From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Anti-goals are all about what you refuse to give up while chasing those goals. The trap a lot of people fall into is getting so laser-focused on the target that everything else just fades away. You put on blinders.
If you tried to achieve that purely through informal methods—where hallucination is a persistent risk—getting to the same level of consistent correctness would likely require a lot more research effort and resources.
You are as good as your highest level of preparation in any negotiation. In any negotiation, you develop trust by putting in time where you don't have any skin in the game; that means you need to watch negotiations happen- and get a feel for how it's done. You can't just throw yourself in at the deep end and hope you can swim.
Winning is good, losing is bad! If you're winning, you can give back — to your family, institutions of your choice, and your local communities. If you're losing, your pockets are empty.
Selling is about creating agency in the people that you are talking to so that they feel like they are part of the decision-making process. Selling is wanting to ask questions that you really want to know the answers to. Not ones that you have to ask.
One you have to get a unique insight. It starts there. Two, you need to be prepared to devote a lot of energy and commitment.
It's about finding the right balance between being bold, patient, and persistent. For me, it's about not thinking it's crazy to reach out to an Oscar winner or a billionaire, but realizing it takes patience and time.
Big firms can get credit and are not using it while small firms cannot get credit at all.
I completely appreciate that people think social media is a waste of my time, but spending all day being obsessed with our customer, interacting with them in every way that I can, answering every question, trying to understand everything that I can about them, matches everything that we do and everything that we produce.
When you look at a business in trouble, the important thing is to understand where the trouble is coming from. Critically you need to know whether it's a restructuring or transformation. A restructuring is where you adjust structures to a reduced volume or revenue level, but in this case the business model is not broken. In transformations, you still restructure, but you are dealing with a potentially broken business model.
inspires because it has a huge emotional component, everybody feels very attached to it. At the same time, it's incredibly complex- and full of mind-bogglingly stupid things that make it more complex than it needs to be
Social media has changed everything for companies. Within 24 hours, people on the other side of the world were cancelling flights because they were outraged. You can't segment your message, you have to take ownership.