From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Habituation is a very basic mechanism. It's something we find in every neuron and every system of our brain, including our fundamental abilities like perception. Essentially, we stop responding to and perceiving things that are not changing or are changing very gradually.
We tend to go deeper with that in terms of specific facial expressions, body language, and vocal tone. And I think what's important to know there is that we often make a lot of mistakes when we're reading other people's emotions because we bring in our own cultural values, our own belief systems, and we oftentimes project emotions onto people as opposed to really knowing how they're feeling.
To be a great fighter you obviously have to have talent, but what really matters is dedication and discipline. I've seen so many guys with talent where I've thought, 'this guy's going to be a world champion…' but they've not had the dedication. They've not given what you had to give, which is everything. To succeed as a boxer, you have to dedicate your life to it… it's a very short career for a professional fighter.
I believe happiness is a consequence, not a goal. If you engage in the right activities that bring contentment, happiness will naturally follow. Viewing happiness as a goal makes it elusive; it's like chasing an illusory concept.
I give all of you permission whereby, if I change the way I behave, my beliefs, the way we are going, I give you permission to hit me in my face, you need to bring me back to reality.
No-one is perfect. In fact, we are perfectly imperfect. When we do the self-reflection work to reveal who we are, everyone has bad and ugly in them and we may not like what we see, but that's what healing and doing our work to grow as individuals and as leaders is all about.
Anxiety isn't one thing, it's two. It's the anxieties of the mind, but it's also this alarm state, this state of constant protective hyper vigilant alarm, physiological activity in the body. And each of them energises the other.
The way I prefer to think of perception is as a processor of active construction, a controlled hallucination. Sensory signals don't come with labels attached. Everything we perceive is a kind of inference, a burst guess about what's out there.
All leadership really is, is empowering people to find their purpose, because the only way people are fully engaged and productive and happy, which I think is one of the most important things people forget, is when they are working towards a higher purpose.
Starting a business is an exciting venture, often filled with enthusiasm, borrowed money, and a fair share of ignorance. In fact, a certain level of ignorance can be beneficial for an entrepreneur. If you were fully aware of the potential obstacles ahead, you might hesitate to start.
We should be looking at our regrets not as meaningless, debilitating phenomena but as signals, information, and data. If we do that systematically? We can use this emotion as a transformative force for progress.
The hardest part of the job is telling those players that they are not playing, I remember from my playing days how that felt. This is when compassion is an important tool as well.