My father arrived in this country with just $16 in his pocket, and my mother, also an immigrant from Congo, instilled in me that the notion of life being too difficult was not an excuse, especially in the United States or any developed Western country where one is inherently blessed.

Innovative companies are not afraid of failure – they're willing to take risks, fail forward, learn from missteps, pivot, and keep going.

It's important that every person you work with, all your colleagues, all your co-workers, leave a company with more skills and economic mobility than when they arrived. Further, it's important the time they spent with you wasn't miserable, that it was great, good, enjoyable.

For a long time there was a kind of cultural chauvinism: the idea that if you just played Mozart to people in the Amazon or to hunter-gatherer groups in the South Pacific, they'd instantly recognize its greatness, maybe even see God. But of course, they don't experience it that way at all.

Our brains are constantly making predictions about the world, and we learn when those predictions turn out to be wrong. So what Marshall did was deliberately redesign training so that people learned how to cope with a wide range of unpredictable challenges—turning the unpredictable into something more predictable.