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 to be phenomenal. See more at: http://orrenprunckun.com

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.

32. Life
Persistence pays off.

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.

41. Life
Gut instinct exists.

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.

52. Life
Privacy is dead.

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.*

118. Wealth
*Not financial advice.

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.

142. Relationships
Fuck first.

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.

172. Relationships
Labels matter.

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