From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It doesn't matter how successful you are, how much market share you have, if you're in your comfort zone you will leave yourself exposed. Courage also links to decisiveness, which is one of the key attributes of great leaders. Cowardice pushes the day of reckoning out, decisiveness brings it closer.
Training helps you turn fear from something that paralyses you or makes you flee into something that spurs you to take the right decisions in very difficult situations.
Work is not the be-all and end-all for me. It never has been. My family is the most important thing to me, and I talk a lot about that to my employees. It actually makes you a better employee if you have your balance right between work, family, passions, studies, all those things.
If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.
The wilderness doesn't care about your university degree, your bank balance, or your social media following. It only responds to your character, your resilience, and your ability to adapt.
Your brain has an agenda: to make you feel good about you. So if you're the CEO, and you decided to launch a product two weeks ago, your brain assumes, 'Well, that must have been the right decision.' It starts scanning the environment for proof — cherry-picking anything that confirms you were right.
I always thought that nothing or no one should stop me from doing what I like. If you have a passion for questions, and if you have the courage, then you don't need a model that is exactly like yourself.
It feels to us that the festival is owned by the people, and me and my Dad are kind-of custodians of it. In that sense, it's a bit like a sailing ship… me and my Dad drive it, but the ship is made of a few hundred people – our key organisers and creatives, who build each part of the ship with their own vision.
I'm bad at grieving; perhaps that's why I keep going. Some call it resilience, but it's likely just escapism. When you keep moving, the wind moves behind you, and you leave behind who you once were and move towards something new.
The vision for Zappos was for it to be about the very best customer service and for the Zappos brand to be synonymous with the very best customer service. In order to do that, we had to build a culture where employees genuinely wanted to provide great customer service — where it wasn't a department, but a way of being.
You create change in other people when you're totally honest, transparent, and authentic. When you show people who you really are, with all your flaws, with all your vulnerabilities...it moves them. People would come up to me crying and thanking me for telling the truth.
Power is the ability to affect others and get the outcomes you want – and that's true whether on the individual, national or international level. You can exert power in three ways. You can do it with coercion (sticks), you can do it with payments (carrots) and you can do it with soft power – through attraction.