From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Above all, great entrepreneurs have completed and undivided commitment to their company and doing what it takes to make it successful. Building any new major company is much harder than most realize, so if requires a very high pain threshold – great entrepreneurs are so tough mentally and emotionally.
Wherever there's judgement there's noise, and more than you think. In the criminal justice system, we saw variability between judges in the severity of their sentencing for equivalent crimes. In business, you may have a company where someone in hiring says, 'bring everyone in, I think they're great' and you end up with a company full of people who shouldn't be there.
Numerous studies including recent ones from Stanford and Harvard Universities show that young girls, by the age of six, in the U.S. feel they are less intellectually capable than boys. Why? Because when they open a history book, they are predominantly exposed to male innovators.
People play Farmville, they don't play Zynga! In the same sense, people don't go to Paramount movies, they go to see Mission Impossible.
A lot of that feeling of alienation that you see in The Office, Dilbert, and so-forth is driven by people feeling that they don't understand context, and ultimately decisions don't make sense.
I believe happiness is a consequence, not a goal. If you engage in the right activities that bring contentment, happiness will naturally follow. Viewing happiness as a goal makes it elusive; it's like chasing an illusory concept. Once you grasp it, it tends to dissipate—such is the nature of emotions.
Steve Jobs forced me to figure out what was important to me, and who I was. He demanded that everybody in the room had to be at the top of their game, the best in their field.
We are made up not of atoms, but of stories.
Most studies today show that our political leaning is at least 50 per cent genetic in origin — genetics is as important, if not more important, to how you vote than your cultural context, your economic context, and all the evidence you engage with in the world.
I'm a firm believer that creativity comes from restrictions, so I'm really grateful that I grew-up with so many restrictions around me. When you give people limitations and say, 'here's a canvas, but you can only paint with yellow..' – the wheels start turning, and you plan to get out of the box you're put in.
Entrepreneurship means a constant willingness to keep learning. It's about maintaining that start-up spirit—where you're forever young, and forever in crisis. It's about always having your mind on the business.
Songs are these magnetic creations of words and music, in very short form. A song needs to hit you in less than a minute and sometimes it can be an incredibly solitary, emotional experience where it's just you and the imagined relationship with that singer.