Relentless Relevance
On Tuesday night, I attended the launch of Rich Mulholland’s new book, “Relentless Relevance”. It was profoundly insightful. It forced me to really dig deep into where my journey is today and how to navigate the future in a relentlessly disruptive and often scary world.
To quote Rich Mulholland, “The world is shifting at an unprecedented pace; we are watching the world change, we are watching intelligence change, and we are watching the change of the very essence of what it means to be human. If you are not relentlessly fixated with relevance today,y you will be ruthlessly annihilated by irrelevance tomorrow.”
Reading his book, what I thought was fascinating was the way he positioned the understanding of relevance to longevity. Epigenetics (The power of ageing well) is one of my passions. For me, health is the true foundation of success.
My passion is identity intelligence. I loved what Rich said in his book about identity and habits. He reflected that while books like “Atomic Habits” focus on patterns of power, there appears to be a gap in documenting how we maintain patterns of power. I found that enlightening because of my own lived journey.
Over the past 15 years, I embarked on a health journey following a devastating time in our lives when I was broken and on my knees. That brokenness became my greatest gift because I was forced to reinvent myself.
However, I only read “Atomic Habits” many years later, after having already claimed an entirely new identity and instilled new patterns of behaviour, from conscious eating to conscious moving to conscious thought leadership to conscious tribes. I literally live “Atomic Habits” now, but I did not learn them through reading books.
I learned it through my lived journey of trial and error over 15 long years. What I found fascinating is two elements that Rich touched on. The key is not to “do what you love but to learn to love what you do.
I speak and write on the mindset of identity. That is where the power of consistency lies.
The other critical element he highlighted is that “the winners of the future will not be the people to use AI or machine intelligence to make their lives easier but the people who use it to reach new levels of hard.”
I always say “do the hard things so that you can become soft in the critical things.”
The final thing which touched me in his book linked to doing the hard things is that “Expectation is the fuel of entitlement and entitlement is the enemy of appreciation.” Let that one digest slowly. It's a huge element of what I call Identity Intelligence™.
When I was younger, I started an MBA, but then my life took a different turn, and I became an entrepreneur in action rather than an academic. My MBA became an entrepreneurial journey of 26 years through Mastery By Action instead. That is why I am so passionate about giving back through entrepreneurial education, particularly focused on financial literacy for SME’s and the power of Identity.
I am an eternal student of “learning streaks and applying action” rather than formal education. That is why the events run by organisations such as Suits and Sneakers fill my tank with manageable chunks of knowledge that make learning fun, entertaining, valuable, and deeply practical.
There is so much in Richard's message of “Relentless Relevance” that it will take three blogs to do it justice.
I want to say thank you to Mark Sham and the team at Suits and Sneakers for constantly challenging my thinking, my thought leadership, and my exposure to curiosity. As Rich said on Tuesday night, “Curiosity is the super fuel of relevance, and mischief-making is the essence of entrepreneurship.”
Let's all continue to be mischief makers so we can live in curiosity, optimism and the eternal energy of making mischief.
