From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I truly believe humans have the capacity to change. That's the definition of freedom… our ability to choose who we want to be.
If you take a trade that follows your process exactly and if that trade loses money, that was not a bad trade. It's only a bad trade if you deviate from your process and lose money. I would go further and say that if you deviate from your process and make money, it's still a bad trade.
High performance is- truly- a checklist. It's waking up, understanding how many things you can do that day to the best of your ability, getting those things done, allowing yourself time to exercise, eat, rest, engage in active recovery, get some social support, have some mindfulness and gratitude time.
When these things happen in life, our soul calls on us to learn a lesson. Often we need pain to be able to see the light. Most of us begin our spiritual journey after a job loss or a career change.
It's only when you look back that you can connect the dots to where we are right now. All of us go through things that make us think, 'this makes no sense, why is this happening to me!…' but when you look back you realise that had it not been for 'that,' you wouldn't have had that opportunity… that meeting… that chance… that love.
This ease of gaining virtue status on social media, coupled with our innate desire for status, explains the platform's toxicity. We're drawn to the simplest form of status acquisition, and social media facilitates this with minimal effort, creating a cycle of virtue signalling that feeds our need for recognition and approval.
I recall a moment when my dad and I, lacking presents, salvaged chairs from a community dumpster, a testament to our determination to make the best of our situation without any sense of pride or entitlement. His willingness to do whatever was necessary for us taught me resilience.
Don't become paralysed by anticipating the unexpected. It does not pay to be worried about failure. If your mind is crowded with thoughts of what could happen, you will never achieve your best performance.
Vulnerability isn't oversharing; it isn't necessarily personal. And that's where some of the fear has come from—this sense that leaders might need to role-model less sharing about their personal lives. Yet vulnerability can look very different. Trust benefits from clearer boundaries, because trust needs clear expectations and clear limits.
The more pronounced a group identity is, especially when an identifiable outgroup exists, the more likely individuals are to dehumanize those not in their group. When asked to describe oneself, if the first identification that comes to mind is that of the group, the likelihood of outgroup dehumanization increases, seeing them as less than human.
When you don't know your self-worth, you're more docile and easier to control by the 'machine.' That's the cult-like structure society is built around.
I realised that what people do is, instead of figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it whether they want to or not, doing the ethical thing, what they do is they figure out what they want to do and then come up with the rationalisation for doing it, whether it's right or wrong. And we fool ourselves.