From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You need clarity of vision and purpose. You need to know the reason you're there at that surgical table with a knife in your hand. You have to be clear that you are using these sophisticated tools (tools which can cause a lot of harm) to fundamentally and primarily help that entity, that child in front of you. That mindset provides the energy and focus needed to carry out the task.
Self-confidence is about believing in your capabilities, while self-esteem is loving yourself irrespective of outcomes. Both are crucial.
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.
To have a career, you have to be able to break out of your ways of thinking about success, otherwise you'll just end up disappointed.
My discipline lies in taking full responsibility; I don't blame anyone else. If I lose, it's on me to accept and address it. The very next day in the gym, I start working on what went wrong.
It was visionaries with a quest for achievement who made Apollo happen, and it seems to me that now? Our sense and spirit of adventure boils down to what we can afford, and not what we can learn or achieve by doing something.
Being an entrepreneur, or even running a large organization, is like being a society builder. The system is bigger than any individual. When you build a business, you're architecting and constructing something substantial.
Nature has evolved the human race for individuals to be very different from each other. Half of us are thinkers, and we proceed according to the facts. The other half of us are feelers. Nature says you need both kinds of people to push humanity forward.
Innovation is a skill, a teachable skill, just like management. If you focus on a handful of key principles, you can effectively drive innovation in any type of business.
The sad reality is that if we tried to pass that declaration today, the UN General Assembly would fail to do so. Firstly, we don't have someone like Eleanor Roosevelt as an advocate for human rights, and where previously the US played a leadership role, Trump would no doubt block virtually every human rights pillar associated with the declaration.
Had I not defended it and stood by it, I think it could have disappeared into history- but because I protected it, stood up for it, believed in it and understood why it existed and what it had done? That's why it still remains.
As business-leaders we have to start taking responsibility to speak-out about our own struggles, so that others do the same- and by doing so, make our teams and our peers realise that it's fine to not be fine.