Rebellious Thoughts #69 - 🤘 How to Hack Culture

Hey Rebels!

As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game.

Last week, we launched the Life Shake Up! Community (starting late March)—a space and program to help you shake up your life, your career, de-risk your financial position and to simply create more freedom to do the stuff that makes you happy.

Lots of people asked for more details, so this week, I decided to give you a starting point.
We created a FREE 5-day email course “the ShakeUp! Starter Series” —short, punchy lessons designed to challenge the way you think about your future and get you moving. In your inbox, every day, for 5 days.

Click here, opt in, and we’ll send you one lesson per day over the next few days so you can experience it for yourself. It’s free. Just take the first step.

YEW!

So… If you ask an Argentinean how many fingers they have the answer is twenty - not ten - 20 fingers! We have “hand fingers” and “feet fingers” all of them fingers - hahahaha - You didn’t know you wanted to know this but I did so now you know - you are welcome.

Let’s get into it

Completely blown away by a book a friend gave me last year that I have finally picked up. It’s not a new book (2019) but it is as relevant as ever. It’s called Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie, and it’s a window into the world of Cambridge Analytica’s (CA) mechanics for controlling humans (read this article if you've forgotten about it). The crazy thing, and I encourage you to find it and read it, is that not only did they control humans with incredible tangible and scary results, but it is still being done today… and in one way, shape or form we are all contributing to it. I am sure I am going to share many passages of the book over the next few months but here comes one that I think is awesome and it’s related to the saga of Cambridge Analytica, but more generally to business.

The author (perhaps a genius behaviouralist and an incredible human data scientist) faces an interesting challenge: explaining to someone that if you want to change culture you first need to define what that culture is. He argues that if you can’t define it, you can’t measure it and if you can’t measure it you can’t know if you are changing it.

You may have a similar experience to me, but as much as I have seen dozens of different tools to measure culture and I have a consulting business that helps transform culture…. it is and has always been hard to measure, and more often than not feels like an art form more than a science. But I love how the book made me rethink some of my postures.

He uses Italians as an example.

Italians are known to be extroverted and passionate.

This is a stereotype of course, BUT, if you visit Italy and then Finland you will indeed notice (no need for research) the drastic difference… Italians are louder, hands going everywhere, lots of facial gesticulations, a lot more pasta and pizza, etc. There are things you can define as Italian culture.

We often use language that very much relates to personality when we describe culture… and we use this personality language for people and for peoples (individuals and aggregates).

Sure not all Italians are extroverted and loud and move their hands, but if you plot the Fins and the Italians on a curve, the top of the bell curve, the average Italian, is more extroverted than the average Fin.

So… get this… the author, when helping set up Cambridge Analytica, knew that if they could infer certain cultural traits from Facebook personal information on people and were able to describe culture and plot a distribution chart, they could technically change culture… the crazy thing is that they did, and the book explains how Brexit and various other elections in the US and around the world were manipulated by weaponising social media.

Now, think of the culture of your team, or your business… and imagine it in this super simple way:
The stereotype of your business is that they are all Finnish and you want them to be more Italian.

One of the measurable traits you can infer from watching them in meetings is how much they move their hands. Say the average Fin in a conversation moves their hands every 6th word and an Italian it’s every 2nd word.

Now of course you know that if your team moved their hands more and behaved more like Italians your business would sell more and do better.

So, you implement programs and work hard to push that average hand gesture from every 6th word to every 2nd word. This simplifies my understanding of cultural change in business, and although we all know it is not as easy as that, it is a wonderful way to think about it and talk about it and design change with it.

This is a real practical way of thinking about the often intangible elements of culture.

Here is your challenge - can be your team, your family, your business, your department:

I’m playing with it just so you know. Yew!

Love,

Gus

As mentioned before, last week we launched the Life Shake Up! Community
This isn’t another self-improvement course. Life Shake Up! is a movement. A mindset shift. A no-BS community that will help you break free, reinvent yourself, and start making bold moves.

Inside our community, you get:
✅ Weekly coaching calls with Gus and team to keep you moving forward
✅ A private members-only chat for support, wins & accountability
✅ Proven frameworks & tools—but with guidance so you actually use them
✅ A community of people just like you, shaking things up together

Big shifts don’t happen in isolation. If you're serious about making real changes, join us inside. Check it out now!

HEY! Lucas, who helps me with some projects like this one, has a cool newsletter. Check it out!

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