From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Many people say that if you're the brightest person in the room, you're in the wrong room – that's totally right. You need to bring in people with much more expertise than you to take the business forward. I started out making shoes by hand – I'm a shoemaker, not an intellectual.
The key component of bravery is integrity. My father's nickname for me was, 'the brave one,' and what I saw growing up was the reality that people would often give their integrity to make life more comfortable in the short term; but guess what, that leads to your integrity being chipped away until you are left with nothing – just with the shell of who you are, and who you could have been.
In my book, the reason I call figures like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., red leviathans is that they're actually serving a role that's necessary in a modern progressive revolution: they're the ones who say what is revolutionary and what isn't. Because it turns out that's not an easy question to answer.
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.
My ultimate legacy would be to retire from Atlassian one day and see it going on to bigger and better things in twenty, fourty, or fifty years after me!
We should be looking at our regrets not as meaningless, debilitating phenomena but as signals, information, and data. If we do that systematically? We can use this emotion as a transformative force for progress.
The vision for Zappos was for it to be about the very best customer service and for the Zappos brand to be synonymous with the very best customer service. In order to do that, we had to build a culture where employees genuinely wanted to provide great customer service — where it wasn't a department, but a way of being.
I recall a moment when my dad and I, lacking presents, salvaged chairs from a community dumpster, a testament to our determination to make the best of our situation without any sense of pride or entitlement. His willingness to do whatever was necessary for us taught me resilience.
We need to shift our thinking about what government does, and what civil servants do, away from this relentless focus on policy and ideology and onto project management and problem solving.
The most common mistake is to stop challenging when things are going well. I recognise failure as not having made a business better than when you were first involved.
I don't believe in a one-size-fits-all approach for talent, you have to approach every individual and opportunity from a bespoke perspective.
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.