From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Success is working on things important and valuable to you with people you like and respect. Since I became financially independent, I work on things that I find interesting and where I can have impact.
We often project our 'superhero' aspirations onto our leaders and vulnerability, and other more human traits, are not always encouraged. Organisational leaders often experience loneliness, and the 'truth' within their company is often illusive to them because subordinates will often tell them what they want to hear.
If I ask better questions, they come up with better answers.
I believe that you have to keep asking questions, and that there's no such thing as a negative question. It's all learning.
Our story, our fight, the story of President Zelenskyy… these all come together in the story of how everyone is capable of more than the world expects of them.
No one man can, for any considerable time, wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which is the true one.
When you're identifying talent in music or other industries- one of the most important things to identify is which of those individuals is able to marry talent with extraordinary drive.
The true measure of success, as I see it, lies in the effort to effect positive change in the world. However, this perspective isn't universally embraced. The feeling of success, it's crucial to clarify, has little to do with financial gain or even fame. These are two entirely distinct concepts.
We often project our 'superhero' aspirations onto our leaders and vulnerability, and other more human traits, are not always encouraged. Organisational leaders often experience loneliness, and the 'truth' within their company is often illusive to them because subordinates will often tell them what they want to hear.
The most successful teams are the ones who present with authenticity and passion. You could have the next cancer cure, but unless your audience believes in you, they won't invest in you.
When you fail, you take ownership of the failure, and then you assess what mistakes were made, what could be done differently, what better instructions you could have given, what better support you could have given, then you fix those problems, move on and try again, simple.
Have you ever read Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power? One of the laws is 'discover every man's thumbscrew,' which means that every person has something that matters deeply to them. I think you can approach this not from a negative perspective, but a positive one: to understand the 'good guys,' the 'bad guys,' and everyone in between. Why do they do what they do? As a journalist, the best way to uncover that is to listen—authentically.