From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Bystander effect isn't necessarily due to a lack of willingness or ability to make a difference. Rather, the real challenge stems from feeling overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the issues we're passionate about. They're vast, and against them, we often feel insignificant.
You have to have some humility in life before you can begin to understand yourself, and before you can begin to change yourself, the world, or other people. If you only think others have problems, you're never going to be able to look at yourself and change who you are.
Our role as coaches is essentially to help players utilise 100% of their potential. That, to me, is the essence of our job.
Organizations fail when leaders fail to write-down their own depreciating intellectual capital, and bureaucracies exaggerate that problem by vesting so much power in so few people. Most change management programs are in-fact catch-up programs.
We don't always see change and activism from the perspective of what we're giving, it's too often about taking things away… Don't eat that… don't do that… don't drive that car… we have to reframe and rethink. Imagine if we told people we could give them the universe back, it's a beautiful gift- but also allows us to save energy, birds, insects and more.
I see it as a blend of the boomers' hindsight, having navigated economic cycles like inflation and recessions, with the zoomers' insight into an ever-evolving world. Together, they forge the foresight essential for future capital deployment.
In space, you can only worry about the things you can control – not the constant low-level simmering danger that you might explode and die. If you worried about that, even a two-week flight would be hell, never mind a 200 day one.
BE CONSISTENT across your communication – what your values are, what you're trying to do – it's super obvious but without a single clear proposition that you communicate consistently at every contact point, you can't expect to grow an audience that believes in you.
A resilient position means that you are not always on the brink of war. The cost of war is so great that being on the brink is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. We have to make leaders and societies pay more attention to the costs of conflict.
Many people say that if you're the brightest person in the room, you're in the wrong room – that's totally right. You need to bring in people with much more expertise than you to take the business forward. I started out making shoes by hand – I'm a shoemaker, not an intellectual.
Before I felt leadership was something you earned. Mount Everest, I think changed my opinion quite dramatically. When I came back from that expedition, I realised that all leadership really is, is empowering people to find their purpose, because the only way people are fully engaged and productive and happy is when they are working towards a higher purpose.
If you offer no vision for the future, someone else will. Our geopolitics cannot tolerate a vacuum, and if you retreat- whether physically or ideologically- someone else will come up with a plan which may not be complementary for democracy.