If you don't prioritize your life, in 2017, someone else will. #HappyNewYear.

This is a great quote adapted from the wisdom of Greg McKeown. So my question to you – as my wife and daughter sleep soundly – giving me this hour to blog is…

What are your priorities for 2017?

AND….

What are you grateful for? 

This last point I will tackle first – as it’s more important. It’s key for your happiness and the happiness of your world.

What have you been actively grateful for in your life in 2016?

Many people have said 2016 is the worst year EVER. Actually...

the “ Fuck you, 2016” sentiment is likely just acollective feeling, borne by social media, that this was “ the worst year ever”

Which makes me think perhaps some people don’t write down what they are grateful for. And many people don't have a full grasp of the technological and demo-graphical changes that are causing this psychological magnification.

I urge you in 2017 to start doing just that. The former rather than the latter.

Write down a list of what you are grateful for.

Every 5 days or so I write down a list of what I am grateful for. What has gone well that day. And what I will do the day after.

Next year I will make this part of my daily ritual.

In 2016 I did it for over 3 months after a health scare.

Today I worked out the TOP 5 things this year I am grateful for.

They were in no particular order:

1.   My Health

2.   Our Wealth

3.   The Family

4.   My work

5.   Opportunities.

In 2016… I can sum up each relatively quickly….

My Health.

Simple but key to existence. On a basic level I am here. I exist free of known disease. My back is getting better and stronger. I am overweight and I am 40. I am not fit.

But apart from that I go to the gym a few times a week now. More than ever before.

Our Wealth:

Again, not much to report. Not that we don’t have much. We have lots.

As this infographic shows if you have the basics you are already richer than 85% of the world!

But I could do with a little more (couldn’t we all.)

And so this year I am going to investigate where it all goes and save more.

I will also invest. In myself and in tech companies I believe in. Including my own.

The Family:

I am very lucky. My daughter is fully fit, funny as f%^& and always pushing my buttons and boundaries. And those of my wife. And thinking about she does the same ;)

I am not as close as I would like to be to my closest family – due to my business being set up miles away from them. But my extended family are generous to a fault in both time and energy. Plus we (as a family) have all missed a few “bullets” from the big C this year and so I am continually grateful.

My Work:

Over the last year, I have produced more workshops and training sessions than I ever have done before. I have:

-      Produced workshops to over 200 young people. Creating courses for specialised audiences. That have been some of the most rewarding courses I have ever produced.

-      Worked with some BIG household names. Training them and their partners in social media marketing, social selling and digital marketing.

-      Passed a personal milestone in money made in a day. More than I have ever made before. Making more in one, very special, week than I made in a year - 20 years ago!

My Opportunities:

I am very lucky to life in Manchester, a city growing in its influences and confidence. And I am even luckier to live near the recently created Media City. This means my opportunities are well positioned so I have been lucky enough to:

-      Been asked to work on great tech space support ideas like LAUNCH at Media City.

-      Launch my own tech startup called FFFlip.

-      Be working with the UTC at Media City with their employment engagement piece.

-      Been on national radio stations as a digital marketing / social media expert. For all the UK countries – some of them a couple of times. Even been on Radio 4 and the World service!  

-      Been asked to be on the BBC breakfast show - many times. In fact, I have now been on TV more this year than all the appearances on any channel - in my whole life before. Have even done the newspaper reviews a couple of times... 

So what are my priorities for 2017?

And what are yours? Do you have areas of your life that you would like to improve? Or master? Or perhaps you want to start something completely new and go back to being a novice to improve yourself? 

All I can do is give you mine – which might surprise you.

My Priorities:

-       Either build my brand or forget about it. As going on the BBC is lovely but it only makes sense if part of a continued strategy to be famous. 

-       Be the change I want to see in the world. It’s time to influence people by being rather than just telling. Training others is great but I need to do more.

-       Get a handle on money (not saying this year has been bad it hasn’t.) But I really want money to start working for me rather than me just work for it.

-       Start working with other people more. Going solo as a consultant is heart breaking. Handing over projects and moments is soul destroying for me. 

-       Family first, business second. It’s time to be more patient with my own ideas and failures. Making myself mentally ill for a success that is eluding me - is blinding me of seeing the very success I already have achieved. 

Which is the point of this blog on the eve of 2017. 

To see what I have achieved. What you have achieved. Not necessarily what the world has achieved.

Happy New Year. 

Please do write down a few things that you are grateful for this year.

Perfect timing, my wife has just woken up - it's time to crack open the champagne ....

Very wise words.... An Inconvenient Truth About Silicon Valley and Donald Trump

Probably the cleverest thing I have read about Trump so here it is... Not written by me. 

My own thoughts on Trump are not safe to write down....

An Inconvenient Truth About Silicon Valley and Donald Trump

The President-elect’s disruptive platform sounds awfully familiar to the valley’s leaders

I’ve come to believe that Donald Trump makes Silicon Valley’s founders uncomfortable precisely because they all have so much in common. Hear me out. They consider themselves the ultimate disruptors. Trump won the presidency (if not the popular vote) on the promise of being anti-establishment, and changing everything. This ethos has long defined the valley; it’s the idea from which tech’s founders take their sense of identity — and one that still reverberates through garages, startup accelerators, and shared office spaces from Palo Alto to San Francisco. Everything can always be reimagined so that it’s better than it is right now, and the best way to do it is to ignore the current constraints and systems and dream up new ones.

The problem, however, is that many of the valley’s most disruptive ideas have transformed into massive companies that have established themselves in our culture and economy as mainstream. Techies may think of themselves as disruptors, but they’ve emerged as the titans of industry — the kind of established power brokers that don’t take well to the chaos that comes with new disruption. And Trump? He is disruption embodied. Trump reminds them of the gap between their roots, and their current status. (Check out today’s piece on Uber in a Trump era.)

Often, when people set out to take down the establishment, they succeed in creating a more elite and calcified version of it. It’s classic. Earlier this week, I published a story about Peter Thiel’s eponymous fellowship program, which pays young people to forego college in favor of entrepreneurship. Intended to be a meritocratic way to help smart teens learn about entrepreneurship without going into debt, the Thiel Fellowship has become a prestigious entitlement bestowed on already successful young men (and just a few women), many of whom look and sound remarkably similar to Thiel himself. He set out to take down higher education— to prove that a pedigree didn’t have to matter. Instead, he just created an even more elite pedigree, bestowed to an even narrower cast of already established entrepreneurs.

In many ways, the fellowship’s trajectory reflects the recent history of Silicon Valley. Its charter members were renegades and contrarians — people who took issue with the status quo, and who had radical ideas about how to change the future. But their success in pushing those ideas forward came with a price: Those ideas moved the founders who had them from fringe to mainstream. In the United States and the beyond, everyone got a personal computer. Then an AOL account. Then Facebook. Then a smartphone, and on and on. And as technology crossed from nerdland to the center of our economy, the companies that introduced it grew from innovative tiny startups to the titans that now threaten nearly every industry. 

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are five of the seven largest companies in the world. (Berkshire Hathaway and ExxonMobil are the other two.) In other words, the disruptors have become the establishment.

Which brings me back to Peter Thiel. He has become the de facto ambassador to the valley. He has grown up to become a member of the new establishment, without abandoning his roots. He is a self-made billionaire, having benefitted from the valley’s rise; he wrote Mark Zuckerberg his very first check for Facebook. But he’s also the kind of freethinking contrarian who positions himself as antiestablishment. 

He is always willing to bet against the status quo, to take a swing at the institution. I wrote about the fellowship in part because I wanted to understand Thiel better by learning about the people with whom he surrounds himself. In doing so, I re-read Zero to One, the best-selling book he wrote with Blake Masters on building startups. Even those people who take issue with Peter personally will often step back and acknowledge that it’s a very smart look at what makes valley companies successful.

 My favorite thought that he introduces is one that embraces the power of humans. He writes: 

“Other animals are instinctively driven to build things like dams or honeycombs, but we are the only ones that can invest in new things and better ways of making them.”

In classic Silicon Valley fashion, Thiel made a contrarian bet that the ideas Trump espoused — primarily, that many Americans weren’t being served by the current establishment, and a massive disruption could unleash the change they needed — would be embraced. 

He was right. The danger is that Thiel’s stab at remaking the administration under Trump will turn out as misguided as his attempt to build a program to replace college — instead of introducing the change that will make all of American great again, it will simply make a lot of rich white men (and a few women) even richer and more entrenched than they already are.

VERY VERY WISE WORDS INDEED. 

And sadly probably what's going to happen. The rich will get very quickly richer.

And for a more balanced and even clevererererer view - which is still kinda surprisingly pro trump - check this out.