build some, this is the framing, this is the frameworks. Now you're building a framework of saying, all right, well this is my thesis, this is information that supports, that there's information that makes me, you know, makes me, make me reconsider in particular ways.

Ross (21m 11s):
This is the ways which I balance. This is the synthesis that I build of my investment thesis from all of the different pieces of information of looking for diverse enough sources. And I think, you know, that's one of the first things as you develop your expertise, I think you wanna say, I want to build for myself my own investment thesis. I don't want to be looking at, you know, I won't name names, but you know, various online queries, online stock recommendation Yes. Platforms. And just sort of say, Oh look, they recommend this, I gotta buy that. Well, okay, maybe that's one piece of input, but you wanna be taking some other piece of input as well, and for yourself, built in your own decisions by being able to build that structure and the frameworks of what it is that you know, is, makes you comfortable with your particular investment.

Phil (22m 0s):
Yeah. But I think that's something that I've learned in this podcast that people love to have a guru. They wanna have someone basically to tell them what to buy without having to put in the hard work. And people, first of all, they need to understand that they've gotta do hard work to get anywhere in investing like this if they're going to be directly investing in stocks and shares. And to also be humble because there are many, many, many highly trained, highly educated financial services people with incredible tools at the disposal that are trying to achieve the same thing as you are.

Ross (22m 33s):
Yes, absolutely. And I, I tell you, that's you, you're always competing essentially with companies with literally billions of dollars, their resources. So, you know, that's disposal. So I think and

Phil (22m 47s):
Incredible access to management of companies and, and, and all of that.

Ross (22m 51s):
Yes, yes. And I, you know, I think that you do need to be, you know, recognize the realities of that. And I think part of, and also recognizing why it is you are investing directly yourself. And to be frank, I think one of the big, the most important reasons is the fun where, you know, this is partly an endeavor to, you know, do well with your money. But in order to, in that process of looking to perform what professional managers might do, I think part of it must be and should be that this is enjoyable. I like looking for information, I like discovering new things.

Ross (23m 32s):
I like building my own ways of thinking about, And if you don't enjoy it, then you should be going through, yeah, a professional manager and doing it for yourself should be about the, the joy and the fun of it. And I think that comes back to purpose. You know, the purpose for you to invest in the market should be at least as much as I want to enjoy this, I want to have fun with it as it is to say, you know, this is a purely financial objective of, you know, getting a particular return on your capital.

Phil (24m 2s):
So how to z practice that Zen Buddhism, I'm presuming help us to see things that others don't

Ross (24m 9s):
Attention is at the center of our lives to pay attention to the things which are around us, and to be able to make sense of those. And the reality is that our brains are always distracted. The psychologists talk about the default mode network, which is essentially mind wandering. So when our minds wanders, that is described by psychologists as default mode. And that's the reality. Most of our, the time, our minds are wandering and in order to be able to pay attention to the information that's coming in, to the things that matter to us, to what is around us, we do need to train that we do new exercise. Our attention is a muscle which we can either become flabby and, you know, not very capable, or it can be something which is fit and help us to be able to direct our attention.

Ross (24m 59s):
Well, so Zen Buddhism is, and so my own experience of this is having lived in Japan for a number of years, including a year in a zen center where Zend Dojo, where essentially we lived our everyday lives. I was a financial journalist at the time, and, but each day we meditated twice a day and we were part of the community and there were lectures from our zen master. And the foundation of Zen is simply being there, of being aware, of seeing the world around us. And one of the instructive things about zen meditation, it is done with our eyes open.

Ross (25m 41s):
So most forms of meditation, your eyes are closed and you are closed off from the world. Whereas in zen meditation, you are open to the world, you are seeing the world as it is to be able to sort of see that information coming in. So as you know, in living our lives, including in investments, we need to be open to the signals. We need to train ourselves not to have our mind wandering. So we never even notice the world to actually looking around us and seeing the world that we have. And it's, and again, it's fairly easy today to look around us and see people that are not seeing the world around them at all. All they've got is a screen in front of them or they're distracting their thoughts as opposed to actually perceiving the world.

Ross (26m 23s):
So whether we are reading re annual reports of our company, or able to see what's happening in the market, or simply noticing the world around us and be able to notice there are particular change in behaviors which may suggest that there is an investment opportunity, we need to be train ourselves to notice, to be able to be better at paying attention, to be able to guide our awareness. And this is really the foundation of firstly just really being, being truly alive in a very busy world, to be able to see the world around us and to be able to by choice, direct our attention to the things which will serve us, the things which will serve us in providing us insights and investment opportunities, or the things that will simply give us a better life.

Phil (27m 14s):
And it's also important, I think, just to turn off and let you, your mind, have a bit of time just to process all the information that it's ingesting.

Ross (27m 22s):
Yeah. Although that's, that is a different mode. That is more the modes of synthesis. Oh,

Phil (27m 27s):
Okay.

Ross (27m 27s):
So in, in meditation or in Zen, you know, your mind is empty. You are, you are just there. And, but there is value, there's critical part of that phrase. So in synthesis, the chapter on synthesis, I look at the practices that we can do to be able to both seed and incubate ideas where we start to say, Oh, well these is the foundations for some of the my thinking, this is the research which I'm doing. This is the piece together, this is the, the contradictions that I see in all of that. And then being able to pull yourself into a state of mind where you're incubating those ideas to be able to wear in background mode.

Ross (28m 11s):
You are pulling those together in order to be able to reflect, to come up with a synthesis, to be able to come up with that insight into what will actually be driving value. So that's a, a different frame of mind. One is that of pure attention, Another is one of incubating ideas, and we need to, again, these are the, some of the different attention modes which we can schedule and prioritize in order to be able to get the best outcomes.

Phil (28m 42s):
So Ross, you seem very together and you've got a lot of things sorted in your life. Were you ever hopeless?

Ross (28m 49s):
I was, well I've always taken this frame of whatever the situation now, there is always a better course of action. So yeah, I've, I have mood swings, I've got ups and downs, I've had lots of downs as well as ups. And you know, there are times when illness or other things have just made that a lot harder to get in that positive frame. But I've always managed to come back to this frame saying, Well, wherever I am, there are things which are more likely to lead to a better outcome than less thing. And I think one, one of the most important things in life and in investment is this idea of sunk costs.

Ross (29m 35s):
And I, that's one of the, I think one of the foundation of a large proportion of investment errors is this idea of sunk cost. All right, I have made an investment, it's gone to half of its value. The fact that it's gone to half of its value is absolutely irrelevant. The point is, this is where it is now. Is it gonna go up from now or down from now? And wanting to get your money back that you invested into it is absolutely irrelevant. The point is, that's where it is now. Is it gonna go down? Is it gonna go up? And that hope of regaining your money is just an emotion, which is absolutely misleading and, and terribly destructive in investment.

Ross (30m 21s):
And the same thing in life. All right, I made a bad decision this bad thing, which is outta my control happened to me. I'm in a, you know, this, this is where I am. I've lost all my money, whatever it may be. That's the past. The only thing you can make a decision about, the only thing you can act about is the future. So you do need to let go of the past in a way. I think for investors, that's a particularly pointed, an important lesson. Doesn't matter what you bought something at or where, what the history was. The point is what are your assets now? What's the allocation? And is this the best? And if not, then we should change it so that it is better irrespective of what happened in the past.

Ross (31m 4s):
And the same thing in life where it is about saying, Okay, this is where I'm at, and it may be depressing. It's not a not a good situation. You should

Phil (31m 14s):
Not a pre side.

Ross (31m 15s):
I've, I've had ups and downs. There are times when I think, oh my God. But I then managed to get to this point saying, Okay, well what is it that I should do now? What are those next steps? So I would say I've often been beaten, beaten down, but I've never quite been hopeless because I've just managed, again, that state of saying, All right, well, okay, what are the, what's the, what are the things which I need to do next? Let me just do those whether I feel like it or not. And that will help me get back on the right course.

Phil (31m 50s):
Ross, I've been really enjoying this discussion. How can listeners find out about you and your work and more about what you're doing and what you've got to say?

Ross (31m 58s):
So the book is Thriving on Overloads. And I would hope that the old adage, wherever good books of board applies, or if you don't find it the first place you look, you can find it somewhere else. Also, have a website thriving on overload.com, which has not just information about the book, but also a podcast as it happens. And an online course where for those who want to dive deeper, they can actually provides that the training and helping people to build their own personal information plan, which serves them in their purpose and a lot of other resources and more generally. My work as a keynote speaker and you know, strategy advisor, you can go to rossdawson.com, or just search Ross Dawson or Thriving on Overload.

Ross (32m 43s):
I'm sure you'll find some useful resources on the way.

Phil (32m 47s):
I forgot to mention the podcast. Tell us the name of the podcast,

Ross (32m 50s):
Thriving on Overload.

Phil (32m 51s):
Fantastic. Okay, well, we'll put links to all of those in the description, in the notes in the blog post, so listeners can find out more. Ross Dawson, thank you so much for joining me today. It's

Ross (33m 1s):
Been a great pleasure.

Phil (33m 2s):
If you found this podcast helpful, please tell a friend, especially if it's someone who needs to start thinking about investing for their future, you'll be helping them and helping me to keep this show on the road.

4 (33m 12s):
Shares for Beginners is for information and educational purposes only. It isn't financial advice, and you shouldn't buy or sell any investments based on what you've heard here. Any opinion or commentary is the view of the Speaker Only not Stocks for beginners. This podcast doesn't replace professional advice regarding your personal financial needs, circumstances, or current situation.

Phil (33m 31s):
And thank you for listening to my podcast.

Shares for Beginners is for information and educational purposes only. It isn’t financial advice, and you shouldn’t buy or sell any investments based on what you’ve heard here. Any opinion or commentary is the view of the speaker only not Stocks for Beginners. This podcast doesn’t replace professional advice regarding your personal financial needs, circumstances or current situation.