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On the night of Friday June 7, 2013, a pre-wedding party was in progress at the Cavalli Club – named after the renowned Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli – within the 5-star luxury Fairmont Hotel in Dubai. There was champagne in abundance and some of the performers on ground for the all-night gig included DJ Jimmy Jatt, leading comedian, Basketmouth, singer Wizkid and rapper Naeto C. It was the summer party to be at.The next day, the wedding proper held at the JW Marriot Marquis Hotel on the same street. Most of the floors at the hotel and the nearby Mirage Palace were occupied by the over 300 guests who had flown in for the wedding from Nigeria to attend. Over 40 private jets were buzzing in and out of the United Arab Emirates with sitting governors, senators, traditional rulers, government officials, politicians and businessmen.The entire weekend was, as tabloids will call it, awash with pomp and pageantry. The groom was Oluwatosin Omokore, first son of Olajide Omokore, a maverick oil trader; and his bride was Faiza Fari, first daughter of Abdulkadir Fari, then Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum Resources. Encomium Magazine reported that souvenirs at the wedding rumoured to have cost an estimated $8 million (N1.2 billion using the exchange rate at the time), included the Blackberry Q10 released in January of that year, other smartphones, Bang & Olufsen luxury speakers.In the aftermath, the then Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, acting on the recommendation of his petroleum minister and Mr. Fari’s boss, Diezani Alison-Madueke,suspended and later redeployed the father of the bride to another parastatal. His accounts were also reportedly frozen by the Economic & Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC. An insider at the ministry told The Nation newspaper that the wedding was deemed too lavish for a civil servant to fund and that in allowing his daughter marry the son of a major player in his sector, Mr. Musa had triggered a conflict of interest.In reality, the wedding had been primarily funded by Mr. Omokore who understandably spared no cost to give his first son the gift of a good wedding. Mr. Fari who reportedly had been a little too strict in demanding due process on some deals relating to marginal oilfields, was simply the sacrificial lamb who had to go for delaying Mrs. Alison-Madueke’s desires. He was one of many in a revolving door policy that saw five group managing directors and several permanent secretaries exit the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, in the five years of Mrs. Alison-Madueke’s tenure.Back in May 2010, the death of Umaru Musa Yar’adua precipitated the ascension of Goodluck Jonathan as Nigeria’s president. There was pressure on him from his kinsmen and others within the enclave of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, to run for the 2011 elections. It was only expedient to turn to the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, a major source of election funding for incumbents since the return of democracy in 1999.To ensure a smooth process, Rilwanu Lukman, the incumbent minister who favoured a restructuring of NNPC into a full commercial entity, was replaced with Diezani Alison-Madueke in a cabinet reshuffle. Mrs. Alison-Madueke eventually became like an unofficial prime minister. From then till May 2015 when the Muhammadu Buhari presidency took over; anyone that stood in her way was removed either by her personally or the presidency acting on her recommendations.In an era where Nigeria earned over N51 trillion from oil and the commodity price peaked at $112 per barrel, it was the best of times to have the listening ears of the president and the discretionary powers of an oil minister as enshrined in the Petroleum Act of 1969. In that five-year period, Mrs. Alison-Madueke, whose name means ‘look before you leap’ in her native Ijaw, leapt to unbelievable levels of immense influence and the accompanying affluence.DIEZANI’S CHILDHOODBorn Diezani Kogbeni Agama in the city of Port Harcourt two months after Nigeria’s independence, the young girl had a decent childhood as the third of six children. Her father Frederick Agama – had a distinguished career at Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) as a management executive before retiring to become a traditional ruler of the Epie-Atissa Clan in Yenaka, Bayelsa State. Her mother, Beatrice Agama, is a retired schoolteacher. Though her parents were not as wealthy as rumoured, they lived a decent life by all standards. She grew up at the Shell residential camp in Rumuomasi, Port Harcourt and schooled in Warri, Port Harcourt and Mubi.An intervention from her maternal grandfather N. K. Porbeni, a renowned Ijaw chief from Delta State led her to study architecture rather than the creative arts. “He travelled all the way from Warri [to the UK] to tell me in no uncertain terms that my father hadn’t spent all that money on my education for me to study Fine Art”, she said in a 2007 interview.Mrs. Alison-Maueke began her architecture training in the UK. It is unclear why she abandoned her studies in the UK, but she later moved to the United States to do a 5-year architecture course at Howard University. She graduated in 1992. Right after her graduation from Howard, she was employed by SPDC and would continue to go through the ranks, heading strategy and planning team handling its joint ventures with the NNPC. By this time, she was married to a former military governor of Imo and Enugu State, Alison Madueke.In 2006, she was appointed Executive Director, Facilities, becoming the company’s first female Nigerian director in its entire history. Ann Pickard, the controversial American who headed Shell’s operations in Nigeria from 2005-2010 fast-tracked her from mid-level executive, singling out her and other promising young women for top roles. Perhaps Ms. Pickard, believed to have placed moles in the Nigerian government –according to US diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks – and described as “having a willingness to manipulate every available political angle to further the company’s interests”, saw a reflection of herself in the younger woman.While at Shell, she was rumoured to be involved in contract racketeering and it was not uncommon to see staff in the corridor whispering about her dirty deals during lunch breaks. “The Business Integrity Department takes time to act”, an insider in Shell Nigeria revealed on the condition of anonymity, because the company strictly forbids unauthorised persons from talking to the media. “It can be tracking an executive for years, so it would have caught up on her activities sooner or later. She got away with it because she was ED for just over a year.”In July 2007, she was named Minister of Transport. Her tenure was brief and uneventful save for when she wept openly in August that year while inspecting a bad road. Between December 2008 and March 2010, she was heading the Ministry of Mines & Steel Development.During her time in the Ministry of Mines & Steel Development, it funded ‘Hollywood Glamour Collection’, a new limited-edition collection of Nigerian gold and gemstone jewelry by the popular jeweler Chris Aire. The collection was unveiled at an exclusive event in Beverly Hills, California on April 7, 2010, barely hours after Mrs. Alison-Madueke had been moved to the petroleum ministry. In the months after, Mr. Aire registered new companies for the sole purpose of being awarded questionable contracts to handle crude lifting, earning over an estimated $30,000 daily.Her royal heritage, love for jewellery, style and the finer things of life inevitably drew swift comparisons with the late Princess Diana of Great Britain. In time, friends, well-wishers and hangers-on began to call her Princess Di.THE MENOne of these hangers-on was Donald Chidi Amamgbo, the lawyer who reportedly became her lover for a while when they met at Howard. Usually described by the Nigerian press as her cousin, he hails from Imo State, not Bayelsa and runs a thriving U.S.-based legal practice, Amamgbo & Associates. In 2012, he was put on probation by the state bar of California for misconduct.When government appointees and politicians in general assume office, friends, well-wishers, government contractors and stakeholders in their specific industry find ways to contact them through their network, sending unsolicited gifts to them and their relatives and taking out pages in the newspapers for congratulatory advertorials.“When someone sends you a $10,000 watch here or expensive jewellery there with no favours asked, you have to call one day to say thanks and have the person visit”, said a former staff of the ministry, who asked not to be named because he still works for the government and has not been permitted to talk to the press. “Or your daughter calls from Dubai that an unknown person paid her tuition for two years and sublet an apartment for her. Can you say no? Even the Bible says it that ‘A man’s gift maketh a way for him’.”No one knows for sure which gifts came to Mrs. Alison-Madueke from some of the men at the centre of the storm in her world today. But they worked regardless because they became her close associates soon enough. There was Kola Aluko, an oil trader seeking a big break; Mr. Omokore, a shipping magnate looking to diversify and swell his fortune. There were also the fronts and middlemen, Benedict Peters and Walter Wagbatsoma.One of the many billionaire conquests of supermodel Naomi Campbell, Mr. Aluko was born and bred in Lagos as one of the nine children of Akanni Aluko, a geologist and popular traditional chief in Ilesha, Osun State. His first reported stint in the oil business was in 1995, after years of wandering through the pharmaceutics and automobile industries, when he cofounded Besse Oil, an oil trading firm. By the mid-2000s, one of his serial companies, Exoro Energy International merged with a partner firm, Weatherford, to become Seven Energy. It was run by Aluko who had one per cent equity, alongside Mr. Omokore and a third man, Phillip Ihenacho.Kogi-born Mr. Omokore, who was given the title of Elegbe of Egbe in his hometown in October 2014 for his commitment to his town, was an affiliate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) from state to national level. As a government financier, he was rewarded with waivers and mega contracts from agriculture to oil & gas.From time to time, there were contingency bailouts requested by members of the inner caucus of government. After the 2012 flooding disaster, he donated N50 million to the victims.In February 2014, Lamido Sanusi, then governor of the central bank was suspended by Mr. Jonathan after a controversial statement about missing $20 billion in crude oil earnings. According to an insider in the oil & gas sector who did not want to be identified due to his current position, Mr. Omokore allegedly doled out $200,000 to a number of local journalists to begin a campaign against the outspoken central bank governor; Mr. Jonathan had apparently fallen for the bait and wanted the pressure off his beloved minister.In 2010, Shell was plagued with a lot of issues in its onshore operations. Oil spills across the Niger Delta had gotten it into a lot of legal tussles; its goodwill with the host communities had been on a decline since the days of slain environmental activist, Ken Saro Wiwa in the 1990s; militants had wreaked considerable havoc on its asset causing countless force majeures; the government was seeking to get more local marginal field operators out onshore. It has gone on a large-scale divesting spree since then. That same year, Shell fixed one of the major pipelines in the country – the 97 kilometre-long Nembe Creek Trunkline passing through 14 oil pumping stations – for $1.1 billion. By November 2013, it was on the market.The company went ahead then to divest its stake (45 per cent) in asset held in joint venture partnership with NNPC which held the remainder (55 per cent) on behalf of the Nigerian government, and focus on the less ‘dramatic’ offshore fields. The divested fields were the OMLs 4, 26, 30, 34, 38, 40, 41 and 42 and Shell sold them to indigenous operators, raking in a total $2.3 billion.Meanwhile NNPC transferred its shares to one of its many loss-making subsidiaries, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, NPDC, for $1.8 billion as valued by the Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR. Till date, over $1.7 billion is outstanding as only $100m has been remitted to NNPC which wholly owns it.On September 16, 2011, a Strategic Alliance Agreement (SAA) was signed between the NPDC and Septa Energy, a subsidiary of Seven Energy for OMLs 4, 38 and 41. Another SAA was signed with Atlantic Energy Drilling Concepts (AEDC) Ltd for OMLs 30 and 34. These companies were registered in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands and in the United Kingdom, limiting the revenue payable to the Nigerian government in form of taxes.The contracts were awarded by single-source procurement, in clear violation of Nigeria’s Public Procurement Act which stipulates that bids be subject to public tender and competitive. Mrs Alison-Madueke also contravened a guideline under the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act 2010 that mandated companies wanting to lift Nigerian crude to show records of involvement in the industry in the preceding ten years.SAAs are usually signed between two or more companies for a number of reasons including collaborating to augment technical expertise, meet capital requirement or reduce high costs of operation. NNPC adopted this approach to meet the huge capital requirement for cash call and lack of required skill and manpower at the corporation.According to the terms of the SAAs, the partner company provides the capital outlay required to lift crude in the assets supplied by the NPDC as well as non-refundable entry fees of $0.30 per barrel and $0.010/mcf, 70 days after the start of exploration activity. It was to recoup its investment by lifting crude. Quite interestingly, another requirement was that the collaborating firm pay a fixed sum of $350,000 per asset annually for five years to facilitate the training of NPDC staff. This came to $1.4 million per year and Atlantic Energy never paid up.Till date, Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) is pursuing Atlantic Energy to get its tax returns. And while the NNPC has moved to terminate the SAAs so it can get new partners who will pay as at when due, a court order obtained in October 2016 by Seven Energy, may be restraining it from doing so.“NPDC has till date paid only $100m for those eight OMLs but is still enjoying the benefits of an owner”, says Waziri Adio, executive secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) which tracks revenues accruing to government.An alternate commercial valuation byPricewaterhouseCoopers in 2015 took Shell’s divested assets into consideration and roughly estimated these eight assets to be worth $3.4 billion in total.“NPDC brought them on as partners because they are supposed to have financial capacity and technical capacity even though the assumption is that NPDC itself has financial and technical capacity to manage the assets”, Adio explains. “These firms had neither and the same assets were used in raising the money. What stops NPDC from raising the money and hiring contractors to do this job as well?”Essentially, an unnecessary medium was created to pay the SAA partners for sourcing capital which they used the national assets to raise. All of this was possible because of Mrs Alison-Madueke’s discretionary powers.In 2014, Mr Sanusi told the Senate that Atlantic had lifted over $7 billion worth of oil between January 2012 and July 2013, but while the NPDC had paid $400 million as petroleum profit tax (PPT), its partner had paid nothing, flouting the PPT Act 2007.“The profit sharing arrangement was too good to be true”, The Cable screamed in its analysis. “Under Article 10 (d) (i)-(v), the two parties were to share “profit oil” and “profit gas” in ratios of 90% for NPDC to 10% for Atlantic (“profit oil” and “profit gas” with regards to undepreciated costs associated to capital costs prior to execution of agreement); 40% to 60% (upon full recovery of development costs by Atlantic); and, thereafter, it would be 70% to 30%.”“Up to the full recovery of development costs related to the continental resources, “profit oil” was to be shared 40% to 60% and, thereafter, 70% to 30%. For the “profit gas” upon full recovery of development costs regarding non-associated gas by Atlantic, NPDC would take 30% and Atlantic 70%, and reverse to 30% to 70% thereafter. Profit gas” from the continental resources was to be shared 30% to NPDC and 70% to Atlantic, and thereafter, 70% to NPDC and 30% to Atlantic.”“When you look at the depositions from the US courts, you see that it (the SAA) was a cover for Mrs Alison-Madueke and others to cream off things that should have come to the Federal Republic of Nigeria”, Mr Adio concludes. According to a July 2017 affidavit at a federal high court, Messrs. Aluko and Omokore owe the Nigerian government the princely sum of $1,762,338,184.40.Curiously, the 55% held by NPDC was not given to the National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), the NNPC subsidiary concerned with supervising Nigeria’s joint ventures (JVs), production sharing contracts (PSCs) and services contracts (SCs). Why then did the NNPC transfer them to the NPDC, which had no capacity for exploration?Back in March 1999, as former military head of state, Abdusalami Abubakar was wrapping up his eleven-month stint in office and preparing for the transition from military to democratic rule, the Deep Offshore and Inland Basin Production Sharing Contracts Act was sent to his desk. The bill was meant to stem declining investment in the upstream sector at that point in time due to the absence of a defined fiscal structure. Nigeria had also entered PSC agreements in 1993* and did not have legal backing for the agreements it was entering.Particularly significant was Section 16.For the purpose of the efficient management of Production Sharing Contracts and joint ventures under this Decree, the National Petroleum Investment Management Services (in this Decree referred to as “NAPIMS’) shall be incorporated into a limited liability company under the Companies and Allied Matters Decree 1990, as amended.Accordingly, NAPIMS shall be vested with the exploration and production properties and assets owned by the Federal Republic of Nigeria for the purposes of this Decree.It was following in a tradition of governments signing controversial or hard-hitting legislations at the end of their tenure. Nineteen days to Democracy Day (May 29, 1999), the bill was signed into law; however, a single clause present in the initial version had been deleted. It was Section 16.The amendment effectively opened the floodgates. “With that clause, JVs would have been incorporated”, says a source within the Ministry of Petroleum who requested to be named because he does not have the permission to on the matter. “If they were, as opposed to the unincorporated JVs agreement we run currently, quite a few things would not be permissible. NPDC would pay its bills, crude lifted will be accounted for, recently incorporated companies will not be given such juicy OMLs to operate, cash calls will not be paid ‘mistakenly’ etc.”“Will NPDC use shareholders’ funds to be doing rubbish?”, the source asked rhetorically. “Will an incorporated company setup to make profit be acting so silly? So many ifs.”If the deleted clause was a loophole, the discretionary powers given to the oil minister in the Petroleum Act was a spade that helped Mrs Alison-Madueke dig into depths previously unknown. The entire petroleum industry is controlled by the president and the minister; the former appoints the latter who is then empowered by law. Only the National Assembly could have checked her excesses, but it didn’t.“The political pressure on petroleum ministers to finance elections has turned NNPC into petty cash machine for government”, says Bassey (last name withheld for anonymity), an industry insider. “That the minister has discretionary powers that makes things worse and that’s what we’re trying to unbundle with the PIB. Discretion can make or mar our industry but it is clear what happens in Nigeria.”Who and what institutions dropped the ball and allowed her fully exercise those powers? “The CBN was definitely not one of them, because Mr Sanusi kept harping on the rot in the oil sector”, says Mr Bassey. “The greatest enablers of corruption are civil servants who keep quiet or look the other way to save their jobs because of the god complex of chief executives in Nigeria. Red flags were raised only because of inter-agency collusion with banks, audit firms etc.”“The government is one single unit”, emphasizes Kola Banwo of Abuja-based Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Center. “Institutions have roles but usually, with the nature of patronage and corrupt party system we operate, corruption is endemic. The NNPC has internal mechanisms and systems to prevent fraud. The relevant National Assembly Committees have oversight roles and could have prevented this. The Office of the Auditor-General could also have made some difference. The EFCC, ICPC, etc. However, these all formed part of the problem and so did nothing then. Some action from one or all of these, could have reduced if not prevented what happened during that period.”Those in the know say it was the impunitywith which Mrs Alison-Madueke broke the rules that set her apart from those before her. There were times when she stopped receiving visitors at the office and made them come to her in the comfort of her official residence. She would keep governors waiting for hours, dodge calls from CEOs and chairpersons of multinationals, employ domestic staff on the bill of the corporation and more.Mrs Alison-Madueke requested kickbacks from her collaborators to approve dubious contracts and the infamous oil swaps which Buhari ended in November 2015. Mr Aluko for instance, admitted paying rent for Mrs Beatrice Agama’s luxury home in Parkwood Point, St. Edmund’s Terrace, St. John’s Wood, London, describing it as “simply gifts to a friend, given long after Atlantic had signed its deal.”Under her, the NNPC ran accounts that CBN and Ministry of Finance were unaware of. The president would regularly send people to her with odd financial requests and she became the nation’s unofficial treasury with the state corporation as her petty cash ATM. As a result, she was not remitting funds and records to the Ministry of Finance which as in turn unable to remit to the CBN.In the run-up to the 2015 elections, pressure mounted again on Mrs Alison-Madueke to deliver funding and then something happened. In October 2014, Bernard Otti a director at the NNPC was appointed deputy group managing director (Finance and Accounts), a position created entirely out of thin air. The press release justified his appointment as needed to transform NNPC into a commercially-driven entity but the truth was that he had to close some deals to secure election funding.After the Mr Buhari’s inauguration, he ran to the UK after reportedly entering a plea bargain with the EFCC; With his help, the EFCC traced monies allocated for the Ekiti gubernatorial elections and other issues. His retirement was later announced by Kachikwu in August 2015.Audits by both PwC and KPMG showed that the NNPC had at its discretion, spent an average of $6 billion annually from 2011 to 2013 and there were no watertight records. A similar amount had also not been remitted on a yearly basis by NNPC to the CBN.After studying the patterns and making calculations, Mr Sanusi cried out in a September 2013 20-page memo to Jonathan that $20 billion was missing. The NNPC claimed the money had been spent on subsidy payments for kerosene and pipeline maintenance even though Mr Yar’adua had ended the payments in July 2009. Another audit by PwC was submitted before the 2015 elections but never released by the government.“Civil society has always suspected that there was corruption in the oil sector”, reveals Banwo. “When information of extravagant spending for maintain jet emerged, civil society raised alarm, called for investigations and her immediate resignation or removal, which the then president ignored. The NASS set up a committee to probe but nothing came out of it.”“When in 2015, the then CBN Governor alleged that she was responsible for the missing $20 Billion from the NNPC coffers, civil society also initiated a campaign for her investigation and removal. The impunity in the then government allowed her get away with the deeds.”If Mrs Alison-Madueke was Princess Di, then Mr Aluko, who was last seen in Porza-Lugano, Switzerland, in 2016, was The Fresh Prince. He owned quite a few private jets and an $80 million yacht, Galactica Star; in September 2013, it was rented to Jay-Z and Beyoncé at the cost of $900,000 a week for two weeks for the latter’s 32nd birthday party. A big fan of Ayrton Senna, he is also a car racing enthusiast and placed third with a Ferrari 458 GT2 at Rome’s Vallelunga circuit in December 2012. Mr Aluko was also the owner of the eighth most expensive condo in New York, costing a mere $50 million.Omokore likewise had expensive lovers including Porsha Williams of; Sanomi and co would reportedly send jets to different cities to pick random girls for weekend parties in cities in another continent. It was the good life.The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a lawsuit under its Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative against the trio asking for the forfeiture of assets worth $144 million,proceeds from the oil contracts. Mr Aluko remains elusive while Omokore has been arraigned in court since July 2016. Mrs Alison-Madueke herself has been arrested even though she is yet to be tried in court. The proverbial mills of God that grind slowly, seem to at last be grinding well“She kept saying ‘when we come back’, says Mr Bassey. “She did not think that Jonathan would lose the elections. Maybe the opaque deals would have continued till now.”Beyond Mrs Alison-Madueke and her oil men, perhaps the biggest fear of stakeholders in the industry is that there could be deja vu in this administration or another. As the salacious details of her time in government circulate, the loopholes that made this possible remain open. The NNPC currently remains more of a political financing tool than a truly national oil company like her peers globally. Newcomers to the party will be happy to take notes – literally.This report was made possible by the BudgIT Media Fellowship 2017 with support from Natural Resource Governance Institute.http://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/242769-special-report-diezani-men-deals-bled-nigeria.html

No. That was a TV caricature trope.They were some Marines in the Viet Nam era who suggested being like him, however. They were called “Mcnamara’s boys” in TV media.It was the one time in the Marine Corps’ history that Marines were drafted.** McNamara’s Boys **Horst Faas/Associated Press, Hamilton Gregory, Spring 2017Quora required LINK: McNamara's Boys .“””” In 1966 the U.S. military desperately needed more troops in Vietnam. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had a plan to get them.In 1966, with American involvement in the Vietnam War rapidly escalating, President Lyndon B. Johnson faced a big problem: How could the U.S. military round up enough men to send to war?Johnson could have moved to revoke student deferments, but in so doing he would have heaped lots of political misery on himself and put his administration at sharp odds with powerful lawmakers,who were writing a new Selective Service statute that would continue to guarantee 2-S deferments to undergraduate college students in good standing.He could also have chosen to draw on the million or so men and women in the National Guard and Reserves. But LBJ and his advisers knew that this course of action would be just as unpopular politically.Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, had another idea: to dramatically widen the pool of draft-eligible Americans by lowering the standards for entry into the armed forces.There were plenty of young people out there who weren’t protected by student deferments but had flunked the military’s entrance exam, the Armed Forces Qualification Test.If the standards for passing the test could be lowered, McNamara argued, tens of thousands of previously “unqualified” young men and women would suddenly be available for military service.In August 1966 McNamara went before the annual convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars to unveil his plan, promising that it would “salvage” some 40,000 draft rejects and substandard volunteers—most of them from “poverty-encrusted backgrounds”—in the ensuing 10 months.“Currently,” McNamara noted, “the military rejects 600,000 young men a year for failure to meet minimum standards.”In his VFW speech at the New York Hilton Hotel, McNamara framed the plan as a compassionate rescue mission.Disadvantaged youths—many from urban slums and rural backwaters—would, he said, be lifted out of poverty and ignorance. They would be taught basic skills, including reading and arithmetic.Though the men may have failed these subjects in school, they wouldn’t fail now because the military was, as he put it, “the world’s greatest educator of skilled manpower.” It knew how to motivate men and deploy an impressive array of pedagogical gadgetry.McNamara had made a name for himself as one of the “Whiz Kids” who helped to rebuild Ford Motor Company after World War II. He believed that the military could raise the intelligence of those it might otherwise reject through the use of videotapes and closed-circuit TV lessons.“A low-aptitude student,” he said, “can use videotapes as an aid to his formal instruction and end by becoming as proficient as a high-aptitude student.”McNamara’s announcement apparently caught the Pentagon by surprise, as the plan was clearly a dramatically expanded version of a proposed three-year, $16.4 million experiment—the Special Training Enlistment Program (STEP)—that Congress had killed the previous year. Nonetheless, Project 100,000—named for its target first-fiscal-year recruitment level—was officially launched on October 1, 1966. By the end of the war, it would bring 354,000 “second-class fellows”—as President Johnson had referred to its recruits in private—into the armed forces.In announcing Project 100,000, McNamara didn’t say anything about combat duty. He said the participants would gain valuable skills and self-confidence, which would help them get good-paying civilian jobs when they got out of the service. To hear him describe it, one would have thought the men were going off to school, not to war.From nearly the beginning of Project 100,000, McNamara’s critics accused him of disguising its true objective: using the poor instead of the middle class for combat in Vietnam. The truth was more complex. McNamara had proposed Project 100,000 two years earlier, seeing it as a way to contribute to the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. In fact, the idea had been kicking around Washington before McNamara arrived on the scene.Its leading advocate was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist who in 1976 would be elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. The best way to alleviate poverty in America, Moynihan’s argument went, would be to draft the hundreds of thousands of young men and women being rejected annually as unfit for military service. Take these young men—mostly inner-city blacks and poor, rural whites—and put them into uniform. Instill discipline. Train them to bathe daily, salute, and take orders. Teach them a marketable skill. After a couple of years, lazy, unmotivated slackers would be transformed into hard-working, law-abiding citizens. Moreover, the new generation of military recruits could then teach their children to be solid middle-class citizens, thus breaking the generation-to-generation continuity of poverty.Johnson and McNamara embraced Moynihan’s concept in 1964, two years before Project 100,000 was launched. Secret White House recordings captured a conversation in which Johnson said that he wished the military could be persuaded to take the “second-class fellow,” adding: “We’ll…teach him to get up at daylight and work till dark and shave and bathe.…And when we turn him out, we’ll have him prepared at least to drive a truck or bakery wagon or stand at a gate [as a guard].”McNamara told LBJ that uniformed officers in the Defense Department were opposed to drafting such men because “they don’t want to be in the business of dealing with ‘morons.’ They call these ‘moron camps’ now, inside the [Pentagon]. The army doesn’t want to be thought of as a rehabilitation agency.”Caption: Infantry trainees at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in 1966 wait for a mock ambush. More soldiers were shipped to Vietnam from Fort Polk than from any other American training base. (Lynn Pelham/The Life Picture Collection/Getty ImagesIn 1964 and 1965 Johnson and McNamara had tried repeatedly to lower the bar for military service, only to be stymied by higher-ups at the Pentagon and their allies in Congress. Democrat Richard Russell of Georgia, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and LBJ’s mentor on Capitol Hill, accused McNamara of trying to set up a “moron corps.” The Department of the Army was more temperate in its criticism, saying only that it wanted to “fight with the highest caliber of men available.”By 1966, however, the top brass, desperate for manpower, had to capitulate: If Johnson and McNamara weren’t willing to draft more middle-class Americans, then “second-class” servicemen would have to suffice. With bitter disappointment and grave doubts, military leaders went along with the decision of their civilian bosses, and Project 100,000 became a reality.Military recruiters, backed by an aggressive public relations campaign (one army ad in Hot Rod Magazine proclaimed, “Vietnam: Hot, Wet, and Muddy—Here’s the Place to Make a Man!”), had great success persuading men from poor urban neighborhoods to join Project 100,000. Glossy brochures with exotic locations and glamorous jobs portrayed the military—even with a war going at full tilt—as a good career choice. The pressure on recruiters to sign up more “volunteers” for the program was intense. Many resorted to using “ringers” to take tests to gain a passing score for enough recruits to meet quotas.Typically, military recruiters would get the names of low–scoring men who were now acceptable to the armed forces and visit them to steer them toward three-year hitches. The recruiters would tell them that if they waited for the draft, they would serve only two years but almost certainly end up in an infantry platoon in Vietnam. But if they signed up for three years, they would be assigned to a noncombat job. There was, however, an important catch: The military didn’t have to honor any oral promise made by a recruiter. A recruiter might promise prospects a job like helicopter maintenance, but after basic training—when it was time to go to a specialized school—the military could decide that their test scores weren’t high enough to qualify for helicopter maintenance. Or if they did qualify but flunked the training, they could be transferred to infantry. Thousands of three-year Project 100,000 “volunteers” ended up in infantry this way.Project 100,000 recruits—“New Standards” men, they were called—were assigned to all major branches of the armed forces: 71 percent to the army, 10 percent to the marine corps, 10 percent to the navy, and 9 percent to the air force.Most of the 354,000 men and women brought into military service through Project 100,000 went to Vietnam, and about half of those who went to Vietnam were assigned to combat units. All told, 5,478 of them died while in the military, most of them in combat. Their fatality rate was three times that of other GIs.Project 100,000 men had to complete basic training, and, in some cases, undergo additional training. Novelist Larry Heinemann, who had served with the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, recalled in a 2005 memoir that in his basic training barracks at Fort Polk, Louisiana, he would look across the street and watch McNamara’s Boys in a special training company. “These were the guys who could not hack it during regular basic training,” he wrote. “It was painful to watch.…Some of them could not even get the hang of so simple a thing as standing at attention, and otherwise seemed severely unsuited for military life.”“The young men of Project 100,000 couldn’t read,” Joseph Galloway, a war correspondent who was awarded a Bronze Star with Valor in Vietnam for carrying wounded men to safety in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, later recalled. “They had to be taught to tie their boots. They often failed [basic training] and were recycled over and over until they finally reached some low standard and were declared trained and ready. They could not be taught any more demanding job than trigger-pulling, [so most of them] went straight into combat, where the learning curve is steep and deadly.”One veteran who had good reason to be dismayed by the deaths of Project 100,000 men in Vietnam was Leslie John Shellhase, who had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and had served as a lieutenant colonel under McNamara on a planning team at the Pentagon in the 1960s. “We resisted Project 100,000 because we knew that wars are not won by using marginal manpower as cannon fodder, but rather by risking, and sometimes losing, the flower of a nation’s youth.” He and other Pentagon planners tried to persuade McNamara to drop Project 100,000. When that failed, they proposed altering the program so that military commanders would be barred from sending low-aptitude men into danger zones. “We never envisioned that these men would be used in combat,” he said. “Instead, we intended for them to be used in service and support areas, where their mental limitations would not cause them to be killed.” Unfortunately, Shellhase and his fellow officers failed in their effort to keep Project 100,000 men off the battlefield.Barry Romo saw a lot of combat in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader in 1967–1968, receiving a Bronze Star for his courage on the battlefield. During his tour, he learned that his nephew Robert, just a month younger than him, had been drafted and was being trained at Fort Lewis, Washington, to be an infantryman, destined for Vietnam. Barry was alarmed because he knew that Robert had failed the army’s mental test. But Project 100,000 had lowered the standards, making him eligible to serve. A host of people—his relatives, his comrades at Fort Lewis, his sergeants, his officers—wrote to the commanding general at Fort Lewis, asking that Robert not be sent into combat because, as one relative put it, “he would die.”But the general turned down the request, and when Robert arrived in Vietnam he was sent to an infantry unit near the border of North Vietnam—one of the most dangerous combat areas. During a patrol, he was shot in the neck while trying to help a wounded friend and died.In a speech delivered 42 years later, Barry Romo said that the family had never recovered from losing Robert. “His death,” he said, “almost destroyed us with anger and sorrow.”Military leaders—from William Westmoreland, the commanding general in Vietnam, to lieutenants and sergeants at the platoon level—viewed McNamara’s program as a disaster. Project 100,000 men were typically slow learners, so they had difficulty absorbing training. And because many of them were incompetent in combat, they endangered not only themselves but their comrades as well.“Project 100,000 was implemented to produce more grunts for the killing fields of Vietnam,” wrote Colonel David Hackworth, who fought in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars and became one of the most highly decorated warriors in American history. “It took unfit recruits from the bottom of the barrel and rushed them to Vietnam. The result was human applesauce.”McNamara’s intentions to use video instruction to raise the intelligence levels of Project 100,000 may have been sincere, but few men actually received it. There was a bloody war raging, and army and marine units in Vietnam desperately needed replacements. Training centers were under great pressure to get troops to Vietnam as quickly as possible. There was no time for remedial reading and arithmetic.Westmoreland estimated that, in fact, only about 10 percent of McNamara’s Boys could be molded into real soldiers. Although some Project 100,000 men did well in the service—passing basic training and going on to productive military assignments—large numbers of them had trouble coping with the demands of military life. They were often hazed, ridiculed, and demeaned. Ironically, McNamara, in one of his speeches extolling Project 100,000, had said, “I have directed that these men shall never be singled out or stigmatized in any manner.”When it was time for Project 100,000 men to leave the military, many of them received a heavy blow. Slightly over half of them—180,000—were separated with discharges “under conditions other than honorable,” a stigma that made it hard to get good jobs because many employers would not hire veterans who failed to produce a certificate of honorable discharge. They were often barred from veterans’ benefits such as health care, housing assistance, and employment counseling. Some of them became chronically homeless and troubled.Although some “bad-paper” vets had been guilty of serious offenses, most had been accused of minor offenses related to the stresses of military life and combat: AWOL, missing duty, abusing alcohol or drugs, or talking back to a superior. David Addlestone, the director of the National Veterans Law Center from its founding in 1978 until his retirement in 2005, said that one of the leading reasons that the military gave for bad-paper discharges for Project 100,000 men was “unsuitability.” Little wonder: Many of the men were obviously unsuitable to be drafted in the first place.Caption: President Lyndon B. Johnson reacts to news of heightened problems in Vietnam while hosting Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (right) at the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall, Texas. (Corbis via Getty Images)In their 1978 book, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation, Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, who were senior officials on President Gerald Ford’s Clemency Board, told of Gus Peters, who “came from a broken home, dropped out of school after the eighth grade, and was unemployed for most of his teenage years. His IQ was only 62.…His physical condition was no better.” Drafted under Project 100,000, Peters was ridiculed by other soldiers, and he failed basic training. Unable to cope with military life, he went AWOL and was eventually given an undesirable discharge. Baskir and Strauss concluded that Peters was worse off when he left the service than when he had entered it. “He still had no skills and no useful job experience,” they wrote, “and he now was officially branded a misfit.”There was a cruel irony in the less-than-honorable discharges. Millions of men who beat the draft through deferments and exemptions suffered nothing. In fact, they held an advantage over men who served: They got first crack at jobs and compiled seniority and experience. Even the draft dodgers who fled to Canada and Sweden got an amnesty. But not McNamara’s bad-paper vets. They had no one to lobby for them.In his starry-eyed belief that videotapes could dramatically transform slow learners, McNamara revealed the same blind faith that deluded him into thinking that he could defeat the enemy in Vietnam by using computers, statistical analyses, and advanced technology. As biographer Deborah Shapley put it, McNamara was “a naive believer in technological miracles.”At the beginning of his program, McNamara had predicted that after returning to civilian life, Project 100,000 men would have an earning capacity “two to three times what it would have been if there had been no such program.” But a follow-up study on Project 100,000 men showed that in the 1986–1987 labor market, they were “either no better off or actually worse off” than nonveterans of similar aptitude.Many veterans of Project 100,000 were psychologically devastated by the war. John Wilson, a psychologist at Cleveland State University who spent several years studying Vietnam veterans’ emotional problems, estimated that thousands of Project 100,000 men who had served in Southeast Asia were so “severely messed up” that they couldn’t function in society—hold jobs, raise families, and cope with day-to-day living.Historians have also rendered harsh verdicts of Project 100,000. In his 1993 book, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, Christian G. Appy of the University of Massachusetts wrote that while the program “was instituted with high-minded rhetoric about offering the poor an opportunity to serve,” its result “was to send many poor, terribly confused, and woefully undereducated boys to risk death in Vietnam.” Anni P. Baker, a history professor at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, has branded Project 100,000 “a disaster, benefiting neither the men nor the Armed Forces.” In 1993 Jacob Heilbrunn, then a fellow at Georgetown University, wrote in the New Republic that “McNamara’s experiment in social engineering had the most awful results,” including ridicule in training camps and death in Vietnam. And the late Samuel F. Yette, a professor at Howard University, said that instead of preparing impoverished young men with skills for a better life, Project 100,000 was “little more than an express vehicle to Vietnam.”Toward the end of his life, McNamara issued a series of candid mea culpas for misjudgments about Vietnam that were made during his tenure at the Pentagon (1961 to 1968), especially his delay in acting on growing doubts that the war could be won. “I’m very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I’ve made errors,” McNamara told filmmaker Errol Morris for The Fog of War, Morris’s Oscar-winning 2003 documentary.Caption: Caskets containing the bodies of U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam are unloaded from an air force transport plane following its return to the United States. (Bettmann/Getty ImagesWhile he never issued a formal apology for his role in the Vietnam quagmire, McNamara, who died in July 2009 at age 93, made clear he was haunted by the blunders made under his watch that cost the lives of thousands of U.S. troops. “People don’t want to admit they made mistakes,” he explained in 2003 to a reporter for the New York Times. “This is true of the Catholic Church, it’s true of companies, it’s true of nongovernmental organizations, and it’s certainly true of political bodies.”Conspicuously absent from McNamara’s apologias was Project 100,000, which officially ended on December 31, 1971. To the very end of his life, McNamara refused to acknowledge the many accounts of abuse, suffering, and death associated with Project 100,000. Selectively looking at the success stories of some Project 100,000 men who did well, he insisted that the program had been beneficial. He was resentful of the term “McNamara’s Moron Corps,” which he had heard for years.Nonetheless, Project 100,000 and other Vietnam-era failures wrecked McNamara’s reputation. “At first admired for his intelligence and analytical prowess, he later became one of the most hated men in America by the officers and enlisted personnel he had led,” Thomas Sticht wrote of McNamara in the 2012 anthology, Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower, 1860–1960. One officer even confronted McNamara in public. As McNamara touted the virtues of Project 100,000 at a Washington conference, an army psychologist who was treating psychologically afflicted Vietnam veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center stood up and spoke out. Although he was a “mere” captain, Dr. Walter P. Knake told McNamara, “What you are doing is wrong!”Regardless of culpability, the results of the project—not its intentions—doomed McNamara’s Boys, who were, on average, just 20 years old and disproportionately black. “They never got the training that military service seemed to promise,” Baskir and Strauss concluded. “They were the last to be promoted and the first to be sent to Vietnam. They saw more than their share of combat and got more than their share of bad discharges. Many ended up with greater difficulties in civilian society than when they started. For them, it was an ironic and tragic conclusion to a program that promised special treatment and a brighter future, and denied both.” MHQ””””, McNamara's Boys .Hamilton Gregory, who served in Army Intelligence in Vietnam in 1968–1969, is the author of McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War.This article appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Vol. 29, No. 3) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: McNamara’s Boys

Over the last 31 years of my life, I've learned a lot through my experiences.These experiences include:1. Having my articles featured on Forbes, Business Insider, Fortune and Inc.2. Starting two companies and building 4 top 100 apps in different categories3. 10 years in the technology industry at amazing companies like Cisco, VMware, Box and Optimizely4. Writing a book on Amazon that hit #1 in the resumes category with over 40,000 Kindle downloadsAnd today, I'll be sharing with you my top 100 tips on work, life hacks and life lessons.To make it easier to read, I've categorized this into three categories for you:Work tips - #1-34Life hacks - #35-55Life lessons - #56-100Hope it helps you live an epic life!Work tips:1. Say no to 1 hour meetings - "I love 1 hour meetings," said no one ever. 1 hour meetings are often unnecessary. You can usually accomplish in 30 minutes what you thought you needed an hour for. 30 minutes will force you to be concise and on point.2. Do the Steve Jobs walk - Steve Jobs often did some of his most important meetings while going for a walk. I do this all the time. First, doing meetings in conference rooms can feel very stiff. Second, getting people outside of their everyday environment may get them to see things from a new perspective. Third, being physically active during your meeting could help you think more clearly. So open the door, get some fresh air and go for a walk.3. Visualize your success - Imagine 3 groups of basketball players.*The first group would practice shooting free throws 20 minutes a day.*The second group wouldn't practice free throws but would visualize themselves making free throws.*The third group would not practice or visualize at all.The results? There was a significant improvement in the second group. In fact, they were almost as good as the first group.By the way, this is a real experiment that was conducted by Australian Psychologist Alan Richardson.So if you want to get that new jobs, imagine yourself prepping for the interview, nailing it and signing the job offer. Visualize what you want your future to be.4. Listen first before speaking - Seek to understand first. How can you make an intelligent remark on something if you haven't taken the time to observe what's happening first? You have two ears and only one mouth. There's a reason for that.5. Keep your daily to do list small - Instead of writing up a huge to do list every day - focus on completing the 3 more important items every day. This forces you to prioritize your activities to ensure you're getting the best return on your energy and time. Ask this question: "Do I really need to do this today?"6. Set goals - If you don't even know where you're headed, how will you create the plan on how to get there? Set your destination first and then set sail.7. Celebrate progress - The journey to your goal could be a long one. So make sure you take the time to celebrate your progress along the way. Eat a nice dinner. High five your teammates. Strike a gong. Do a fist pump. Yell out from the rooftops. Because success is worth celebrating.8. Figure out your why - It's a such a great question that isn't asked enough. Why does it all matter? Figure out your why and that'll be the fuel for your motivation. Whether it's supporting your family or making an impact on the world, figuring out your why is critical to taking your work to the next level.9. Understand your strengths and amplify those - You'll be naturally talented in certain areas or you'll practice a skill enough to become an expert at it. Focus your energy on amplifying those strengths rather than trying to be mediocre at everything. Better to be an expert at a few things than a mediocre jack of all trades!10. Don't burn bridges - I get it, we all work with jerks at some point in our careers. Who cares? Don't let it get to you. There's no need to say anything bad about them. If anything, try to find humor in it, learn from it and move on. You've got better things to focus on. Like being the most epic version of yourself that you can be.11. View challenges as opportunities - Have you ever spent a long time waiting at the post office to ship something before? I know I have. What if instead of complaining of that process, you created an app that would allow you to request a driver to arrive at your house and to pick up and deliver your shipment for you? If you viewed that challenge as an opportunity, you would have created Shyp, an amazing app that does exactly that.12. Shorten your commute - I used to travel over 3 hours on the freeway for work every day for a few years. I was stressed, tired and exhausted. I also wasted a ton of time sitting in a car. It's absolutely not worth it. Work near where you live. If you can, make it within walking distance. Imagine 3 hours a day working on something you love. Time is precious. Don't waste it on the freeway.13. Test your assumptions - Did you know that A/B testing helped Barack Obama raise $60M by running a simple experiment? This blog post from Optimizely highlights how different tests run on media and buttons made a huge impact on results.At the end of the day, all of us have an opinion at work. The only way to know the answer is to test your assumptions.14. Dip your toes into the water - You never really know until you try. If you never try, you'll always be wondering "what if." So what are you waiting for? Want to explore a new career? Want to learn about a different department? Want to start your own business? Dip your toes into the water. Make it happen.15. Give credit where it's due - People can't stand it when someone takes credit for something they didn't do. Don't be that person. Recognize others when they do an awesome job. It creates trust among teammates and will you further as a company.16. Every person you meet is a potential door opener to a new opportunity - Be nice to people. You never know how you can help each other down the road.17. Make data driven decisions - When in doubt, look at the data. What is it telling you?18. Trust your gut - Data driven decisions aren't quite as helpful when there's little or no data to work with. In those cases, go with your gut.19. Focus on the 80/20 rule - 20% of your clients will usually generate 80% of the return. Focus your energy on the work that matters.20. 10 years test - You're going to run into problems that might seem like disasters. Don't freak out. Instead, use the 10 years test. Will this problem matter in 10 days? In 10 months? In 10 years? Probably not. And if it won't, don't stress about it. It's not worth it.21. Do what you love - Life's short. Do you really want to spend 23.8% of your life working at a job that you hate? Didn't think so. Do what you love.22. Focus on making an impact - Don't do work for the sake of looking busy or only because someone told you to. Think about the impact. And if it's not impactful, have the courage to say so. Challenge yourself to do great work that makes an impact.23. Lead with or without the title - You don't need a big title to make a difference at your company. You can lead by driving a new initiative, coming up with an awesome idea or by coaching and encouraging your teammates to be at their best.24. Build a personal brand - You have a living, breathing brand. Want to build a great brand? Dress the part. Act the part. Live the part.For example, if you want to be perceived as a great content marketer, you've got to act the part. You could write a ton of Quora posts, LinkedIn articles and blog posts on the subject of content marketing. That way, when people have a need for content marketing, they think of you because they've seen 500 of your posts.25. Invest in your LinkedIn profile - Nearly every single recruiter who has reached out to me this year found me on LinkedIn. Think about that for a second.Time's have changed.We used to submit our resume to company websites to find jobs. While it can still work, it's not the most effective way to learn about new job opportunities.Once you submit your resume, it's immediately outdated. LinkedIn, however, is brilliant because people are incentivized to update their profiles constantly. So what ends up happening? Recruiters find most of the best talent on LinkedIn.It's a new age folks. Invest in your LinkedIn profile. I have a ton of tips on this in my book The Resume is Dead (It would take us way too long to highlight in this post).26. Leave your business card at home - Add someone on LinkedIn instead. It's easier to keep in touch with them, reduces your administrative work in loading that person into your contact book and updates on each other are easily viewed. Welcome to the cloud.27. Stay humble - You might be pretty good at what you do, but chances are somebody else in the world does it better. And even if you are the best at it, chances are you aren't good at a million other things. So stay humble. Stay foolish. Stay hungry. And keep learning from others.28. Embrace failure and learn from it - You are going to fail at some point in life. It could be a big event, like getting fired. It could be a small event, like forgetting to do the laundry. It's all relative.The important thing is to recognize that the process for dealing with big or small failures is the same.Acknowledge that it happened. Deal with the situation. Learn from it. Improve yourself. And move on.J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, went from being an unemployed single mother living off unemployment benefits to becoming one of the best selling authors of all time.Failure happens. It's how you deal with it that matters.29. Embrace your champions - Along the way, you will find people that genuinely believe in you and your mission. They will cheer you on. Embrace them. Even if your only champion is your mom.30. Embrace your naysayers - On this same journey, you'll also find people who doubt you every step of the way. Embrace them too. Only this time, use that doubt as your source of motivation. I had 4 managers who ranked me second to last in interviews at a Fortune 100 company. I used that to motivate me when I finally landed a job. I ended up managing the #1 operation in the country. Thanks for the motivation.31. Recognize the importance of transparency - People are more empathetic when they understand why things are happening. When they're left in the dark, it becomes hard to build trust. Be transparent.32. Invest in a standing desk - A study from the Annals of Internal Medicine found that sitting increases our chances of getting a disease or condition that will kill us prematurely. Holy. Moly. Get a standing desk. Now. I did this for two years and felt way more productive.33. Work smart - Why are we doing this? Does it have to be done this way? Is there a better way to do it? How can I get a better return in less time?Keep asking questions like this. Working hard is great. Working smart and hard is a even better. #WinningCombo34. Find mentors who live your desired lifestyle - Want to work 5 hours a week and travel the world? Find people who have create a passive income lifestyle successfully like Pat Flynn, Eric Siu and Benny Hsu and have them be your mentors. While they may not be able to mentor you 1:1, you can have them be a virtual mentor by following their website learnings.Life hacks:35. Freeze your fruits/vegetables - You want to eat healthy but your produce always manages to go bad before you can finish it. So here's what you do instead: right before it goes bad, freeze it! Then you can use it in soups, stews or smoothies in a pinch!36. Cut the cable cord and get Netflix - You still get awesome entertainment and just reduced your monthly bill a ton.37. Clean your home once a month - De-cluttering your living space will de-clutter your mind. Here's a simply way to determine what you keep: Have I used this in the last year? If no, donate it.38. Utilize quick pick me ups - Sometimes you just need something to jump start yourself into a happier mood. Watch a funny Youtube video (Jimmy Fallon's Lip Sync Battles, Ellen Degeneres clips), sing one of your favorite songs outloud or dance like nobody's watching. Life's short. You may as well have some fun.39. Buy a chap stick keychain - Have you lost your chap stick before? I've lost a ton. That's why I bought a chap stick keychain. Problem solved. My lips have never been happier. Smooth like butter.40. Host events - When all is said and done, relationships are what matter. Host an event for your friends, family and loved ones so that you get a chance to spend some quality time together. Want to do it on a budget? Make it a potluck.Want to make it work related? That's awesome too. Trust me, your coworkers want to enjoy life outside of the office too. They may not always remember what you did in the office, but they'll definitely remember the epic get togethers you hosted.41. Invest in an awesome mattress - You spend about 33% of your life sleeping. Why would you skimp on your mattress? Help yourself get the best sleep possible.42. Iron your shirt without an iron - Don't have an iron? Your last resort: hang your clothes in the bathroom while you take a hot shower and then blow it dry with a hair dryer. It works for me all the time!43. Arrive at least 2 hours before your flight take off time - Especially if it's an international flight. Trust me, I've flown to over 50 cities in a year. You don't need the stress.44. Pack food for your flight - You don't have to pay a small fortune to have lunch at the airport anymore. Bring your own sandwich, fruit or snack.45. Wiggle your body during turbulence - I use to hate hitting turbulence. It would make me a nervous wreck. The solution? Wiggle your tush when the turbulence hits. You'll feel less of it. I don't know why this is true, but it works. I've tried it a few times now!46. Charge your phone faster - Switch it into airplane mode and it'll charge faster.47. Get an extra battery pack - Let's face it, we use our phones for almost everything nowadays including directions, finding places to eat, communicating and entertainment just to name a few. When our phones die, we're close to being incapable of doing anything.I'm kidding of course. But life does get harder without a smartphone to help out. So buy an extra battery pack.48. Stay away from processed foods - The more you eat whole, natural foods like vegetables and fruits, the more likely your diet will stay healthy. Stay away from the processed stuff.49. Don't live someone else's life - Learn to build your own values, passions, opinions and personality. You are not anyone else. You're completely unique and awesome in your own way. This is your life. Own it.When I told people I wanted to build a blog focused on motivation called www.ceolifestyle.io - some of them were skeptical.Who cares? It's not their life. It's mine. If I get passionate about motivating other people, I'm going to make it happen. #MakeItSo50. Skip the caffeine - You don't need it. You can make yourself more focused and awake by doing things that are completely natural and free. Here are some quick examples: exercise, meditation, drinking enough water (your frequent bathroom trips will make you alert, trust me) and working on something you're passionate about.51. Slow down - We get it. You want to make a dent in the universe. You want to change the world. You want to create something magical. Slow down. Take a deep breathe. You don't have to react instantly all the time. Sometimes, taking a moment to collect yourself and to think about the situation might drive a better outcome for you. I learned this from a special person I met in Spain and it's improved my quality of life tremendously.52. Color code your keys - My friends taught me this trick. Ever fumble through your keys to try to find the right one, only to try it and realize it's not? There's a fix for that. Color code your keys. For example, our garage door is the yellow key, the green key is for the main public entrance and the red key is for our front door to our apartment unit. You can buy colored key covers on Amazon or use nail polish / paint to make the keys color coded. #problemsolved53. Put a small garbage bin in your car - Notice your car getting messy? Admit it, you've tossed stuff you needed to throw away into the passenger seat before. You don't have to live that kind of life. Get a small garbage bin.54. Hang a tennis ball in your garage - Speaking of cars, have you ever had trouble parking your car in the garage? Seriously, it's not easy to make sure that you parked close enough to the wall so that you car doesn't get crushed by the garage door. Hang a tennis ball in your garage so that you know exactly when to stop moving forward.55. Stuff newspaper in your shoes - It'll remove the moisture and some of the smells it's picked up over time. Okay, I admit it, I haven't tried this one myself but I heard it works.Life tips:56. Learn one new thing a day - This could be one word from a new language, a scientific fact, a life hack or anything else that you're interested in. Over time, learning one new thing a day will shape you into awesomeness.57. Remember people's names - Did you know that a study has shown that if you call people by their name, they usually respond with more energy and engagement? Yup, I ran that study. And my sample size group has been the thousands of people I've worked with over my 11 year career in technology. When you say someone's name, it shows that you care. It shows that you recognize their presence. It shows that you're a nice person. Try it.58. Focus only on the present - Stop regretting the past. Stop worrying about the future. Focus on the present. Focus on the now. Feel the sun on your face. Feel the wind behind on your back. Hear the wind as it blows the tree branches. Dig your toes into the sand. Listen when people talk.If you read a page from the last chapter over and over again you'll never finish the book. So stop thinking about the past. Be in the now.59. Listen to your body - When you're exhausted, don't fight it. Take a nap or sleep. When you feel stressed out, take a break. When you feel sick from eating that 10th donut, well, maybe you shouldn't have done that. Learn to listen to the signals in your body and respond in the right way.60. Learn to let go - Mistakes happen. Don't drill on it. Life isn't perfect. Think of any issues you run into as "speed bumps" - they make the ride a little uncomfortable but you'll get through it.61. Read before sleeping - Don't let the blue light from your computer or phone keep you up at night. You can use F.lux, which is an awesome app that makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day. This way you can use your computer to read an awesome book and learn something new. Or you can go the old fashioned route and buy a hard cover book. Getting into the routine of reading before sleeping will help you wind down the day and learn something new at the same time!62. You are the 5 people you surround yourself with - A few months ago, I ran into what I thought was a disaster for my company. A part of me wanted to shut down the company (It's called Collide). My good friend and co-founder Steve challenged me immediately. He asked what I wanted to achieve in life and why I created the company in the first place. After a long talk, I realized that I wanted to stay the course. Steve helped me understand that my desire to succeed was far greater than my fears. I'm telling you this story because I've learned that surrounding yourself with people that inspire you to be better can completely take your life to new levels.63. Learn to say no - You can't do everything for everyone. Stop spreading yourself thin. Learn to say no. Focus on a few things and be great at those.64. Explore the world - Travel the world. It's a great way to get a fresh perspective on life. Howard Schultz traveled to Europe and feel in love with the coffee shops there. Guess what happened next? He started Starbucks. #GetInspired65. Build your own values - Model yourself after people that you admire. At the end of the day though, you've got to be able to make your own judgment calls. The best way to do this is to decide what your values are. Once you do, write it down and post it on your mirror. It's the foundation of who you are.66. Embrace change - You need to get comfortable with this simple idea: The only thing constant is change. Instead of fearing it, embrace it.67. Clean along the way - Sure, you could let those dishes pile up for a month, but that would be pretty painful to clean up. Along the way, your home would start to smell, fill with fruit flies and generally make it less enjoyable to live in. So don't procrastinate. Clean along the way.68. Silence can be beautiful - You don't always have to fill up silence with words. Sometimes there is beauty in being silent.69. When in doubt, simple respond with "Let me think about that." - Let's face it, we don't always have the right answer. Instead of rushing to answer, tell the person that you need time to think about things further. This shows that you're being thoughtful and also gives you something to respond with.70. Do your most important task first thing in the morning - Your energy will be higher at this moment. It's why I workout first thing in the morning most days.71. Use the "We'll see" method - Even when it seems like something terrible has happened at the moment, there's the possibility that it might lead to something good in the future. So instead of making up your own conclusions about the future, just tell yourself, "We'll see."72. Meditate - You can use apps like Headspace that are free and can help you clear your mind. This is an awesome way to relax your mind and body.73. Realize that most people don't care about you - Sorry, people's lives don't revolve around your universe. Well, the exception might be if you're a celebrity. But in all seriousness, stop worrying about what other people think of you. Most of them don't even really care that much. Instead, focus on being the best possible version of yourself.74. There are a few people in the world that really deeply care about you - Keep those people close to you in life. They're the ones that can make your life amazing. They're the ones that will stick with you through the good and the bad.75. Roll your clothes - When you travel, try rolling your clothes to maximize packing space. I did this and can fit 2.5 weeks of clothes into a carry on now.76. Only you are responsible for your own life - So own it. Take control. You have to figure out what makes you happy. What gets you inspired. What drives you.77. Say something awesome to yourself everyday - Positive reinforcement can help you maintain an upbeat mood even in the worst of times. Treat yourself well.78. Take a deep breath - Didn't that feel awesome? Yeah, try doing that more. You'll feel better.79. Happiness is a state of mind, not a destination - Growing up, I used to tell myself, if only I had this specific thing, I would be happy. After 31 years of living, I can tell you that's not how happiness works. Happiness is a state of mind.My close friend told me that he feels happiness when the sun shines on his face. He almost died when he was in his early twenties. He was saved by a stranger who donated a kidney to him. He's happy that he's alive today.You can find happiness now. It's right in front of you, everywhere you look. It's up to you to open your eyes.80. Remember to have the time of your life - Remember that at the end of the day, no one lives forever. So while you're here, remember to have the time of your life. Laugh, smile and have fun.81. Promise only on what you can deliver - Reliability goes a long way. A ton of people over promise and under deliver. Don't be that person.82. Be fearless - Fear is just a feeling. Learn to take it head on. Have a bias towards action and be fearless.83. Marry your best friend - You want someone who's going to be there with you through the best and worst of times. Someone you can talk to all night or have a completely comfortable silence with. Someone who loves you for who you are84. Be insanely curious - Being curious will help you keep an open mind. By doing so, you'll learn new ideas and help bring passion and excitement in your life. You don't know everything, so learn as much as you can in your life!85. Think about how you can help others - At the end of the day, your legacy will be who you loved, who loved you and how much you helped others.86. Time is your most valuable asset - I had a family friend who spent most of his life saving up every penny to eventually live the life he always wanted. After years of saving, he was involved in a tragic car accident. He never lived the life he dreamed about.Money is valuable. Time is even more valuable.Utilize money to help you find more time.Time with your loved ones.Time with your buddies.Time with your spouse.Time with your kids.There are 525,600 minutes in a year. How do you spend your time?87. Someone else's recipe may not work for you - Just because it worked for someone else means it'll work for you. Learn from others but also realize that everyone's situation is unique.88. Have an idea jar - Whether it's for love, friendships or family, an idea jar is a great way to ensure you have activities to do together. The next time you have an idea for something, put it into the idea jar. Each week, you can pull one from the idea jar and voila, you've got some fun in your hands!89. Act exactly how you feel - Why the poker face? It's unnecessary. If you're upset, act and feel upset. If you're happy, smile. Better to be 100% authentic than to live a lie.90. Smile at people - It makes you happier. It's contagious. It lowers stress and anxiety. It strengthens your immune system. It makes you seem more competent. It makes your look trustworthy. It can even be an effective management technique.And yes, every single of these has been proven by a study. Every. Single. One.By the way, it cost you nothing. That's awesome.91. Simple is good - Stuff has administrative debt. That new car you just got? Maintenance and insurance. Those 10 shopping sites you subscribed to? 100 emails in your inbox you have to go through. Keep life simple. It's easier and more enjoyable.92. Don't get attached to stuff - Once you take care of your basic necessities, like your health, shelter, clothing and food, chances are that stuff won't make you happy. Don't get too attached to it. When we leave this world we can't bring our stuff with us anyway.93. Choose experiences over stuff - What you should value are experiences. A simple dinner with your mother talking about life. A vacation with your spouse to a place you've always wanted to travel. A long talk with friends over a warm fire on a cold winter night. Working late night with your teammates to build a game changing startup. These are the moments you'll remember.94. Don't compare yourself to others - Just focus on being the best possible version of yourself.95. Making something for someone to show that you care - It's easy to buy something for someone. Making something with love, passion and care is much harder. Go the extra mile and make something for the person that you love. Need ideas? Check out Pinterest.96. Love yourself first - Before you fall in love with anyone else, make sure you're in a good place. Learn to love yourself, including all of your awesomeness and your flaws. The more comfortable you are with yourself, the better you can love someone else.97. Your word choice matters - Your words have a lot of power.Version #1: "We have a problem with our project."Version #2: "We have an opportunity to fix things on this project."I feel a lot better hearing version #2. What about you?98. Learn to let go - Sometimes you can't fix things. Let it go. Yup, I wrote this life tip earlier. I'm repeating it because it's that important.99. Everyone has a story - Maybe someone was mean to you today. That sucks. But what if you found out it's because they just learned about a tragedy in their family? It changes everything, doesn't it? Just remember, everyone has their own story to tell.100. Love - When all is said and done, all that you'll really remember are the amazing people you've connected with and helped along the way. Love your friends. Love your family. Love your spouse. Love is all that matters. Love more.I hope this list helps you live the best life possible.What are you waiting for?Go. Start. Now. Because it's never too late to be amazing.Cheers,NelsonKeep in touch with me here.