From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.
Start doing things not for the end product, but for the impact on your heart, your brain, your life, and your health. Recognize that you've been conditioned to hate yourself and your creativity for the sake of a culture that does not care about you.
We can actually retrain our brains to think about and handle conflict differently. Some of this comes down to self-awareness, but also to taking intentional pauses that help us recognise what we're feeling. There's a lot of research on affective labeling—the act of naming our emotions and fears—which helps reduce what's called limbic irritability.
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.
Resilience is not a muscle we're born with, it's something we have to build and believe in over time. We should never ask ourselves how much resilience we have, but rather how much we can build, and how we can build it into ourselves, our friends, and the people around us.
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 have to go into a very quiet place in your mind, away from the noise of the world, the noise of doubters, insecurities and your own self. You have to quiet your disbelief and create open mindedness to your own ability to succeed and overcome.
Just as you wouldn't want a surgeon to go from one operating theater to the next without having washed their hands, you don't want a manager to go from one context to the next without being in a position where they can actually do some good—or at least do no harm.
In business, you get incredible highs and lows… and it can take a decade of work before you start to see the story, and so having peer networks around you helps you realise other people have been through this.
Comedy delivers the cerebral and the hyperbole, it can be funny and serious. You can see that ability for the pendulum to swing both ways when you watch the best comedians perform.
I believe it's more fundamental: similar to the 'use it or lose it' principle that applies to muscles, our brains engage in a nightly routine that stimulates thoughts and ideas not typically relied upon during the day. This built-in process keeps our thinking adaptive and nimble, fostering divergent thoughts and offering an evolutionary advantage.
We are definitely seeing a shift in the skillsets that are needed. On our platform here at Udemy, we are seeing a lot more people taking courses around empathy and emotional intelligence and coaching. How do you ask the right questions? How do you enquire? How do you actively listen?