Jonar Nader explains why those who are labelled as ‘infuriators’ are often just trying to stop others from infuriating them. Jonar speaks about the deadly intangible diseases, including the disease of abdication, that stops people from achieving success. Further below is a transcript of the video.
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Here is the transcript:
Jonar Nader: We teach people one side of the virtues but I think life trips you up when you don’t understand the opposite of your virtues. So, if you understand love but you don’t understand hate even though I don’t want you to foster hate, but if you don’t know what it looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like, it’ll jump on you, pounds on you.
Female: Yes.
Jonar Nader: And you find the greatest successful people in the world are those whom you might say infuriate other people but they’re not really infuriating other people. They are stopping others from infuriating them because they have momentum, they have direction, they know where they’re going, and other wishy-washy people around them keep telling them why they should slow down and destroy their momentum.
And I’m a consultant to business but I really, I tell my clients, ‘I don’t care about your business. I care about your people. And the only reason I consult to business is so that we can do something to improve life because business basically controls most of the world.’ I mean, if you talk about IBM, it’s – the capital flow is bigger some countries put together and it employs more people than some countries have as a population. So, a corporate life seems to dominate us. And I have seen people go home crying and I’m now writing about taking control of your career. But unfortunately, people don’t know how to do that …
Female: No, they go to school.
Jonar Nader: … because they go to school to get a university degree. And they think, ‘Oh! That might work.’ Or they get a divorce, they think, ‘That will make me happy.’ Or they get married and they think, ‘That will make me happy.’ And they always think happiness is somewhere else. They go on holidays over there because over there I’ll find happiness.
Male: Because you touched on university. You mentioned in some of your notes as a kindergarten for adults.
Jonar Nader: Yes. If by 13, you don’t have a gut feel and by 16, you’re not sure then I can assure you by 21, you still don’t know. So, you have people at 26 years of age still studying and still don’t know where they’re heading.
Female: And I – yes. And I …
Jonar Nader: I mean this notion …
Donna: Well, you’re like that.
Jonar Nader: No, I left school at 14 because I knew and people called me a school dropout and I said, ‘What do you mean a dropout? Is that – are you putting a negative tone on that because I finally knew where I was heading?’
Female: Yes.
Jonar Nader: And what I was doing? And you know, and so, life is about advantage. And they think I have an advantage if I have a Masters, whatever. But you won’t have 50,000 people a year who get one. So now, what’s your advantage? And the real advantage for me is not – yes, it’s what’s in your head. It’s what you do with what you have.
We are lopsided in our approach in that we all understand fear, none of us understand courage. And so, when you fuse fear plus courage, you arrive at conviction. And when you meet someone with conviction, you call them control freaks. You call them hard to get along with.
Female: Yes.
Jonar Nader: You call them prima donnas. But they know what they want to do.
Male: Yes.
Jonar Nader: As a digital age philosopher, my job is to help you ask the right questions. I found in life that if you tell people what to do, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, don’t do – don’t – they say, ‘Look, I’ve heard it all before. I know it. Thank you.’ And they still go and do it because it is not their knowledge.
Female: Yes.
Jonar Nader: So, if they read a book and the book says, do and don’t. They say, ‘Look, yes, I’ve heard that before.’ So, what I do is I don’t challenge them that way. I ask them to ask themselves the right questions and I tell it in such a way that they build curiosity. And I lead them with that curiosity. And nothing mean to someone than wanting to know the answer. And I’ll find it.
Female: Now, How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People must be very popular. It’s in its third edition now.
Jonar Nader: Well, it hit number one in New Zealand.
Female: Yes, yes.
Male: Why do we avoid conflict?
Jonar Nader: Okay. Well, because we don’t have courage. And the definition of courage is to not allow anything or anyone to weaken your resolve. Many of us resolve and we even have New Year’s resolutions. We say, ‘I resolve that I will do this. I will stop smoking. I will tell my boss that I want a pay rise.’ But – but courage is not allowing people to weaken that resolve which means the absence of courage. For example, if you lack courage, it means that you go – want a pay rise and your boss does is threaten you, well what are you going to do about it? Nothing because you’re one week away from poverty. Most people are one paycheck away from poverty.
Female: Yes.
Jonar Nader: So, that weakens your resolve. Where will I get another job? I don’t have a good qualification. Oh, that will weaken my resolve. So, all of a sudden what you know is to be true, you cannot articulate, you cannot enact because all these get in the way.
Female: Yes.
Male: Exactly. And you touched on the nine modern diseases of failure.
Jonar Nader: Nine deadly.
Male: Deadly disease.
Jonar Nader: Intangible that they are.
Male: Yes.
Jonar Nader: And these diseases cannot be seen. And so for example, if you know, if I grab this …
Male: Yes.
Jonar Nader: … I’m sure it will annoy everyone on television and they’ll say, ‘What’s this guy doing with this?’ See, it’s tangible. And they say, ‘Geez, weird.’ Because the tangible things are instant. Everyone can see it. Now, but can they look at someone, an executive or a child and say that that child has got this trait or that trait. And the nine deadly – the tangible diseases begin with a poor abdication. And we abdicate. The very fact of buying insurance means I abdicate. I buy my car and I pay you $500 a year and if anything happens to it, it’s your problem. So, I’ve abdicated my responsibility for my car.
Now, we do that with school. We say, I abdicate my education to the teacher.
Female: For ten years, yes, yes.
Jonar Nader: Yes. And my welfare to the government, my future to the clairvoyant, my, you know, wealth to the lottery, and my career to my boss, and my happiness to my lover, and everything is over there. Remember? I keep saying. And that is a disease. There are other diseases like selfishness, like simplicity. And these intangibles are not seen because how can you see a busted, an idiot, a backstabber, a corporate, a monger?
Male: Absolutely.
Jonar Nader: And when I did use to see them, is that good English?
Female: Yes.
Jonar Nader: When I did see them, my boss would say, ‘Jonar, that’s a personality type.’ I say, ‘No, no. This guy is destroying our company. This guy is – is destroying people’s energies at the office.’ But the boss can’t see that because these idiots who actually destroy our lives know how to suck up to the boss and they look really good upward.
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