From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
What excites me the most is offering something tangible that people can apply immediately to enhance their performance—not something that will start showing results a year down the line. There's a common misconception that improvement is complex and time-consuming. My goal is to change this mindset, guiding people to focus on specific, actionable steps they can take today.
When you contrast that with human rights defenders, they are willing to self-sacrifice, to give everything to defend the community… not just their community, but everyone's rights. Why can't politicians be like that?
War teaches you that there are many different types of people, good and bad, and you have to understand that good and evil co-exist, and it's up to you to calculate your way through the world, understanding where people are rooted.
From day one, we said that we wanted to create value, create impact, and create inspiration. We're not going to build a business that just creates impact—we're not a nonprofit. We have to create value. As long as we're doing all three, we're never going to lose.
When you fail, you take ownership of the failure, and then you assess what mistakes were made, what could be done differently, what better instructions you could have given, what better support you could have given, then you fix those problems, move on and try again, simple.
You have to get under the skin of every employee, becoming a chief meaning officer, giving your team purpose, getting everyone on the same page. You have to make sure your entire team knows where they're going, how they're going to get there, and what's in it for them.
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
I firmly advocate the idea of reinventing oneself every 5 years.
I am not a big fan of the word hope, I am a big fan of the word determination. Being determined is a moral position, when you are depend on the word hope you are lazy.
Those who criticise China have a case to complain about the contributory role the country's authoritarian system played in the spread of the pandemic, but that very system also allowed authorities to get a quick grip on it and bring it under control with impressive efficiency.
There are really no defeats in life, just opportunities to become better, stronger.
We've had hierarchical and bureaucratic structures as far back as we can go in human history. The Chinese civil service goes back to at least 2000BC and militaries have always been structured as hierarchical. Modern bureaucracy is a mash-up of two ideas. Firstly, the command and control structures which have been core to organized human activity for millennia and secondly, the principles of industrial economics.