From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Even in those very difficult moments, I had enough freedom to choose who I wanted to be in the face of that circumstance. For all of us, the challenge is to rise above our experiences and make choices to choose light over darkness.
I define authenticity as the consistent practice of choosing to know who we are and embracing who we are. For a lot of us, we come to know who we are, but then we rail against our identities.
Unfortunately, by my definition, many leaders are mentally unfit, because they spend most of their day in negative emotional states and they're usually not consciously aware of it, because they're externally focused.
Early on, being told no helped me figure out what I wanted my yes's to be. I learned who I wanted to be from people telling me who I could not be.
Every soldier who enters the military knows what makes the grass grow. Civilians are like, 'okay… sun? Water? Photosynthesis?…' for us? Its blood, we say the bright red blood makes the green grass grow.
In my experience, great advisors are the ones who give you the scaffolding to observe your gut-instinct from every angle and arrive at decisions which allow you to flourish.
Work is preventing us living. So many people use work to avoid deeper topics around their lives, relationships, kids and health – deeper topics that can lead to the positive choices they need to make that will make them happier.
In a highly emotive and risk-averse market, rationality seems to fall by the wayside, with investors trigger-happy to pull immense volumes of liquidity out of assets at the earliest risk warning.
They all had a wilful denial of reality… against all evidence to the contrary they had to believe they would succeed.. that's ultimately what entrepreneurs do.
Industry expertise can sometimes be a hindrance in innovation. Those deeply entrenched in an industry are often the least likely to disrupt it.
Research has shown that learning brings more joy than material rewards. In a study where participants were given money for doing well on a task, they felt happiest not when they received the money, but when they learned something new about the task.
Our brains are not so well equipped, we just tend to assume patterns that look connected are causally connected. So a conspiracy theory is just another causal theory – why did these things happen?