From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I learn every single day from my girlfriend, my family, from graduates coming into the business… I try to learn relentlessly.
BE CONSISTENT across your communication – what your values are, what you're trying to do – it's super obvious but without a single clear proposition that you communicate consistently at every contact point, you can't expect to grow an audience that believes in you.
I have learnt that situations in themselves are not inherently stressful. Our perception of situations is what creates stress for us. Some players thrive in the biggest sporting occasions and others struggle to cope.
We formalized making sure that the company culture and the employee happiness was priority number one, and everything else — including profits, revenue growth, and so on — was a byproduct of getting the culture right. Because our whole belief was that if we get the culture right, then most of the other stuff, including building our brand to be about the very best customer service, will happen naturally on its own.
The idea of grit is being able to sustain effort and commitment to goals that take a really long time. That's the part of the equation that sometimes gets overlooked.
Visionary leaders that build great companies have some personality attributes they share. They are self-confident enough to be humble. They have a reservoir, a personal drive, passion, belief in their capabilities, and they're willing to admit what they don't do well and to seek those people to join their team from the very beginning.
Power is decaying because it has become easier to acquire, much harder to use, and thus easier to lose.
What failure really means is that you are trying to live life, and the fact that you fail means that you are trying. As soon as you try to avoid failure, you are facing the wrong direction.
Resilience is the responsibility and opportunity of the community. We can either face it and learn from it or we can pretend it's not happening. We have to explicitly face the fact that resilience is the responsibility of all of us, together.
The physical and mental aspects of our lives are inseparable and taking care of the basic physical requirements is essential. Athletes and leaders rarely experience deep relaxation and this can become transformative in their lives.
Power requires oppression. In order to be powerful, you have to stand upon something. Strength comes from within. We are seeing the emergence of new political organisms with strength not power at the core. From Moscow to Hong Kong and India to the United States, powerless organisations are creating strong governance without power.
I wanted to impart this fundamental philosophy that a person should endeavour to better the world, an aspiration divorced from monetary considerations. While some might contend that financial power is a prerequisite for effecting change, I don't subscribe to this belief.