From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There's thousands of people out there- men and women- probably waiting for me to drop dead so they can take my position, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I've done the show with a blown-out back, with one leg, coming off laryngitis, coming off or having a 103 degree fever.
Silence is, by definition, an absence—an absence of voice, opinion, and life. It begins so subtly that it often goes unnoticed. We start by withdrawing or withholding our genuine thoughts from conversations, replacing them with what we presume others want to hear.
You can have many great actors but you have very few who really become movie stars. It is that indefinable quality of someone who becomes iconic that people want to come and watch regardless of the type of film they're in.
Every single individual in the world, including you and I, have a grievance or a problem at any given moment in time. When you and I go to sleep tonight in our own beds, you'll be thinking about a problem that's affecting you and I'll be thinking about a problem that's affecting me.
One of the greatest myths in the lives of the people I coach is, 'I will be happy when…' as if there is some place to go to. There's only one book that ends with the phrase happily ever after, that's a fairy-tale.
My argument is that happiness shouldn't be pursued deliberately. Happiness is more of a by-product, a downstream effect of making sound decisions, and adopting the right mindset. I cite a quote from Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, in his book, 'Man's Search for Meaning'. He posits that success shouldn't be sought deliberately but rather, it's something that materialises when one is engaged in meaningful endeavours. This logic applies perfectly to happiness as well.
The fact that you and I are alive is against stupendous odds. One day we will die, and that's sad, but there are people who will never die because they were never born. We're the lucky ones, we get to die. You can only die if you were alive.
When you observe chimpanzees and other apes, you see how extremely humanlike they are in almost everything they do. We have been so indoctrinated to think we are special (as a species) that when you see an ape up close and see they are- in essence- us, you don't know what to do with those feelings.
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.
The bottom line is that this goes back to the fact that, like all primates, we are an intensely social species, and having our friends, cohorts, and acquaintances close is important to our general success. In these senses 'keeping the wheels oiled' is critical, hence why we like gossip, and hence why biographies and fiction so wildly outsell anything else in the books market.
Life is not a race against other people. Life is a competition with yourself. One of the greatest achievements in life is to outperform yourself and live your greatest life possible. Greatness lives in all of us, but we must all find what it is that ignites our souls.
The silence we've adopted, along with the habits, behaviours, and patterns we've established, don't have to dictate how we proceed today or tomorrow, even if they characterized our yesterdays. It's challenging, to be clear. Changing behaviours is difficult. But on the other side of that challenge lies the opportunity for us to meet our needs, to build the teams we truly intend to build.