1. When we lose someone, we can’t stay where they are. Our life must go on. We have to pick up the grief, and what we can of our loved ones, and take it with us. And it may feel like pushing a boulder up a hill forever. But if we don’t keep moving forward, we lose again.
2. We have to grieve. If we don’t control how grief comes out of our system, it will control us.
3. Do not judge others for how they grieve.
4. Grief is love. Grief is the form love takes after we lose someone, and when we’re feeling terrible for losing loved ones, it’s because we loved them so much.
5. One of the greatest gifts we can give someone who has lost a loved one is a new memory of that person.
6. There’s no shame in being sick.

1. By remembering that death is coming for us all, we can hopefully make better use of our time, and that includes remembering everything that is right in our lives.
2. Dr Mishra was lauded for his math, but laughed at for his English, so he decided to write every day for 5 years.
3. Identify your own peak purpose.

1. Hard is good. And it isn’t kinda good, it’s really good. Mendenhall’s guiding principle at Virginia was “hard things together” which helped bond and unify his team.
2. Relationships are more important than routines. Even though routines occupy most of our time, relationships are everything.
3. One of the greatest gifts we can give young people is high expectations with zero compromise. If we remove all obstacles or lower our standards for those we care about, we limit their opportunities for growth and development. Extreme expectations, surrounded by love…that combination is a magical sweet spot to help people become.
4. Mendenhall is in the pursuit of AND: developing amazing players AND amazing students, with amazing social lives, who give back to the community, all while preparing themselves for the future.
5. We can never have enough of the things we don’t need.
6. When we stand at the end our life and examine the moments that truly matter, we’ll see moments where we were intentional about trying hard to help others.
7. Eternity is the wrong thing to be wrong about.

1. “What-e’er thou art, act well thy part.” The more you can do, the more you can do.
2. Learn from others, and then teach others. For nine years, Greg learned the intricacies of play-by-play from Paul James. And even though Greg doubted his own ability to do play-by-play, once he was given the opportunity, he learned that he had already learned how to do the job successfully.
3. Learn to differentiate the constructive feedback from the destructive feedback. Greg seeks to minimize the presence and mitigate the effects of the destructive feedback, all while seeking out the constructive feedback.

1. Control what you can control.
2. Be true to yourself, both on and off the court.
3. Don’t take things too seriously.
4. The goal is to find something that we love to do so much that we want to practice it every single day on our own.

1. Take responsibility for yourself and your actions, especially in a society that tries to shed blame when things go wrong.
2. Protect your reputation by living with integrity, because if we tarnish our reputation, we may never be able to build it back.
3. The things that we value most in life come through rigor and hard work.
4. If we’re not willing to put in the work to achieve our potential, we’ll never reach the rewards we’re striving for.
5. Life is ultimately about the relationships we build and the degree to which we impact others for good. No one is successful on their own. We all depend on each other.

1. If we want to get better answers for ourselves, we need to ask better questions, asking ourselves each day: What we did well? What we learned? and What we’re going to do better tomorrow?
2. When we’re playing the “What if game” we need to make sure we play it properly, and think about all the positive and incredible “What ifs” that might happen to us.
3. We need to protect our time, attention, and energy by building systems and routines around these finite resources.

1. When it comes to creativity, quantity drives quality.
2. Don’t confuse efficiency with effectiveness. Some of the most creative people of all time famously napped, played the violin, or juggled on a unicycle when they were stuck on a problem. In other words, they were willing to be underemployed.
3. In the words of Amos Tversky, don’t waste years of your life by not being willing to waste hours.

1. Think probabilistically. Many of the decisions we make involve uncertainty, so rather than make categorical or binary assessments, we can think in terms of probabilities to improve our decision making.
2. Second, think probabilistically ahead of time. The six-page memo used by Amazon employees helps them reward well-intended efforts and protects employees from resulting…judging decisions only by the outcome rather than the process used.
3. Keep track and keep score of our predictions.

1. We need to exercise to effectively deal with the stress of life.
2. Be thoughtful in how we spend our time. By blocking out time each week to complete her urgent important tasks as well as her not urgent important tasks, Whitney has become more productive.
3. Life is all about relationships. Whitney learned over and again from Sara Blakely that she could play business by her own, more feminine rules, which included carefully choosing the people she works with and treating them like family.

1. Be a learn it all, not a know it all. Its the curiosity quotient that drives success, and whether we’re failing or succeeding, the learn-it-all views everything through the same lens…as an opportunity to learn something new.
2. “Volunteer for the job that no one else wants.” Brad’s dad gave him that advice when he graduated from college, and by following this simple advice, over and over again, Brad eventually found himself as CEO of a multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley tech company.
3. No matter what industry we’re in, we’re always in the people business. People will forget what we said, people will forget what we did, but they’ll always remember how we made them feel.

1. Genuine, honest, recognition has almost untold benefits. People want to feel part of a group, but they also want to stand out, and recognizing them for their contributions accomplishes both.
2. Many of the people we’re surrounded by are self-motivated. So it’s our job to make sure they have enough resources, and then just get out of the way, and recognize them for the great work they’re doing.
3. Unless you’ve been part of an organization that effectively recognizes people for their contributions, via a weekly newsletter, or some other way, it is so easy to under-appreciate just how valuable recognition can be.
4. As we try to constantly recognize others for their contributions, we should especially look to recognize those people who are under-appreciated. Everyone wants to be recognized and appreciated, but some people will naturally feel more appreciated than others. So we can get the biggest bang for our buck by showing the “accompanying spouse” and other under-appreciated people, that they deserve the same level of attention, care, and love as everyone else.
5. When we’re stressed out and panicked, others are likely feeling the same way, so we can help them by projecting an air of calm…by staying cool on the radio, so to speak.

1. Use your imagination to do something that’s never been done before. Ron’s approach to this was to spend 90% of his time doing what he was supposed to do exceptionally well, then spend 10% of his time imagining something that had never been done.
2. According to Steve Jobs, if you can’t communicate anything you’re trying to do in life in four words or less, you haven’t thought about it hard enough. 
3. Figure out how to extend the reach of your best people. When people are challenged, they can grow, develop, and thrive.
4. Don’t just improve. Innovate.

1. Most of us tend to be under-social, underestimating how much we can benefit others and ourselves by being just a bit more social. When we’re concerned about being social, we can remember that people tend not to judge our gestures, they just appreciate the kindness. And they also tend to reciprocate in kind.
2. Taking the time to connect face-to-face with others can greatly improve well-being. Through technology, we’re able to be more connected, yet it also contributes to feelings of disconnection. Technology cannot replace the richness of in-person communication. We need to prioritize face-to-face communication.
3. Be mindful of how we use technology. While technology has transformed communication, we should be cautious not to use our devices in ways that detract from our well-being. 

1. Everything is hard at first. Embrace the difficulty of new experiences. It’s natural to encounter difficulties and struggles when attempting something new. However, it’s essential to remember that everyone faces challenges when trying something for the first time. 
2. Perseverance and practice are key to improving and achieving success.
3. We need to figure out our own style. There is no one best way to teach, to coach, or to be an attorney. But all the while, we need to find and/or create the situations that will help us thrive.

1. Use a calendar. By scheduling blocks of time, Jesse became more productive and learned to accurately estimate how long it took to complete specific tasks.
2. Be a good collaborator. By trying to show everyone how smart you are, people aren’t going to want to work with you. But if people do want to work with you, it will be good for your career. 
3. Question your convictions. Or, in other words, be humble.
4. Jesse’s research shows that all too often, people who argue and fight ground their beliefs in morality. By focusing on different moral foundations, people can vehemently disagree while feeling like they are morally superior. As Jesse said, moral humility is needed. We should all be open to being wrong about things.

1. Max built his career on collaborating with great people, who have complementary skills, sometimes better than his own, and by not worrying about who got the credit.
2. Create a life around creating value. 
3. We should recognize and strive to overcome our imperfections. 
4. By collaborating with others, and overcoming our own imperfections, we can create more value in the world.

1. We tend to care a lot more about our present selves than our future selves. This focus on the “now” can hurt us and others, both in the present and future. But by thinking about our own legacy, we can shift our focus to the long term, counteract some of our selfish, present-focused desires, and give our lives meaning.
2. How would you like to be remembered by future generations?
3. What would you like to leave behind when you die? 
4. How would you like your actions, decisions, and behavior to affect future generations in a lasting way?
5. We don’t get a legacy by having a fleeting, temporary effect focused only on ourselves. To create a legacy, we need to have a positive impact on others.
6. Just as Alfred Nobel changed the course of humanity by thinking about his legacy, we can change the course of our lives and the lives of others, and extend ourselves into the future, by thinking about our own legacy.

1. If we want to achieve anything in life, we need to focus on the task at hand. 
2. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but perfect, focused practice makes perfect.
3. As an officer in Afghanistan, Chris learned the importance of attention to detail while traveling from Bagram Airbase to Kabul. By carefully checking all of their gear, and doing it right every time, they were able to literally save lives. 
4. For Chris, higher education is all about servant leadership and solving complex problems that make society better.
5. By developing the ability to stay focused and pay attention to detail, we can learn to solve problems that make society better.
6. “Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that upon other fields on other days will bear the fruits of victory.”

1. Working smart is great. But so is working hard. If we gravitate too much to the “work smart” mentality and ignore the importance of hard work and reps, we will not achieve our potential.
2. Shane really appreciates people who embrace kindness. Just as Sam Smith strived to be kind when he was at his peak, so too should we strive to be kind wherever we are.
3. Some of Shane’s values may seem old school. But hard work, humility, and kindness are crucial keys to success.

1. “When in doubt, reach out.” As the saying goes, “When we smile the whole world smiles back at us.” And when we reach out to others, people reciprocate in kind. Simply reaching out to others can have surprisingly positive effects, even in extreme circumstances.
2. “Talk, don’t type.” When we talk with people, as opposed to texting or emailing them, we sound smarter, more reasonable, more rational, and more human, and it’s also more rewarding psychologically.

1. Relationships count.
2. Over and again, Tom has witnessed less talented teams achieve greater success than more talented teams, because of the relationships of the team members.
3. Know your role.
4. Tom was always talented, but he wasn’t the most talented player, not even in high school. And when he played for the 49ers he backed up Ronnie Lott. But he knew his role, which included being a great teammate both on and off the field, he accepted his role, and he magnified it. The 49ers didn’t need 53 players that were stars. They needed 53 players that came together as one.

1. When we try to mind read other’s expectations for us, we are prone to overreact in ways that don’t help us.
2. Goalies who try to block a penalty kick would be best served to “basically just stand there” and guard the middle of the net, rather than dive in a random direction. But the expectations that they impute from others can cause them to choose the lower probability defense.
3. Rather than imputing expectations from others, we should simply listen to what is said and stay focused on those expectations.
4. Our disfavor towards outgroup members tends to be much strong than our preference for ingroup members. In other words, we don’t just disfavor people who are not like us, we are prone to hate them, specifically when it comes to politics.
5. By getting to know people who have different views than our own, we realize that they’re not all that different from us, and we become more likely to accept them as they are.

1. Savor every moment.
2. The 2021-22 Kansas basketball team was considered by many to not even be in the top 5 of Bill Self’s most talented teams, yet Brian found himself in New Orleans, calling the national championship game, and making his famous call at the buzzer: “It’s a banner year for Kansas Basketball” and then right after making that call, getting hugged by Ocahi Obaji, the most outstanding player of the tournament.
3. “Savor every moment, because tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us.”
4. The game can be bad, but you can’t be.
5. You only have one chance to make a first impression.
6. Michael Jordan knew that every time he played a game, someone was there watching him play for the first time, so he wanted to give them a show.
7. We only get one chance to make a first impression, so bring the energy even if it’s on a podcast with a host you’ve just met for the first time.
8. Life doesn’t always go according to plan. So never give up. And if we savor every moment, control what we can control, and always bring energy, sometimes, just in the nick of time, it actually all comes together.

1. When we make it fun to pursue goals, we get further, faster. 
2. If we dread exercise, but we love listening to podcasts, we can bundle those two activities, which Katy calls temptation bundling, and then we’ll be significantly more likely to exercise.
3. By becoming a coach or mentor to someone else, we can improve our own performance.
4. For example, high school students in Florida gave advice on successful study habits to their peers, and in turn the students giving the advice improved their own performance. Plus, it’s rewarding psychologically when we help others by sharing what we know.
5. Strive to coach and mentor others.

1. How can we write so busy people will read and respond to what we write?
2. When we make it easier on the reader, they’re three times more likely to engage. Todd helped write an email that was sent to 50,000 people, and by simply using headers every two paragraphs, he tripled engagement. 
3. Before we ever hit send, do one round of editing with a single goal in mind: Make this easy for the reader. And Todd’s research has found what helps: Fewer words, fewer ideas, fewer requests, common words, effective formatting, and designing for navigation because everyone skims.
4. The French Philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in 1656, “I am writing you a longer letter only because I did not have time to make it shorter.”

1. Don’t get too frustrated when things don’t turn out the way you planned. Arden went from rural farm boy, to a college student on probation, to an economics professor doing groundbreaking research on air pollution…a path that no one could have predicted.
2. Latch on to the good opportunities that come your way.
3. Work hard and have integrity.
4. Be flexible.

1. When we think of ethics, we often think in terms of explicit lying, deception, or corruption, but we probably don’t pay enough attention to the emotional side of ethics. When we engage in emotional deceit, we’re just lying in a different way.
2. People often compare negotiation to poker. But poker is full of emotional deception, and if we agree that it’s generally unethical to deceive, we should count emotional deception as unethical
3. Approximately ½ of all children are deceptive by age two, and 80% by age four…and it’s likely due in large part to parents, just like me, unintentionally teaching our children to lie. When we force people to suppress their emotions, we may be cornering them into lies, teaching them emotional deception.
4. Employers should embrace free speech rather than view it as a threat. Employers are constantly striving to get employees to speak up about workplace problems. However, employees are fearful of retaliation if they do speak up, so they tend not to. If organizations truly want employees to speak up, then employers need to create a culture where employees won’t be punished for sharing their views. 
5. If people are concerned about getting fired for their civic engagement, this can harm not only the organizations themselves, but also civic society, as people will be less likely to get involved in civic affairs.
6. Had Bruce just “stayed in his lane,” he would have never had these opportunities. I love Bruce’s advice to, “Think about how you can reinvent yourself.” If you’re completely “happy in the tunnel your in,” then it’s fine to stay in it. But many people look for variety, and reinvention can make both personal and professional life more interesting. 
7. Remember that reinvention is possible, but sometimes you just have to plunge yourself into it. 

1. Frequent ethical reminders can help us behave more ethically. 
2. If someone ever includes you in a lie, even if it’s designed to make you feel better, please have the courage to call them out on it. 
3. Richard was likely sizing up Aaron when he included him in that first lie, and had Aaron had the courage to call out Richard early on, Aaron might never have been part of the fraud.
4. We should carefully consider what our own definition of success is. We are so often and easily influenced by the people we associate with, and if we haven’t carefully determined how we’re going to measure our own success, we may default into definitions that lead us to sacrifice our ethics.
5. Aaron never expected to become a convicted felon. But because of the people he was surrounded by and the pressures he gave into, he eventually found himself in prison. 
6. In the words of St Augustine, “Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.”

1. Ask for what you want. Over and again Maggie asked Stanford for things that she wanted, expecting the answer to be “no” yet over and again she was surprised at the answer.
2. We tend to underestimate how willing people are to help us, so we should ask for the things we want.  If we don’t ask, we already know we won’t get it. But if we ask, we might be surprised.
3. Let the data speak. The world is more complex than we appreciate, and our predictions are often wrong, sometimes in the complete opposite direction. But by letting the data speak, we open ourselves up to new ideas and opportunities.
4. Mentor others. One of the things that kept Maggie energized throughout her career was the relationship she had with her doctoral students. That relationship also led to entirely new fields of research that still pay dividends today.

1. The triangle structure beats the ladder structure. Teams perform best when there is a clear leader, and everyone else on the team is at a relatively flat hierarchical rank. This is in contrast to the ladder hierarchy, where everyone on the team is at a different hierarchical level, or even the inverted triangle, where there are too many cooks in the kitchen. 
2. The best leaders are able to flex…occasionally flatten the hierarchy for specific tasks or times, but then pop back to the top of the hierarchy. For example, in the military and on the battlefield, there is a clear hierarchy. However, when teams debrief, they leave their ranks at the door…they flatten the hierarchy to encourage everyone to share information. But as they walk back out the door, they pop back to the hierarchical structure.

1. Learn to be wrong.
2. Because Eric learned to be wrong, an entire field of research has become infinitely more impactful than his single paper even could have been.
3. Be humble when you teach. As Eric meets with national and international policy makers, he’s learned that he has a much greater impact when he adopts the mindset of “Let’s work together” rather than “Let me tell you how it’s done.”
4. By starting with humility, Eric develops partnerships that last for decades. And by humbly working together, Eric’s clients build capacity, and then are able to teach others “tricks on the bike” that even Erik would never expect.
5. We should be humble, both when we learn and when we teach.

1. John’s research on the death penalty found that the death penalty was not having a deterrent effect on crime, and it was all too often administered arbitrarily and unfairly.
2. Research shows that for every eight people executed, one person on death row is exonerated. Given the data John presented and the arguments his team made, the Connecticut Supreme Court abolished the death penalty.
3. John’s goal of trying to reduce harm also led him to conduct research on gun ownership and crime. But rather than focus on the findings of his research, which are many, John discussed the importance of humility. 
4. It’s harder to tease out causal relationships than John had at first realized, so it’s important to maintain some humility when we think we know something. For example, researchers believed for decades that red wine improved people’s health. But now it appears that the opposite is true.
5. Strive to reduce harm, improve things where we can, all while remaining humble in our conclusions.

1. Some people are held back in their careers by unconscious bias. But others are held back by overt sexism. Learning to differentiate between the two is crucial, because the solutions to unconscious bias are not the same as the solutions to overt sexism.
2. Our country is becoming more polarized over important issues, including issues of DEI. However, historically our country was united around the goal of equality of opportunity, specifically for people with similar skills and abilities. By focusing on the areas we agree about, we may be able to return to a place where we work together to create a stable society where everyone can thrive.
3. Sometimes we should exit situations that are bad for us. But other times we should work together to find common ground.

1. Power paired with competence can lead to overconfidence; but power paired with incompetence can lead to aggression. 
2. When we’re feeling competent, power can lead to the illusion of control, in which we think we can control things we can’t, such as an election, the lottery, or even the behavior of others, thus making us overconfident. But if we’re incompetent, we’re prone to lash out at others to reinstate our feeling of control.
3. The key is to be self aware…to not let power go to our head when we’re feeling capable, and not lash out at others when we’re feeling inadequate.
4. If you want to motivate yourself to expand your network, identify yourself as someone who likes to connect with people.
5. We need to be careful to not create a world that we don’t want to live in. We are becoming more willing for technology to track us, which can be a good thing in domains where we might feel judged. However, we run the risk of losing our privacy if we allow too much tracking and monitoring. So, we should be thoughtful in how we allow ourselves to be tracked.

1. Likability is often undervalued. While it may be better to be respected than liked, it’s often possible to be both respected and liked. 
2. For Travis, it’s not about trying to be liked for the sake of being liked. But by treating people the right way and doing the right thing, people will often like us.
3. Be mindful, humble, and appreciative of the opportunities you have, even while striving to achieve more. If we get overly obsessed with ambition and our next step, we may miss some of the opportunities for growth. 
4. Be likable and mindful.

1. To be productive, in the most distractible time in human history, aim for at least two hours of deep focus per day.
2. To be happy and healthy, connected with others, and even more productive, make sure you play.
3. Data suggests that by age 27 most people stop having fun in their lives, and fun is the number one thing people miss from their childhood. But by acting younger than we are, we can improve both our physical and psychological health.
4. Being able to perceive the informal status dynamics in groups and teams can be important to success. By paying attention to who people look to for approval, how loudly people speak, and who people defer to, we can improve our status intelligence.

1. Connect with other people. There is power in connecting with other people, in seeing their perspective, and in generating new ideas. We can get so busy with our work that we don’t take time for significant human connection, so remember the value both for your mental health and productivity, of connecting with other people.
2. Connect with a place. Be thoughtful about the place you choose to work. For Sue, she has created a place that inspires her, full of carefully chosen pictures, thank you notes, and products she has created. Her chosen place reminds her who she is and what she should be doing. 
3. Create a routine. By creating routines, we make work and life easier for us. The more we can routinize, the better off we can be because we don’t have to think so hard. Of course we shouldn’t take this too far and eliminate all randomness from our lives. But those who thrive in the gig economy establish routines.
4. Connect to a purpose. Having a purpose helps us choose work that will maximize our well-being rather than just maximize our income. By having a purpose, we also increase our motivation and inspire ourselves and others. 

1. Embrace being a walk on. Life is hard. It hits you in the face again and again and again. So, we all need to learn how to walk on.
2. There’s no buying your way on to the team. You can’t fake your way in. You have to earn it.
3. There’s beauty in earning your peers’ respect, and there’s joy in the hard pioneer journey. In the words of Robert Frost: Life is terrible. There’s no way out. Only through. 
4. Count your blessings, not your problems, because whatever we count multiplies.

1. Choose your pond carefully. Some people choose to be a big fish in a small pond. But for Linda, she just wanted to be one of the fish, in a really great pond, surrounded by other great fish who could help her learn new things. Such a great perspective.
2. Let your curiosity guide you. Rather than just focus on one topic for her entire career, Linda was open to diversions, which allowed her to learn new theories, new methods, and step outside of her comfort zone.
3. Stay close to practitioners. So often, researchers write research papers for other researchers. But by staying close to practitioners, Linda learned that there was a real need for research on ethical leadership. She then met Katherine Nelson and together they wrote a textbook on business ethics, which is now in its eighth edition.
4. Strive to learn continuously.

1. Don’t always believe what other people say about you. At a young age, Niki was tested and told that she wasn’t smart. She would later learn that she had dyslexia, but she never let that stop her. She eventually earned two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. because she just kept on trying and rejected the labels that others placed on her.
2. Work your way around whatever norms and expectations might be holding you back. The school environment didn’t fit with how Niki learned, so she had to figure out her own way to still learn and navigate college.
3. Niki’s parents didn’t let her give up on herself. They taught her that it’s okay to fail. But it’s not okay to not try. Always just try and see, and if it doesn’t work out, that’s okay. Failure isn’t bad. But you have to at least try. 

1. When David Booth won the auction for the Original Rules of Basketball it set the world record for the highest price ever paid for sports memorabilia. And it never would have happened without Josh Swade.
2. “Nobody gets anything done, unless they’re a little nutty, unless they have great energy, and great enthusiasm.” – Bill Self
3. If you really, truly feel so strongly about something in your bones, and you’re willing to just put one foot after the next, you never know what might happen. Josh was ridiculous but he didn’t care, and because of it, he was able to win the Rules of Basketball at auction.
4. Sometimes you need other people to help you get your message across. 
5. It’s okay to be vulnerable and fly around the country chasing a dream. It’s okay to have fear that you’ll show up to the auction and lose. But the most important thing is to show up. It’s a simple idea, but sadly it stops people from going after their own rules. 
6. “If you don’t give it everything you have you never know the sheer thrill that is victory or the disappointment that is defeat.” – Josh Swade
7. Go after your own rules. You don’t have to be anything other than yourself, just give it a shot.

1. One of the simplest, most important questions we can ask ourselves is, “What is essential?”
2. As we succeed in our lives we have more opportunities, which can distract us from what is essential. We have to learn how to be successful at success.
3. Hours after Greg’s daughter was born, he left his wife and newborn in the hospital to attend a meeting with a client, making what he called, a fool’s bargain. But Greg learned from that experience that if you don’t prioritize your own life, someone else will.
4. When we get pulled into the undisciplined pursuit of more, the antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less, the pursuit of the essential.
5. The word “priority” came into the English language in the 1400s, and it was singular and stayed singular for the next 500 years. But now it’s plural, and nonsensical. How can you have very many, very first, before all other things, things? An essentialist goes back to the first definition, and understands what matters most, and categorizes opportunities as either a “clear yes” or “no.”
6. Another question we can ask ourselves, once we’ve identified what is essential, is “How can we make this effortless?” In other words, how can we simplify? Rather than start with complexity and try to reduce it, Steve Jobs started from zero and tried to achieve what was essential in a single step.
7. Reduction in complexity isn’t the same as simplification.
8. We don’t always achieve more by doing more. We can accomplish a great deal more by being more selective and removing the noise and clutter that complexifys our lives and gets in the way of achieving what we want to achieve.
9. Life isn’t always about trying to achieve more by doing more, but by doing less, but better.

1. Amplification, endorsing someone’s idea while giving them credit, can boost the status of both the person being amplified and the person amplifying.
2. The simple technique of amplifying others can boost our own influence and shape discussions. 
3. Shining a light on others can help us shine too. Amplification is a virtually risk-free way to boost influence and create a positive impact.
4. I watched a shy, quiet, deferential person instantly boost their status simply by amplifying others. They weren’t coming up with new ideas. They weren’t putting their neck on the line. They were simply shining a light on others, and as a result boosted their own status and influence and helped shape the conversation.
5. Avoid stealing credit by embracing amplification. Often in sports the mantra is, “It’s amazing how much we can accomplish if we don’t care who gets the credit.” While this approach can develop selflessness, it’s not always the right approach. If we never acknowledge people’s individual contributions, they may feel unappreciated. We also might unintentionally commandeer their idea as our own and steal their credit if don’t acknowledge which people make which contributions.

1. “Good things come to those who wait.” It might take decades to reap the fruits of our labors. For Bryan, it took 25 years to meet his birth parents. But those good things he waited for are the relationships he now has with his 8 parents and 15 siblings.
2. Life is about relationships. Too often we chase money, our career, academics, etc., but what really matters is our family (in Bryan’s case, his 8 parents and 15 siblings) and our relationships with others.
3. To develop relationships with those we love, we need to put in the time going to games, being at barbecues, making those phone calls, and being present.

1. Instead of giving others advice, there is incredible power in the words, “Take your time, say more, go on.”
2. Thanks to the incredible listening skills of Anat Hurwitz (which she learned from Avi Kluger) Nate had this “crazy, powerful experience” in which said things that were more true than he’d ever said before, and he was able to realize what was really going on inside of him.
3. In the workplace, we often prioritize presenting skills or even conversing skills over listening skills. But the research shows that of the three types of communication skills, listening skills are the most important, which led Nate to develop a class called, Leading through Listening.
4. It’s important to listen to others to relate to them, to glean information, and to evaluate that information.
5. We also listen so that people can hear themselves. People have a remarkable ability to solve their own problems if someone is able and willing to draw those answers out of them through effective listening.
6. “Truth comes after the pause.” When we exclusively focus on what people are saying, rather than thinking about how to respond, and then when people finish speaking we pause to let people continue, we can use thought to respond instead of memory, which helps us go much deeper, and even say things that catch us off guard.

1. Bronco Mendenhall, head football Coach at BYU said to Paul, “I heard you’re someone I could learn from.” Twenty years later, they’re still working together.
2. When thinking about organizational processes, be clear on who “owns” each process/outcome. If everyone owns an outcome, no one does.
3. Paul learned at a young age that whatever happened at work came home with his parents. So as a child, Paul decided that, for his career, he wanted to create great places for people to work.
4. Paul moved to Silicon Valley to work with Federico Faggin, the inventor of the microprocessor. That led to work with American Express, AT&T, BHP, BP, Cherokee Nation, Colgate, eBay, Exxon, GE, Hills Pet Nutrition, HPE Financial Services, InTandem Capital Partners, InTek, NASA, National Semiconductor, Paradigm Oral Health, Sizzling Platter, Vivint Smart Home, and Zilog, among others, while accumulating 13 million frequent flyer miles in 42 different countries.
5. The three strongest facilitators of long term memory are significant emotional experience, music, and a metaphor.
6. A metaphor is an impeccable test of understanding.
7. Paul’s favorite story as a youth was David and Goliath. Paul then used that story as a metaphor for his “Five Smooth Stones” framework.
8. Smooth Stone 1: Strategy is about creating competitive advantage, and the only way to create strategy is by doing similar activities differently or different activities altogether. Doing the same thing as other people, but better, is operational excellence, not strategy.
9. For Paul, strategy consists of a company’s mission, vision, uniqueness, marketplace positioning (what you say yes to and no to), and a balanced scorecard so you can keep track of how you’re performing.  
10. For every rule you need an enforcement, and for every enforcement you need an enforcer. However, that’s expensive to organizations. A cheaper approach is to use Guiding Principles. Teach people correct principles, and let them govern themselves.
11. Smooth Stone 2: Organizations are made of processes, and not all processes are created equal.
12. Not all work is created equal. Get rid of non value work. Then be clear on what is competitive work and what is business essential & compliance work.
13. Smooth Stone 3: Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results that they get. If you want different results, change your organizational design.
14. 5-Stage Leadership Model. Teams move along a predictable path if managed well. At Stage 1, the leader is at the top and directs each team member. At Stage 5, everyone is a leader, and the team self manages. 
15. Smooth Stone 4: Knowledge is the purest form of competitive advantage.
16. Discovery x diffusion. If your company is an 8 at discovering knowledge but only a 2 at diffusing knowledge, the impact is 16. However, if your company is an 8 at both discovery and diffusion, the product is 64.
17. Smooth stone 5: 70% of strategies never get implemented because leaders don’t capture hearts and minds.
18. Frustration is almost always a result of violated expectations. And most expectations are implicit.
19. The best predictor of future performance is past performance.
20. It’s more important to manage our energy than our time.
21. Given that 80% of what the mind absorbs is visual, companies can use visual management (murals, pictures, paintings, photography, etc.) to effectively communicate the mission, vision, core values, and guiding principles.
22. There are more opportunities than resources, and focused resources do better than unfocused resources.

1. You could have two trustworthy people working together, and yet no trust between them, if neither person is willing to extend trust to the other.
2. To build trust, yes we need to be trustworthy. But by itself, being trustworthy isn’t enough. We also need to be trusting.
3. I get asked all the time, “Stephen is trust earned? Or is it given?” And my response is, “Yes.”
4. I work with organizations all over the world. I find that the bigger gap in creating trust in teams is not that people are untrustworthy. Occasionally that’s the issue. But more often it’s that we’re not trusting enough.
5. The act of trusting another is what unleashes their potential, their talent, their greatness, and it is what creates trust exceptionally fast.
6. There’s a risk in trusting. But there’s a potentially bigger risk in not trusting.
7. We create trust by extending trust.
8. I’ve learned that the key to leadership is to always lead from the inside out. In other words that means, “I go first.” I don’t wait on others to do it. I don’t wait on the systems to change. Or the leader to change. My job as a leader is to go first. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
9. Treat others according to their potential rather than their behavior. People’s behavior tends to rise or fall to the level of our expectations for them. As Thoreau said, “It’s not what we look at that matters. It’s what we see.”
10. Think of Michelangelo. When he carved the David, one of the great works of art in the world, he said, “I saw the Angel in the marble. And I carved until I set him free.” Treat others according to their potential, rather than their behavior.

1. “The greatest determining factor of your long-term success or failure is your who.” When Ryan finally got Jim Collins on the podcast after years of trying, Jim’s advice to Ryan was to focus on his who. According to Jim, the biggest determining factor of our success is our friends, our partner, and our mentor. So before anything else, think about your who.
2. Those who consistently perform at a high level compared to those who don’t is that they have a bias for action. In the words of Herminia Ibarra, “We learn who we are in practice. Not in theory.” We can learn from watching, but we learn infinitely more by doing.
3. To be interesting, you need to be interested. If we approach every interaction with others with a genuine intellectual curiosity and we ask questions trying to learn about them and their stories, and if that becomes our default setting, it will make us more interesting.
4. If we’re focused on long-term, transformational relationships, instead of transactional relationships, we will probably have a good life.
5. Redwood trees can grow 300 feet tall, yet their roots run just 6 to 12 feet deep. However, their roots run wide, as much as 50 feet in every direction and they enmesh themselves with each other. When there are brutal storms these trees are strong because they have each other. What a great lesson for life. The people who handle adversity well have an amazing “who” just like those Redwood trees. Their roots go wide and enmesh themselves with others and that’s how they stay strong.
6. “I am attracted to people who take action, who don’t fully have all the answers, who aren’t all the way there yet. But they’re going to get where they’re going. They start before they’re ready, even though they’re probably going to look stupid from time to time. And then they iterate and they get a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better.
7. “You’ll be better off if your default setting is biased toward actions. It doesn’t mean you don’t think or reflect or have a plan. You should have all those things, but then go do it. And to me, I think that’s been a separator from those who sustain excellence over time versus the ones who don’t is that they have a bias for action.”
8. Think about those the people who are actually genuinely interested in you. I bet you actually want to see them the next time you’re at the pool or you’re at the soccer game. Compare that to the ones who aren’t interested in you. If you’re being honest, you’re not quite as excited to see people who aren’t as interested in you.
9. Why was it so fun to be around them? Oh, cause they were genuinely curious. It’s an attractive quality in a person and when I kind of deconstruct those relationships, the people who I’m yearning to see and yearning to meet up with or go have dinner with when I’m in their city. It’s usually because they’re curious people, and interested in others.”
10. “How do you get a great wife? According to Charlie Munger, you have to deserve a great wife. And I think that’s kind of the case for all relationships.”

1. Whenever we make a request of someone, explain why we’re making the request. It signals respect, it helps them feel like we’re being fair, it empowers them to make an even better decision potentially, it gives them meaning, and above all, it makes them more likely to carry out our request.
2. We might feel like it diminishes our status or power if we have to explain to people “why” we’re asking them to do things. But the opposite is true.
3. There is power in explaining the “why” to people. Ask New Yorkers on a subway to stand up, and they won’t. Ask them to stand up because we want to sit down, and many more will.
4. Rather than focus on fair outcomes, focus on fair processes. If we use a fair process, people will tend to accept our decisions, even if it cuts against their favor. And fortunately, following a fair process will most likely lead to a fair outcome.

1. Imagine that you might be wrong. We’re prone to be overconfident, which can reduce empathy, decrease creativity, and increase stress.
2. Just because we’ve been right about something in the past doesn’t mean we’ll be right in the future, because all roads, no matter how long, eventually curve.
3. Be careful of the power of sequential success because every time we’re successful, whether by merit, luck, or both (and we know it’s both most of the time and sometimes just luck), we then have this feeling that the next time we do something it’s going to turn out great, and hence is born the extra energized version of overconfidence.
4. Saying things like, “I bet neither of us is exactly right” or “I’m willing to change my mind” will likely be received much better than telling someone they’re wrong.
5. In the words of Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

1. Embrace the “Attitude of Wisdom.” Two of the best leaders Bob has ever known, John Hennessy, the former president of Stanford, and David Kelley, the founder of IDEO, have strong opinions but look for signs that they’re wrong.
2. The best teams engage in constructive conflict. At Pixar, Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles, and John Walker, the producer of The Incredibles, argued endlessly about everything. But in their words, they worked in loving conflict every day.
3. There’s a disease Bob sees in successful people: no matter how much fame, money, status, power, or even lovers they have, it’s never enough.
4. Kurt Vonnegut said to Joseph Heller, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our [billionaire] host, only yesterday, may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” Joseph responded, “I’ve got something he can never have. The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
5. Attitude of Wisdom: acting with knowledge, all the while doubting what we know.  Confident but not really sure.
6. The worst teams engage in personal and emotional conflict. The best teams engage in constructive conflict…they argue as if they’re right, but then listen as if they’re wrong.
7. When David Kelley reorganized IDEO, he symbolically demonstrated the “Attitude of Wisdom” by shaving his mustache (“It will grow back if I don’t like it.”). He didn’t pretend like he had all the answers and recognized that they could iterate if they needed to.

1. Be proactive. It’s easy for us to be passive…to wait for things to come to us. But when we proactively seek out information, proactively build our network, and proactively volunteer our time, we set ourselves up for success.
2. Some of us are naturally more proactive than others, but being proactive is a choice.
3. It’s easy to remain silent when something needs to be said, but there is danger in remaining silent, especially in the presence of injustice, mistreatment, and misconduct.
4. From a young age, we are socialized to not be a snitch, to not talk back, and to not challenge authority figures. But by paying attention to situational factors and seeking out allies, we can more effectively speak up in the presence of injustice and misconduct.
5. There’s a distinction between common sense and common practice. Knowing and doing are not the same thing. But Elizabeth has motivated me to be more proactive, especially in the presence of misconduct.

1. What do you want? This may be the most critical question we face because if we don’t know what we want, somebody will define it for us.
2. Dave’s client in New York City who was making millions each year needed to be reminded that what he really wanted was a relationship with his son. Knowing what we want gives us certainty in a world of uncertainty.
3. Who do you serve? If we don’t give back, our lives are essentially meaningless. The research says that service, philanthropy, and giving makes us better, so find someone to mentor, and find people to help. And all the better if our career becomes a calling to make a difference.
4. How do you build? Are we building an organization that is better than us? Are we part of a system where the collective group comes together to generate organizational success? It can be difficult, and maybe impossible, to make a difference without being part of an organization that is bigger than ourselves.
5. Where are you? In Genesis, God asks Eve, where are you? For decades Dave thought that was a question about physical location. But 15 years ago Dave saw the question through the lens of the emotional, social, and intellectual. Are you going to change and grow? Are you going to let your mistakes define you? Or are you going to own it, accept it, learn from it, and grow?

1. When Ryan injured his back, and his daughters saw him passed out on the floor, with his pants down, thinking he was dead, and then later, when the doctor told Ryan that his core was weak, Ryan realized that it wasn’t just his physical core that was weak.
2. Rather than get surgery to fix his back, Ryan decided to recover through discipline. He started juicing and meditating, and he improved his sleep. What’s also interesting is what Ryan didn’t do. He didn’t just adopt someone else’s program. He experimented to find out what worked for him.
3. “I want our kids to have big imaginations and dreams. But we have to have the discipline every day to accomplish those big dreams.” – Ryan Westwood
4. To strengthen his core, Ryan used discipline plus experimentation. He made his good eating habits easy, and his bad eating habits hard, and he tried 20 different ways to meditate before settling on one.

1. In some sense, the separation of people is an illusion. We have a bigger influence on people than we often appreciate. There are some 10,000 unconscious signals going back and forth between people when we communicate, making us more interconnected than we realize. This leads to the second lesson:
2. Our impact on one another propagates itself into the future, for either good or bad. Remembering that our behavior impacts the world indefinitely will hopefully help us be kinder and more careful.
3. Beware of the Jungian shadow. We can so quickly, and unconsciously, attribute negative group identities to others, for example just by living in South San Jose compared to North San Jose. Our group identities can be so powerful and dangerous, so it’s important that we examine them for darkness.
4. The 2^nd law of thermodynamics establishes the concept of entropy, in which everything declines into disorder, including, schools, countries, and even people. But we don’t have to go to a dark place. Acknowledging the eventual death of our ideas, our hopes, and even ourselves, can help us enjoy and appreciate things more, improve our value system, and help us avoid negative group identities.
5. Stoicism is basically Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) on steroids.

1. History turns on small hinges. As Rob looked at his successes and failures, he observed that brilliance, talent, and grand gestures never outperform small, consistent, persistent efforts.
2. The little things are the big things. Those who succeed are consistent and persistent in small things in an area they really care about. The tree root will always push up the sidewalk if you give it enough time.
3. Don’t try to go it alone. If we’re depending only on the knowledge in our own head, we’re limiting ourselves. For Rob that meant adding a business partner to provide accountability and someone to share ideas with. We need the filter of other people who can help us weed out the bad ideas and fertilize the good ones.
4. ”What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.” Thomas Paine

1. Do fun, exciting things early in life where you can make a name for yourself, independent of your upbringing. For Luke, that meant being a Top Gun pilot, flying single seat F/A-18s, which he described as being in a wrestling match, while driving a race car, and playing a video game, all at the same time.
2. Flying fighter jets meant Luke developed self-reliance and confidence as he learned to land the $70 million aircraft on a tiny dot in the middle of the ocean, while his performance was broadcast on every TV on the ship.
3. Leaving the military, at the top of his game, to attend Stanford Law School was humbling, and taught Luke the value of interacting with people who think differently than him. Specifically, Luke learned the value of not rushing decisions, and slowing down his decision-making process when possible.
4. When choosing a career, solve for the thing you’re interested in. Prioritize passion over paycheck.
5. When other service members started talking about Goldman Sachs, Luke had never heard of the firm before. But he soon realized Goldman was full of interesting, smart people, in a dynamic field. By joining Goldman, and later founding Jordan Park, Luke was able to work with some of the smartest, most accomplished entrepreneurs of the last 20 years.
6. As Yogi Berra said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” But Luke’s approach to his career was a pretty good bet. Take risks when young, learn from others along the way, and don’t just take a job for the money, but rather prioritize interest and excitement.

1. Quitting isn’t a bad thing. With whatever we’re doing, don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t love it” or “I loved it, but I no longer do” or “I still love it, but I think there might be this other thing that I love more.”
2. All decisions are probabilistic, so it’s important to continually sample. Try a bunch of stuff, figure out what you like, and then keep trying a bunch of stuff.
3. It’s hard for us to leave paths without feeling like we’ve failed. Luckily for Annie, she was forced to try other things when she got sick during her PhD program. And then sampling poker led her to becoming a world champion. Then she realized she liked writing books, giving talks, and running a foundation.
4. Just because something survives a fact check doesn’t mean it’s true…true in the sense that it’s the right model of the facts. If the stock market drops 3,000 points in one day, people might say it’s the largest drop in history. But that would only be true in terms of total points, not true in terms of percentage.
5. Given that every decision we make is a forecast, the quality of our decisions are only as good as the way that we’ve modeled the information that is inputted into the forecast.
6. Annie has developed two questions that are fantastic for modeling facts:  “Out of how many?” and “In comparison to what?” By asking ourselves these two questions we will improve our models and make Annie happy.

1. Less is more. Be brief if we want people to read what we write. People skim, and 99% of people are more likely to read short text compared to long text. Plus, brevity is kinder to the reader.
2. Design for how people read. We read headers, we jump around, we go as fast as possible. So, use headers, bold words, and bullet points to make it easy for people to get main ideas quickly.
3. To write so people read what we write, use the AI model which has been trained on Todd’s principles. Run your text through his model at www.writingforbusyreaders.com.
4. Think addition by subtraction. We improve our writing by subtracting unnecessary words and sentences rather than adding more.
5. Readers are skittish. If you use big, uncommon words, they may run away and never come back.
6. Subtraction neglect: ask people to improve something, and the vast majority of the time they will add things. People too often fail to think that they can improve by removing and subtracting.

1. You throw an interception, you’re embarrassed because 80k people plus your teammates witnessed it. And you didn’t mean for it to happen. But don’t explain the mitigating circumstances. Just take accountability.
2. After throwing a pick, my teammates couldn’t care less about why. What they needed to hear from me is that I screwed up, but we’re still going to go win the game.
3. When we screw up there’s always a way to mitigate it. It’s probably true that circumstances were bad. But fundamentally, the truest truth is that we screwed up.
4. Find the truest truth. And then own it. Have the humility, discipline, and maturity to recognize the truest truth, and then go fix it.
5. Look for places where you can have the truest amount of accountability.
6. If I could teach my children one thing, it would be to have the humility and awareness to see when they’ve screwed up. And then go fix it with discipline and honor.
7. So much in our society is about ducking, dodging, avoiding, and working around. But the most beautiful, bountiful, abundant places in my life have come when I’ve owned the truest truth of responsibility and accountability and then gone and fixed it.
8. Screw ups are those wonderful moments of opportunity. Don’t let them go by, let alone try to duck them. Take them on, and let’s go learn and grow.
9. When I screwed up, and then took accountability, rather than talked mitigation, it created a cascade of accountability on the team. You could see the energy. “Let’s go. I won’t screw up again. Let’s go win the game.”
10. Watch the losing quarterback after a football game when the media ask, “What happened?” And then listen to see if the QB mitigates or accounts. The great players, who don’t lose very often, speak in words of accountability.
11. People say, “How do you be a great leader?” This is how: Show humility and vulnerability when you screw up. And then own it and go fix it.
12. When Steve was new on the 49ers (and in Joe Montana’s shadow) he threw a bad ball in practice, and one of his teammates said loudly, “You suck.” Ronnie Lott stopped practice and confronted the player and said, “When my father was raising me, he told me he had my back no matter what. Same goes for Steve. I’ve got his back.” This changed everything for Steve.
13. “If it’s true on the football field, it’s true everywhere.”
14. Ronnie Lott taught Steve that competition is sacred ground. When there are winners and losers, you have to have respect at all times for your opponents…for their opportunity to learn and grow.
15. I’m at the light. I was late. I had to hustle. The guy in front wasn’t going. I almost honked. But then thought, we’re in this together. And at the next light, we’re sitting next to each other, and I was like hey bro. We got a good, peaceful situation here.
16. To see others and seek their healing, their goodness, their wellness, and if I make that my North star, life gets pretty good. We can’t save people. But we can heal them.
17. A janitor at an inner-city school said to the security guard each day, “Hey, great to see you!” When the guard died, his wife shared a letter with the janitor. The letter, from the guard, said “I just want to thank you. You made a difference in my life, because every day I started with a great sense of spirit and camaraderie and love.” The janitor was shocked. All he had done was say “hey” every morning.

1. Being in charge and being a leader are two separate things. The former is a position; the latter is a behavior.
2. We don’t get to self-designate ourselves as leaders. Other people decide whether we are someone they want to follow, and they do so based on the way we behave.
3. “If you call yourself a leader, and you look back and there’s no one following you, I’ve got bad news for you.”
4. “I was always in charge of something in the Navy. But whether or not I was a leader depended on how I was behaving and what the people in my span of care thought of me.”
5. “There have been people who outrank me hierarchically, and I wouldn’t follow them anywhere. And meanwhile there’s someone over there by the water cooler who has no hierarchical rank whatsoever. And I would follow that person to hell and back because of the way they behave.”
6. You can manage and supervise people, but no one likes to be supervised. They want to follow a leader.
7. One of the most important leadership behaviors is accountability. I own my decisions. And I own the consequences thereof, whether good or bad.
8. As a leader, you can always delegate responsibility, but you can never delegate accountability.
9. Rich was commanding officer of a NAVY seal squadron and had delegated the responsibility of the jump to a new jump master. As a result, they missed the mark badly. But Rich owned the results, even though he had delegated the responsibility of the jump.
10. When we take accountability, we increase our control. When we blame others, we give up control.
11. Leaders aren’t born or made, according to Rich. They’re chosen, based on their behaviors. And one of the most important behaviors for leaders is accountability.
12. Accountability puts us in the driver’s seat, compared to blame, which immediately cedes our position to the back where we give someone else control.

1. Where do you want to get your status from? By being part of a high-status organization? Or by doing great work inside your organization. Would you rather have status or influence? Because often, they are mutually exclusive.
2. Are you optimally distinct…fitting in and standing out? If you don’t fit in, you might not have influence. And if you do fit in, are you providing something uniquely valuable, making the work better for everyone else?
3. Are there any projects causing you self-doubt? If so, you potentially just found a great source of pride if you complete the project.
4. By taking on the thing that no one else wants, and turning it into something that’s really important, you increase your influence.

1. How to live a good life: Be good. Feel good. Do good.
2. To be good, fill our mornings with rocks, the most important, hard things. And then fill in the rest of our day with pebbles and sand.
3. To feel good, be happy and healthy now. Don’t keep pushing happiness off to the future because it may never come. Every stage of life can be celebrated. And friendships and relationships should also be celebrated along the way.
4. To do good, think about the three attributes that best describe your role model, and then strive to follow their example. Don’t get so caught up in trying to be goodthat you forget to do good.
5. As Aristotle said, we can improve our virtues the same way we improve our other habits.
6. If happiness and meaning are habits, we should prioritize them now, rather than waiting for a day that may not come.
7. We need to balance self-acceptance with growth. We don’t want to beat ourselves up for not being perfect, but there’s always space to be better.

1. If you take care of people, they’ll take care of you.
2. It’s sometimes better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, especially when commandeering enemy vehicles.
3. Don’t use the hammer unless you need to. And you’ll rarely need to.
4. You can’t lead from under a truck…or from behind a computer monitor.
5. Remember the 3Bs: be brief, be brilliant, be gone.
6. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

1. Leaders can come from anywhere, because leadership is a behavior, not a position, a verb not a noun.
2. We can lead by example, by challenging the status quo, by having difficult conversations, or by listening to others. Ultimately, we get to decide what kind of leader we want to be.
3. Age unnecessarily divides us in many ways, especially given that age is the only universal social category.
4. We will all join each of ages identities and subgroups if we live long enough. But rather than glue us together, age often divides us, whether its younger people saying, “Okay, boomer” or older people lamenting “kids these days.”
5. Generational tensions are not new. There are quotes dating back to 800 BC where the older generation complained about the younger generation in the same way we see today.
6. Although both young and old are discriminated against, sadly young people tend to be viewed most negatively, both from older and younger generations alike.
7. One way to bridge the generation gap is to recognize that advice given by young people is equally as good as the advice given by old people. Just as leadership can come from anywhere, so too can good advice.
8. We probably focus too much on chronological age. To better appreciate people, we can view people through other age lenses, such as generation, tenure, and experience.

1. Public speaking is something that all of us can improve at. And much of it comes down to managing the symptoms and sources of anxiety.
2. When speaking in public, we can manage the symptoms of anxiety by practicing specific breathing techniques, like taking in deep breaths and then exhaling for twice as long as we inhale.
3. When speaking in public, we can manage the sources of anxiety by doing something physical, whether it’s walking around, talking with people, or listening to music.
4. When speaking in public, we can manage our mindset by reminding ourselves that we have value to bring.
5. When speaking in public, remember that the goal of speaking isn’t perfection but rather connection.
6. When speaking in public remember that each chance to speak is an opportunity to learn and share, rather than a threat or challenge to fear.
7. When speaking in public, strive for connection over perfection.

1. We struggle to separate what we know from how we’ve come to know it.
2. When we think we know something, it’s important to remember the tools and methods we used to learn that information, because that determines how much we do know.
3. Our environment is censored. We don’t know what we don’t know, and this makes learning difficult. So when we think we know something, remember that our environment is censored.
4. So often when people lie, they do so for selfish reasons. But some lies are motivated by kindness, and therefore can have a different impact than selfish lies.
5. Remember that we never truly get to see the counterfactual of our decisions.

1. The reader is 30 minutes closer to death after having read your work. What are you going to do with that knowledge?
2. Knowing that you have a contract with your audience to educate, move, and impress them, never waste their time.
3. Know that whatever you do, you will make your reader feel something.
4. Make them laugh, make them cry, make them want to fall in love again, and make them cry again.
5. Only write what only you can write about. Don’t just write the stories you can tell. Write only stories that only you can tell.
6. “I want to make you see something and feel it so deeply that you just won’t ever forget it and that you’ll keep thinking about it.”
7. “A book is like an empathy machine. You get insight into someone else’s brain as you see their choices and their values.”
8. We should all make art because it meets other people’s needs.
9. I want someone who cares so deeply about what they’re doing that they give me their best and their weirdest, and that will help me create the next thing for me.
10. “We all live as if our life is the most important thing on Earth, because it is to us. And therefore the stories that we live are our most important stories.”

1. To increase influence with people you work with: If you do someone a favor, don’t say, “No problem.” Rather, say “It’s what we do for one another here.”
2. To increase influence with people you don’t work with: If you do someone a favor, don’t say, “No problem.” Rather, say, “I know that if the situation were reversed, you’d do the same thing.”
3. To Increase Influence: When you go into a situation with unfamiliar people, be generous with them. They will then like you and be more generous with you.
4. To Increase Influence: Don’t ask, “Who can most help me here?” Rather ask “Whom can I most help here?” And after you help them, you’ll have an advocate.
5. When we’re generous with others, two levers of influence apply: liking and reciprocity. They will like us more and will want to return the favor.

1. Just get started. So often we want to wait for the perfect time or conditions to do something. But in reality, the best way to find motivation to do things is to just get started.
2. Acting creates motivation. If you don’t feel like writing, but then you start writing, you will then feel like writing.
3. Julius Erving: “Being a professional is doing what you love to do, even on the days you don’t feel like doing it.”
4. “If I decided that I was going to write when I was inspired, I would never write a word.” Instead, I show up in my office, I give myself a word count, and I don’t do anything until I hit that number.
5. Once I start writing I feel like writing. I wish someone had told me when I was younger that action created motivation. It took me a while to figure that out and put it in practice.
6. Our intuition reverses the sequence. We think we have to feel a certain way to act, when in fact you can act your way into feelings.
7. Don’t wait until you feel like doing something to act. Act, and then in most cases, you’ll feel like doing it.
8. Start with generosity. In almost any interaction you have, lead with generosity. It makes us feel better, and there are also massive returns to us.
9. If we make our default setting to be generous, we may have to switch off the default for some people, but most people are worthy of our generosity.

1. Reputation is how people perceive us. But integrity is what we get to choose for ourselves.
2. We can hold ourselves accountable for our integrity, but when we worry about our reputation, we’re prone to get led astray.
3. If we try to control our reputation, we’re prone to avoid risk (e.g., we don’t do the things we should do because we might make people mad).
4. If we try to control our reputation, we may deviate from our values in an attempt to keep other people happy.
5. We undermine ourselves when we prioritize reputation over integrity.
6. Our long-term reputation will ultimately derive from our integrity.
7. You can’t control your reputation. You can control your integrity.
8. Brian was told he was ruining his career. But by focusing on integrity over reputation, Brian and his colleagues revolutionized science.

1. Fierce self-discipline requires fierce self-compassion.
2. Doing hard things, showing up even when you don’t feel like it, is integral to having meaning and excellence in life. But you’ve got to be kind to yourself too. Because if you’re not kind to yourself, your self-discipline is not going to be sustainable.
3. Self-discipline takes you to the really hard places and allows you to step into the arena, but if you beat yourself every time you fail, why would you take that risk in the future?
4. Self-discipline and self-compassion end up getting pitted against each other. But as Brad observes people on the path of excellence, it’s not either or. It’s both and.
5. Individuals who practice self-compassion are more resilient and tend to work through challenges more skillfully.
6. “I knew intellectually that I should be self-compassionate, but it wasn’t until I had a severe episode of depression that I realized I wasn’t very kind to myself.”
7. “I was carrying a lot of self-discipline, but no one really taught me the self-compassion side of the equation. And I had to learn that to get through the depression, because simply showing up is really hard when you’re depressed.”
8. Self-compassion: “Have your own back.”
9. Self-care is really community care. All the research on resilience shows that the number one factor of resilience is seeking support and being enmeshed in a circle of belonging and community.
10. The things that work, work until they get in the way. Self-discipline works until you self-destruct because you’re pushing yourself so hard.
11. Self-compassion works until you get so soft that you don’t actually start, and every time you feel a little bit off you let those feelings dictate what happens next.

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1. We make a mistake in thinking that certain jobs are meaningful and other jobs are not. However, the meaning is really in the relationship between people and their work, which makes finding meaning a far more personal endeavor.
2. It’s not just about finding fit. It’s also about creating fit. Just as there is some finite number of people we could build a great life with, there are also some number of jobs or careers we could make our own and find meaning in.
3. By changing both our perception and behaviors, we can alter the meaning and significance of our jobs.
4. Whether we view our job as cleaning hospital rooms or as healing people, there is significant flexibility in how we can craft our jobs and derive meaning from our work.

1. After backpacking in Asia for a year, and then returning to the states, Jennifer realized that our culture and infrastructure could be different because she had seen different.
2. People think of government as an “other” and unchangeable. But it’s up to us to make government more aligned to our values.
3. Lots of people talk about public service as giving back. But Jennifer got more out of public service than she gave, and hopes that we would all spend time in public service.
4. David Graeber: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”
5. We need to hold our politicians accountable for not only planting new seeds, but also nurturing the seeds that have already been planted.

1. When people receive feedback about their strengths and weaknesses, they often choose to focus on their weaknesses. But Joe’s research, based on one million assessments of 80,000 leaders, shows that people tend to be better off focusing on their strengths rather than their weaknesses.
2. To build leadership strengths, such as trying to improve our honesty, it can be helpful to focus on adjacent strength builders such as assertiveness. By improving our assertiveness, we can improve our honesty.
3. Joe’s research from assessments on 80,000 leaders shows that those who rate us are twice as accurate at predicting our strengths and weaknesses as we are.
4. Steve Jobs had weaknesses, some of which were nearly fatal flaws. But his strengths were so strong, that they more than compensated for his weaknesses in the workplace.

1. The answer for greater happiness isn’t having more time. It’s making our time more fulfilling. 
2. Looking at data of hundreds of thousands of working and nonworking Americans shows that people with too little time were just as unhappy as people with too much time. However, 2-5 hours of discretionary time, plus using that time in meaningful ways, was the sweet spot for maximum happiness.
3. Happiness isn’t about being time rich. It’s about making our time rich.
4. One way to make our time rich is to track our time for a week, while also rating how we feel on a 10 point scale, coming out of each activity.
5. Initial data shows that social media can set subjective and arbitrary expectations for how we should spend our time, thus decreasing our feelings of time richness and fulfillment.
6. When we feel “time poor” we stop helping others. But helping others makes our time more fulfilling thus reducing our feeling of time poverty. 
7. Time management has traditionally focused on maximizing productivity. But by slowing down and focusing on tasks that are more meaningful, like having a nice conversation with a colleague, spouse, or child, we can increase our happiness and reduce our feeling of time poverty.
8. To increase your happiness, take your grandma to lunch. She’ll have perspective, knowledge, and wisdom gained through experience on how to spend our time.

1. For most negotiations use either a playful, upbeat tone or the “Late night FM DJ voice.” And smile.
2. Oprah may be the greatest negotiator of all time. And people still like her. Collaboration beats cutthroat.
3. Women pick up “tactical empathy” better than men. But also they are punished more than men for bad negotiating.
4. Extreme anchors have the tendency of driving deals away from the table.
5. If you routinely win “too big” in negotiations, people may stop dealing with you.
6. Prepare people for bad news with phrases like, “You’re probably not going to like this…” This phrase is way better than, “Not to be rude…”
7. Accusation Audit: Imagine the negative thoughts your counterparty has about you and proactively address them.
8. Mirror Technique: Repeat that last 3-5 words of what somebody just said. This is often received much better than, “What do you mean?”
9. Labeling Technique: After your counterparty speaks, label what they said by using phrases such as, “It seems like…” or “It sounds like…”
10. Use no-oriented questions: “Have you got a few minutes to talk” can be changed to “Is now a bad time to talk?”
11. Use no-oriented questions: “Can I have the day off?” can be changed to “Is it ridiculous to ask for tomorrow off?”
12. When negotiating salary, first negotiate success: “How can I be guaranteed to be engaged in projects that are critical to our strategic future.”
13. You’re going to be more prosperous being collaborative than cutthroat.

1. We’re prone to focus on weakness and shortcomings. Almost 2/3 of emotion words are negative. When we write in journals, we tend to focus on what’s not working. But focusing on our bright spots can be a superpower.
2. We naturally assume that when there are problems we should spend our time focusing on the problems. But an alternative approach is to focus on strengths…the bright spots.
3. It’s so easy to think, “What’s the problem and how do we fix it?” But another mode of inquiry that is every bit as powerful but rarely asked is, “What’s working today and how can we do more of that?”
4. “Again and again in life you’re going to encounter situations with mixed signals. Our natural tendency is to dwell on what’s not working, what’s broken. But I want you to be the person that says ‘Hang on a second, let’s flip this and look at the other side of the spectrum. What are the bright spots?’”
5. Dan is a serial procrastinator. But by focusing on his bright spots, analyzing when he was at his best, he realized that he needed to write in the mornings at coffee shops to be most productive.
6. “One company in particular added an increment of about 9 digits of revenue just by studying their own best work.”

1. Whether leaders are wasting others’ time or underestimating coordination problems, they are creating bad friction that leads people to say things like, “After pouring myself into my BS work each day, I only have scraps of myself for my family.”
2. But not all friction is bad. Creating friction for the Oakland Police Department led to less African Americans and Latinos being unjustly stopped.
3. A leader has two primary jobs: remove obstacles that infuriate. And insert obstacles that educate.

1. The best leaders see themselves as trustees of other’s time. As Bob told his employer at Stanford, and even a Google executive yesterday, “If the California DMV can be trustees of our time, you can do it for your employees too.”
2. At the CA DMV, Bob showed up at 7:30 am, and 60 people were in front of him. Bob was thrilled when he saw a worker walking each row passing out forms, prepping people for their visit, and re-routing those in the wrong line. This DMV hero was a trustee of other peoples’ time (and Bob was out in less than an hour).
3. Our natural tendency is to add things to anything we do, whether it’s a recipe, a vacation, or our jobs. But when we switch to the subtraction mindset, we can vastly improve things.
4. Switch to the subtraction mindset: In the state of Michigan there was a form that 2.5 million residents filled out that had 1,000 questions. But thanks to Project Reform, the form is now 80% shorter and takes half the time.
5. Lead with love. Starting with love, and then building the logistics behind it, can lead to vastly improved experiences compared to starting with logistics. For example, when Netflix made it easy to cancel, they got much better data from their customers.

1. Just as our brains are limited in how quickly they can process and store information (bounded rationality), our brains are also limited when it comes to ethical decision making (bounded ethicality).
2. By using systems, we can safeguard ourselves against some of our biases. So, for example, rather than just hiring for fit, and possibly perpetuating inequality, we can formalize the hiring system and hire for behavioral competencies.
3. Just as we need financial literacy to understand finance and how to invest, we also need psychological literacy to understand ethics and how to behave ethically.

1. Those who had advantages were seven times more likely to ask for help than those who didn’t. But, if we help those who ask and don’t seek out and support those who don’t ask for help, we further perpetuate inequality.
2. By developing policies with an eye towards helping those who are less likely to ask for help, we can help level the playing field.
3. A lot of privilege in this world is a result of asking for help. But when we help those who ask for help, we can unintentionally perpetuate the Asking Gap, as we help those who already have more privilege.
4. An employee who had just had a child was struggling to keep up with work. So, she asked to work remotely. The manager, being kind, agreed. But the two previous mothers who had just given birth, but hadn’t asked to work remotely, were short changed. So, the company created a policy allowing all mothers the same benefit.
5. To reduce the Asking Gap, Zoe automatically grants a two-day extension to anyone who asks. All they have to do is send an email to an email address which automatically responds with the extension.

1. When Andy thinks about the most important things he’s learned about leadership, he thinks about his role models, from church leaders to LaVell Edwards.
2. What Andy especially loved about LaVell Edwards is that he was never out of control, he was honest, he was a good teacher, and he was consistent.
3. Andy is so good at applying lessons learned from LaVell Edwards, for example, keeping control of his emotions when getting “bumped to the other side of the 50” by Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl.
4. Andy is so good at applying lessons learned from LaVell Edwards. For example, committing to always be honest with his players because he doesn’t believe you can be a good teacher if you’re not honest.
5. One of Andy’s greatest leadership strengths: He knows his players. He remembers that Chris Jones was wearing a red tuxedo 8 years ago when Chris didn’t get drafted in the first round.
6. One of Andy’s greatest leadership strengths: He knows his players. He knows that Travis Kelce is the oldest player on the team. He remembers drafting Kelce in his first year at Kansas City and has watched him grow up.
7. Andy’s greatest leadership strength: He loves his players. Andy loves Travis Kelce for his passion, even when getting yelled at and bumped in the Super Bowl. Andy loved Travis for putting his body on the line every play and for wanting to give more.
8. Andy’s greatest leadership strength: He loves his players. Andy loves Chris Jones for committing to do all he could do to win the Super Bowl, and then reaching deep into no man’s land to make it happen.
9. Andy’s greatest leadership strength: He loves his players. Andy loves Patrick Mahomes coming into the huddle every day saying, “Let’s be great!”
10. It’s important for leaders to be calm, honest, consistent, teachers. But I think Andy is one of the greatest of all time for two additional reasons: He knows his players and he loves them.

1. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed more than 2,000 people spanning more than 85 years. The one finding that stands out above all others: Relationships keep us happier and healthier through our lives.
2. From the 85-year Harvard Study of Adult Development: Relationships help us navigate stress, overcome challenges, deal with emotions, figure out our path, and connect us with our past. Relationships are also where we experience our most joy, and they also predict our health and happiness.
3. The risk of mortality associated with loneliness is about the same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
4. One of the biggest problems with loneliness is that it’s quite prevalent. In the United States, in a given week, 20-50% of adults report being lonely. Given that loneliness is as damaging to health as smoking 15 cigarettes/day, the surgeon general talks about this as a public health crisis.
5. In the past, people had to get out of their house to see whether the Jones’s were better off than them. But now we can socially compare ourselves from our phones. And most of us come out of those comparisons feeling worse about ourselves.
6. By going more virtual and focusing on efficiency we miss out on informal connections, like talking to people in the hallway.
7. Just as physical fitness is an important predictor of health and happiness, so too is social fitness. By thinking about our social lives in terms of what’s working, and then prioritizing our positive social relationships, we can improve our happiness.
8. From the 85-year Harvard Study of Adult Development: When people in their 80s discuss their regrets, most regrets are centered on relationships. For example, losing contact with friends, or not being as kind as they could have been to the people they loved.
9. Social fitness is all about making time for our friends and loved ones. Eating lunch with them, going on walks with them, or calling them. As the key finding from the 85-year Harvard Study of Adult Development shows, relationships keep us happier and healthier through our lives.

1. Many word strength fallacies consist of moving to a superlative in the conclusion. Saying that Mary is a great manager does not necessarily mean she should receive the “Best Manager of the Year” award.

2. Insufficient evidence: Moving from likely to certain. Example: “The vast majority of all lightning strikes involving people kill the victim instantly. Mac told me that he has been struck by lightning twice. Therefore, Mac must either be mistaken of else he is lying.”

3. Faulty comparison: Analogies are automatically suspect from a logical standpoint. If the two things that are being analogized are not identical, then the strength of the analogy or comparison is limited to the extent that the two elements are similar.

4. Fallacious appeals to authority: For hundreds of years everyone believed that the earth was flat. Therefore, the earth must be (have been) flat.

5. Ad hominem: Fahad was recently quoted as saying that the city’s crime problem was the direct result of a lack of educational opportunities for lower income young people. However, Fahad is himself a rather seedy character, who has been seen in conversation with several known criminals. Therefore, his remarks should be disregarded.

6. Confusing correlation and causation: A recent survey of MENSA society members revealed that members enjoyed doing crossword puzzles. Therefore, either enjoying crossword puzzles helps one become a member of MENSA, or being a member of MENSA helps one enjoy crossword puzzles.

1. For Brent the purpose of life is to experience joy. And he experiences joy when he sees growth in himself or others he loves.
2. One of the best ways to increase our joy is to increase our love for others. Brentcreated an equation that he tries to apply in his life: Joy = Growth X Love^2.
3. Brent’s parting phrase to his children summarizes what he most wants them to know: “I love you! Have fun! Do your best!”

1. We are not our thoughts, and we can change our thoughts. The way we think can affect our behavior in ways that we don’t really expect.
2. Rather than yell at ourselves like a drill Sergeant to motivate ourselves, it can be more effective to practice self-compassion by talking to ourselves like we would talk to our friend.
3. To improve our happiness, we need to invest in social connection. Not only does investing in social connection make us happier, it makes us happier than we expect it will.

1. The single most underappreciated tool that leaders have is the recognition and gratitude they can express to people working for them, and doing it in a way that is memorable for the people who are recognized and celebrated.
2. Frank recognized people by bringing them up on stage and telling stories about them that demonstrated great customer service.
3. Frank recognized people by writing 200 handwritten personal notes every Sunday, thanking them for specific things they had done.
4. Just as kids will root for athletes who take the time to sign autographs, Frank generated support from his team by writing them personal letters of recognition.
5. Every business leader knows the phrase, “You get what you measure.” Frank’s corollary is, “You get what you recognize and celebrate.”
6. If I say to someone, “I want you to provide great customer service” that sort of vaporizes instantaneously. But if I share a story of great customer service, everyone understands it and can apply it.
7. When you tell a story that illustrates great customer service, people start talking about the behaviors they’re doing that are similar, and the behavior gets reinforced and you get real momentum in the organization.
8. More often than not, leaders are unintentional and undisciplined about how they recognize and celebrate their employees.
9. Frank learned the power of recognition when he worked for George H. W. Bush. As VP, George started every day by spending an hour typing out personal notes. As a staff member, when Frank got a note from the VP, he felt like he walked on air.

You can surprise people by thanking them and doing it in a specific way.

1. Working as Chris Hemsworth’s stress coach reinforced for Modupe that everyone has stress, regardless of their fame or success.
2. It’s within our control to find ways to manage stress so that it doesn’t negatively affect others.
3. If you’re feeling stressed, do a stress check on yourself to see how you candial down that stress in a way that isn’t contagious so that other people don’t have a terrible day because you are having a bad one.
4. If Modupe snaps at herself or someone else, she pauses and asks herself, “What’s going on?” That often helps her realize why she’s stressed so that she can deal with it.
5. If Modupe’s stressed, she thinks about changes she can make in her day to reduce her stress, whether it’s doing less or calling a friend.
6. If you are stressed, pause, figure out why, and then ask yourself, “What do I need right now?”
7. Modupe learned a simple phrase that has improved her relationship with her Mom when she’s stressed: “I’m busy right now, Mom, but I’ll call you this weekend.”

1. There is no magic, one-size-fits-all solution for happiness.
2. No one can tell you the best way or the right way to be happy, just as there is no one best way to cook an egg.
3. One thing that was really hard for Gretchen to learn was what she enjoys versus what other people enjoy.
4. Gretchen had to learn that she didn’t like games, but did like exercise; that when it came to sweets, “abstinence was as easy for her as temperance was difficult.”
5. Yogi Berra: “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” And in the words of Gretchen Rubin, we need to accept ourselves while expecting more of ourselves.

1. No one is immune from behaving unethically. And sadly, over and again we tend to overrate our own ethics.

2. When facing an ethical dilemma, we predict we’ll behave ethically, and after making our decision we recollect that we’ve behaved ethically. But at the time of decision, we all too often feel unexpected pressure, make some excuse, adopt some rationalization, and behave unethically.

3. We’re in a constant battle with our “want self” and our “should self.” And all too often we give into our wants, rather than standing by our shoulds.

4. To improve our ethics, we need good sleep, continued education, and practice. Just as we wouldn’t expect to perform well in a meeting without preparing, we shouldn’t expect to perform well in an ethical dilemma if we haven’t prepared.

5. Study ethics. Take a class, read Ann’s book, learn about the ways that power, pressure, and circumstances can lead us to unethical behavior. And then check your ethics with other people, conduct a pre-mortem, and let your “should-self” win.

1. It’s impossible to dive deep while wearing a life jacket. The things that helped us in the past can be the same things that hold us back today.
2. Cory has found power in the words, “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure, let’s look together” or “What do you think?” By being okay with not having all the answers, Cory has accelerated his own learning.

1. In high school Bryan was sleeping on friends’ couches & working at McDonald’s. He graduated from high school near the bottom decile. He slept in closets and cars. But when Bryan got kicked out of his house, he changed. He took control of his health, served a church mission, earned a 4.0, and eventually he made his way to Goldman, Carlyle, Stanford, and the hedge fund world.
2. “If you realize you’re heading in the wrong direction, even if you’re 95% of the way there, you turn around.”
3. And along the way, he learned crucial lessons:
4. Study to learn, not to pass tests, and work so hard that game day is easier than practice.
5. Persistence is one of life’s biggest differentiators. People are not patient and want results now.
6. An orchid requires just the right amount of water and sunlight. But a weed can grow in bad dirt, with little water and sunlight, and punch through concrete. Do you want to be an orchid or a weed?
7. You can’t outrun your diet. A supersized Big Mac meal is 1300 calories. An hour at the gym burns just 300 calories.
8. Find your limiter and train it until it’s no longer a constraint. Then find your next limiter and repeat.
9. Set some ridiculous goal that’s far out in the future. And then embody that reality with perfect clarity and become it. Smell it, tasteit, live it, and your brain won’t know the difference. And then just persist. People underestimate what they can do in a six-year time frame but overestimate what they can do in a six-month time frame.

1. When we do something wrong, we can feel guilt for the bad behavior, or feel shame for being a bad person. If we feel guilt, we can apologize & try to be better, which can give us hope. But feeling shame, feeling like we’re fundamentally flawed, can make us feel less optimistic about the future and can be much harder to effectively deal with.

2. When we provide feedback to others, it’s generally more effective to focus on people’s behaviors as opposed to more generalized statements about who they are as a person.

1. When Lehman went bankrupt and Nathan struggled to get back into investment banking, he told himself the story that he wasn’t smart enough or talented enough. But then he realized that this story wasn’t serving him. He changed the story from, “I can’t do this” to “I haven’t done it yet, but I can figure it out.”

2. Rather than tell ourselves the limiting story of, “That’s just who I am” we can aim to become the best version of ourselves.

3. Identify the self-limiting stories we tell ourselves and reframe them into stories that serve us.

1. At the heart of most disappointment in organizations are conversations that people are either not holding or not holding well, in part because many of us think that there are just some conversations that we can’t have.

2. Joseph’s work shows that you can talk with almost anyone about almost anything as long as you create enough safety. If people feel safe, and that your motives are appropriate, then they’ll let you say almost anything you need.

3. Joseph witnessed the value of psychological safety when he intervened during a fight at the airport. By showing the aggressor that he understood and cared for him, Joseph was then able to deliver the truth that the man’s behavior was unacceptable. In seconds the man moved from aggression to apology.

1. As a corporate attorney Todd helps CEOs and Boards of Directors 1) act in good faith and 2) be fully informed when buying and selling billion-dollar businesses. If the execs fulfill those two requirements, the court will defer to the “business judgement rule.” Otherwise, the courts will use the more stringent “entire fairness” standard.

2. If you want to be successful at anything, you typically have to work really, really hard at it. This includes embracing the process of improving a little bit each day, week, and year. And if you’re consistent and diligent with your work ethic, overtime you’ll rise to the top.

3. If you’re good to people, doors will open for you. Todd’s managing director at Morgan Stanley taught him that the decisions that would most affect Todd’s career would likely be made when Todd wasn’t in the room. So, Todd needed to make sure that his reputation helped rather than hurt him during those meetings.

4. As Todd learned in Venezuela, “Create fama y echate a la cama.” Create fame for yourself, and then go lie down. Our reputation is either helping or hurting us.

1. To increase motivation, find pleasure along the way. And setting a goal to do something is generally more motivating than setting a goal to stop doing something.
2. To increase motivation, we can monitor progress by looking back and looking ahead. When we start out, we can look back and take encouragement from the small progress we’ve made. When we’ve almost completed our goal, we can look forward, and take encouragement from how little we have left.
3. When our goals are in harmony with each other we’re more motivated than when we have conflicting goals. For example, rather than thinking about work-life goals as conflicting, we can think more abstractly about how the goals complement each other.
4. Including other people in our goals can be more motivating, whether that’s explicitly involving them in our goals, or just acknowledging that others have an interest in us achieving our goals whether they realize it or not.

1. When Amy studied hospital teams, she found, to her dismay, that better teamwork was correlated with higher error rates. But then she had a key insight: better teams were more willing to report errors than worse teams.

2. Most people, most of the time, hold back dissenting views. And because we don’t know what we don’t hear, we have to go on a treasure hunt for people’s dissenting views if we want to hear them.

3. Psychological safety doesn’t mean being comfortable. Rather, it’s about a willingness to endure discomfort, giving people permission for candor, when we go on treasure hunts for dissenting views.

4. We believe we see reality, but we rarely stop to think whether what we think we see is actually true.

1. Though Alison didn’t explicitly set out to conduct research to help women, she realized that it was often the women who were sticking around after class asking for help from someone who looked like them.

2. Status and power are often used interchangeably, but they are distinct. Status is respect. Power is resource control. So, it’s possible to have one and not have the other.

3. Women, more so than men, end up in positions of power without the commensurate status. The alternative, status without power, is much easier to navigate. People think of you as warm, giving, and capable. But people who have power without status are often treated poorly, which can lead to instability and exit.

4. Alison’s most common recommendation for women who ask for help navigating power and status dynamics is to start sooner advocating for themselves. Otherwise, they may find themselves in situations where people have already concluded that they’re not the valuable person in the room.

1. As a special agent, Richard has dedicated himself to continuous learning. Criminals launder money through the Internet in countless ways, whether through cryptocurrency or the banking system, and Richard has to stay on top of all of it.

2. As an IRS special agent, Richard helps keep the playing field level for all of us by holding criminals accountable for not paying their taxes.

3. Look out for yourselves. Fraud is rampant. And look out for your friends, neighbors and family as well, to make sure they’re not being victimized.

1. As Ken Burns said, “Leadership is humility and generosity squared.”

2. Leadership is admitting we don’t know everything and then giving credit to others for their success.

3. When Kevin played basketball in college, his coaches would use every second of the timeouts to coach the players. But as the years passed, he noticed that coaches started using the timeouts to counsel with the other coaches. There’s power in admitting you don’t see everything and in getting advice from others.

4. As the President of BYU, Kevin learned to say “yes” as often as he could, because there are so many times as a leader that you have to say “no.”

5. It’s important to be generous and kind when saying “no,” especially because saying “no” typically doesn’t persuade anyone.

6. I love two of the quotes Kevin shared: “Anger never persuaded anyone” and “The law of love is undefeated.”

1. General Casey’s grandpa taught him: You’re no better than anyone. And no one’s better than you. So, treat everyone with respect. But don’t take any guff from anybody.

2. General Casey’s father taught him: Never be afraid to try to be the very best.

3. Vince Lombardi taught General Casey: Insist on disciplined execution of the highest standards.

4. The higher General Casey rose in the hierarchy, the more he realized he needed to influence the people outside his organization rather than just look down inside his own organization.

5. The more experienced General Casey got, the more comfortable he felt saying, “I don’t know.”

6. “Be a man or woman of your word. If you tell someone you’re going to do something, you either do it or you tell them why you’re not going to do it.”

7. There are only two kinds of plans: those that might work and those that won’t work.

8. Family is everything.

1. Over and over again, Gus saw that his leaders were willing to do everything that they asked their men to do.
2. Secretary Mattis taught the SEALs to ask three questions when making a decision: Does this decision make us more efficient? Does it make us more effective? And does it make us a more lethal fighting machine?
3. Gus noticed that the best leaders delivered information clearly, concisely, and in a timely manner. “Here’s the info you need to know. Here’s what you’re going to do with it. Now go execute.”
4. I was impressed by how Gus controlled his thoughts, whether in combat, on a dive, or even during BUDs. He focused only on the things he could control, in manageable chunks. Sometimes that meant that all he was thinking about was how he could make it through the next hour, or just make it to chow.
5. As a member of SEAL Team Six, Gus is the most elite of the elite. And yet the lessons he shared are lessons that we can all apply. Lessons on leadership, decision making, communication, and mental toughness. All simple, yet profound, practical ideas.

1. One of the skills that Charles most wants to teach his kids is how to ask questions, and specifically deep questions that get at peoples’ values, beliefs, or experiences. Rather than ask someone, “Where do you practice law?” we can ask, “Did you always want to be an attorney?”
2. Nick Epley plays a game with strangers of trying to get people to talk about their hopes and dreams within three questions. He usually gets there in two questions (What do you do? Did you always want to do that?)
3. We often hesitate to ask deep questions, when in reality people love to answer deep questions.
4. When Charles speaks to large groups, he has people share with their neighbor the last time they cried in front of someone. People predict they’ll hate the activity, but then they do the activity and love it.
5. Supercommunicators don’t have superpowers. They’re just a little more thoughtful about communication.
6. Supercommunicators ask deep questions, they show people that they want to connect, and they’re aware of the different types of conversations such as practical, emotional or social conversations.

1. Litigation is like the debate Olympics. It’s a team sport. It’s often irrational to take cases to trial. And there’s nothing like giving a closing argument.

2. Vanessa [Bryant] is an extremely formidable courageous person. Her case wasn’t something that a lot of people would have had the moral fiber to carry forward and push to its conclusion.

3. As a litigator, Craig doesn’t try to act how he thinks a trial attorney should act. He doesn’t try to impress the jurors. Rather, he tries to connect with them by being himself and conveying information clearly.

1. Harry didn’t want to be a famous artist for a living, so he chose a career that allowed him to be adjacent to creativity. And now he represents some of the top artists in the world.

2. Being an entertainment attorney is like reading instruction manuals for board games and looking for ways to cheat. (To identify potential loopholes in the contracts)

3. Remember that many industries are not as large as people might expect. So, reputation and relationships matter. By looking for win/win deals, not only will people want to keep doing business with you, but also you’re likely to get better performance on the deals.

1. When Alfred became president of the Polynesian Cultural Center, the goal was to attract as many customers as possible. But they soon realized that maximizing attendance put too much stress on the infrastructure and the employees, which in turn reduced guest satisfaction.

2. By capping attendance at the Polynesian Cultural Center, they were able to increase guest satisfaction, increase employee satisfaction, and also charge a premium.

3. Alfred’s advice to employees when they ask him for advice: “Keep trying to excel at whatever you do. Love what you do. Enjoy what you do, and don’t worry so much. Because if you are consistent, and do the things you do very well, life is going to take care of you.”

1. When Admiral McRaven asked his Master Chief how to earn the respect of the soldiers, he responded: “Work hard. Come early. Stay late. Work on the weekends.”

2. You don’t have to be the most talented to succeed. But regardless of talent, everyone can work hard.

3. You will earn the respect of others if they know you are working hard on their behalf.

4. Know your business. As a Navy SEAL that meant knowing all about weapons, diving, and demolition. It also meant knowing the details of the playbook. For example, if you’re in an ambush, first guy goes left, second guy goes right.

5. When Admiral McRaven’s solider accidentally blew off the leg of his colleague, the Master Chief wanted to go relatively easy on the solider. But Admiral McRaven believed they needed to “throw the book at him.” And through the tough love of accountability, the solider bounced back and became Sailor of the Year.

6. How do you gain respect of those you lead? Work hard and be a good person. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

7. When I asked Admiral McRaven, “Did you ever get scared?” he laughed out loud: “Yeah, of course. You’re scared all the time.” But he was able to fall back on his training and barricade his fears to help him get through countless life-threatening situations.

1. Jeff found that those who have found their calling, who work with a sense of purpose, tend to do work that has an “other orientation,” a sense of service.

2. Jeff found that those who have found their calling, who work with a sense of purpose, embrace and leverage their own unique gifts.

3. Jeff found that those who have found their calling, who work with a sense of purpose, describe a sense of destiny, as if it were fate that had led them to their position.

4. And even though Jeff eventually found his own calling, he realized that there was more to his calling than he thought, as he accepted new positions and embraced new opportunities.

1. People should come into their careers with confidence, knowing they have something to contribute but also with humility recognizing that there is always more to learn.

1. Maybe no football player has ever been so successful while also being so often mistaken for an equipment manager. But as Ty said, a little bit of toughness and a little bit of grit can go a long way.
2. In Ty’s first college game he threw four interceptions; in an NFL game he threw seven. But he simply took accountability and kept working hard.
3. It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters in life.

1. Listen before you speak.
2. Doug intentionally tries to not sit at the head of the table in meetings to signal to others that they’re all equals.

1. Matt was happy in San Francisco, and when the New York Times told him he needed to relocate to New York City or be fired, Matt decided that he didn’t want to mess with happiness, so he stayed in San Francisco. He then waited for the Times to fire him, but the call never came. And eventually Matt went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

2. “Happiness can be fragile. Don’t mess with happiness.”

1. `We’re all leaders. And the best leaders lead in 3 ways: they help people experience meaning, purpose, and personal growth. They help the organization realize its purpose. And they strengthen the organization.
2. Leaders always do good. They strive to increase light and decrease darkness.
3. When Kim became Dean of Harvard Business School, he knew he had to fire a colleague who had been a kind of poison. The previous administration had been afraid to fire the colleague for fear of a lawsuit with the Union. But when Kim fired the person, the Union said, “What took you so long?”

1. Take almost any bit of data, random or not, and our brain will try to make sense of it…it will try to create a story to explain it.

2. Given that our brains are wired for stories, when it comes to persuading other people, stories are the most powerful tool we have. Don’t underestimate the power of stories.

1. Our lives will tend to be as rich or poor as the lives of our friends. We mimic each other to an astonishingly high degree, and the people we surround ourselves with is predictive of who we are and where we’re going.

2. “Show me your money and I’ll show you your values.” It’s easy to say we value health, while spending a sizable portion of our income on fast food. By analyzing where we spend our money, we can see what we truly value.

1. John teaches students how to thrive. And the first thing he teaches are the myths of happiness: status, wealth, beauty, power. The motivation to pursue those things and the comparisons we make to others, can lead us to feel hollow and empty.
2. To thrive, we have to be intentional and deliberate about progressing on the things that matter most to us…things that are intrinsically motivating rather than extrinsically driven.
3. To thrive, it’s not just about knowing what to do. It’s actually doing it, as John learned for himself, when his daughter told him that she hated his job. So he changed.

1. We tend to underestimate the power of a simple ask. As a graduate student, Vanessa felt anxiety about asking people to fill out a survey. But once she analyzed the data, she was surprised to see how different her perception was from reality. People were way more willing to help than she had expected.
2. Before we ask for something, we should assume we are going to get the thing we’re asking for, and then ask ourselves, “Is this something I should be asking for.” Given how powerful our asks can be, this extra step will help us ask for things that are appropriate.

1. Effective leadership is about finding the balance between how we naturally want to show up as a leader and what the situation demands of us.
2. Mike distills leadership down to four domains: communication, adaptability, focus, and influence. But what’s most intriguing about Mike’s work, is that these four domains are each on a spectrum. For example, adaptability is on the spectrum of rigidity and flexibility. And the best leaders do what the task demands.
3. Though we might naturally feel most comfortable being flexible as a leader, sometimes the task demands that we be rigid; we might feel more comfortable being selfless, but sometimes leaders need to be selfish.
4. It is neither bad nor good to be rigid or flexible, to be selfless or selfish. But rather, the best leaders do what the task demands.

1. Williams Syndrome, which occurs in about one in 10,000 people, makes people incapable of distrust, so people with Williams Syndrome love everyone (and they want to hug everyone). And in return, people love those with Williams Syndrome.

2. I love what Williams Syndrome teaches us. It’s not always about what we say, or how we say it. But rather, if we are genuinely curious about people and want to connect with them, they will feel it, and they will be forgiving if we aren’t the most articulate or charismatic.

1. At any given time, we’re in one of two situations: low uncertainty or high uncertainty. And the mistake we so often make is using the techniques we use for low uncertainty in the domain of high uncertainty.

2. When we’re in an uncertain environment where we’re making a lot of assumptions, we need to collect data to convert those assumptions to facts. Rita calls this Discovery Driven Planning.

3. When planning for a conventional line of business, uncertainty is low, managers have good data, and people can accurately forecast the future with relative precision. But when launching an entirely new venture, uncertainty is high, so it doesn’t make sense to start off with a big team, ambitious goals, all the money upfront, and definite deadlines. Rather, we should do the opposite and start small, collect data, test assumptions, and iterate.

4. When making decisions, we should first assess whether we’re in Situation 1 (low uncertainty) or Situation 2 (high uncertainty). And if we find ourselves in Situation 2, we should start small, collect data, test assumptions, and iterate.

1. What often seems like an obvious answer to a problem is usually not the right answer. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, 1000s of companies diversified, only to refocus decades later. An obvious explanation for this was that the companies had made a mistake. But an alternative explanation was that the companies were right to diversify when they did and then right to refocus when they did, because the market had changed.

2. Just because a company communicates a particular strategy in public, does not mean that they aren’t communicating a different, more refined, inspiring, detailed strategy privately. To get at the heart of the onion, as Costas said, we need to ask at least five Whys?

3. Managers know they should differentiate themselves. Yet data suggests that 92% of managers imitate rather than differentiate. To close the knowing/doing gap, Costas suggests we start small, develop a strategy, work hard, and try to turn behaviors into habits.

1. The reality is that most people are not going to be outstanding leaders. So, we should strive to be brilliant in the roles that best fit our capabilities, and then surround ourselves with people who have complementary skills who are brilliant in their roles.

1. As a PhD student studying unethical behavior, Elizabeth found herself lying to prospective professors about the crime rate in Tulane. She then realized she was doing this to help the school, which prompted her to study unethical pro-organizational behaviors…lies we tell or unethical behaviors we engage in to help our organizations.

2. Elizabeth found that we’re especially prone to engage in unethical pro-organizational behaviors when we strongly identify with our organization. To combat this behavior, Elizabeth suggests that we think about other stakeholders who may be harmed by our behavior.

1. Ken kept three-ring binders on his desk that had hundreds of rejections. Those binders reminded Ken that we pay for what we get with effort, hard work, and perseverance.
2. I love how Ken followed his passion. He ignored the conventional advice to move to New York City, and instead followed his heart and moved to New Hampshire, and that made all the difference.
3. In the words of Emerson: I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.

1. To achieve our potential, it is most effective to focus on areas where we have some natural ability and curiosity. Motivation and hard work can only take us so far.
2. Rather than constantly working on our weaknesses, it is often more effective to harness our strengths.

1. We now live in a digital village, where AI can learn so much more about us than we realize. And naturally, this ability can be used to influence us for good or bad.
2. Pay attention to AI progress. Look out for ways it can help us. But also be on the lookout for ways it can harm us.

1. The skills that got us to where we are may not be sufficient to get us to where we want to go, given the rapidly changing world. So, we need to continually upscale or rescale, to prepare ourselves to do something adjacent or something different.

2. For Ravin, the journey of reinvention is his destination.

3. Seek to continually reinvent yourself.

1. People have their best days at work, feel the most creative and productive, when they make progress on meaningful work.

2. People transitioning into new life phases, for example, retirement, are at risk of not feeling productive, if their meaningful work comes to an end.

3. After interviewing 120 people, Teresa found that those who successfully transition to new life phases do the following: they take action to align their identities with some sort of structure, they strive to be aware of what’s working, and then they adapt accordingly.

1. The demand for energy, specifically and surprisingly for coal and petroleum, has never been greater, especially with the growth of energy-intensive data centers that power AI. But each energy source comes with tradeoffs, so the more diversified energy sources countries have, the greater potential for resiliency when shocks hit the system
2. Estimates indicate that an electric car only becomes less carbon intensive than a combustion engine after it’s been driven for 100,000 miles, in part because dirty energy is often used to charge the batteries, plus mining the material to create the batteries is energy intensive.
3. While nuclear power is quite clean and becoming much safer, it is especially expensive due to regulatory burdens that haven’t been updated with the latest technology. And while wind and solar help meet overall demand, they cannot reliably hit base load demand.
4. As Shon tells his students, the holy grail for energy production balances security, safety, affordability, reliability, and cleanliness. In other words, when it comes to energy policy there are no simple solutions. Only tradeoffs.

1. Anna learned from her patients in addiction recovery that if they wanted to maintain their recovery, they couldn’t tell a single lie.

2. One of the reasons lying hurts ourselves and others is because it denies us access to reality, which of course makes it more difficult to deal with reality.

3. Radical honesty applies to more aspects of life than we may realize. For example, Anna is able to reduce her anxiety before interviews by being radically honest with herself and remembering that she doesn’t have to be all things to all people, she doesn’t have to be anything more than she already is.

1. Silence is a learned behavior. We’re endlessly influenced by culture and society, so it’s important to question assumptions, and ask ourselves: In what ways do we self-censor and in what ways do we silence others?
2. Just as there is no one best time zone, there is no one best way to speak, to look, to act.
3. We should always seek out data, but remember that it’s not definitive.

1. Jon didn’t want to be a musician. But he and his wife adopted the principle of, “Turn your life over to God, and he’ll make more out of it than you’d ever be able to.” And it was that decision that guided Jon back to music.

1. I love the story Rebecca shared about the book contract she had lined up. She was going to write a book about how we are prone to take on too much stuff, and then she had to cancel the contract because she had taken on too much stuff.

2. Finding the right balance between staying focused and embracing change is a never-ending struggle. Rebecca worked with Nokia, Kodak, and Motorola. All of them were at the cutting edge of technology and poised to dominate the cell phone and camera market. But none could adapt quickly enough to the changing technology.

3. I thought it was fascinating to hear how some firms got superior results to other firms, even though they had the same inputs. The economists hated the finding because the research showed that leadership and management practices could make such a difference. The best firms took care of their people.

1. We’re always teaching people how to treat us.

2. We may be prone to over-apologize. But rather than over-apologize, we can simply say, “Thank you for your patience.”

3. Rather than prefacing a comment with, “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” we can say, “I believe we should try X.”

4. When setting boundaries, rather than just saying, “No” to a request, we can say, “I’m happy to make an exception this time.”

5. Rather than always trying to get to the point, we can share anecdotes and stories that will be much more memorable.

6. To make sure we’re working on things that our managers value, we can ask questions like, “What do you wish you had more time to work on?” or “What could I do to make your job easier right now?”

1. What great insight…that the pressure Sabina felt caused her to act in predictable ways that made her team members and colleagues cry. And then what great tips she shared to help leaders deal with the pressure.

2. As a leader, it’s important to use your “shut up” muscle. Don’t over participate, don’t over speak. Instead, let others speak first. For Sabina she tries to be the third, or later, to speak.

3. Don’t treat delegation like an on/off switch, but rather treat it like a dial which is calibrated to people’s readiness and ability.

4. Our behavior as leaders gets amplified on the way down, and peoples’ responses get muted on the way up. But by reacting to feedback kindly, and consistently asking for specific feedback, we can amplify the volume of the responses coming back to us.

1. If we’re concerned about fairness, it cannot be a program. It has to be a way of doing things. For example, DEI trainings are programs. And the research shows that they don’t change behavior.
2. When Astrid Linder collected data on car accidents, she learned that women tended to have worse injuries than men because the crash test dummies that had been used to inform the cars’ design had been made to represent a prototypical male. Designing crash test dummies that are more representative of women is an example of doing things that make life more fair.

1. I love Jenny’s advice to be shameless: have the courage to stand behind our efforts and abilities. And go after what we want.
2. What a great example of shamelessness when Jenny chased her husband-to-be off the subway to give him her business card.
3. In the workplace, it’s hard to be noticed if we don’t stand out. But many of us default to not self-promoting enough. Yet as a manager at Google, Jenny loved getting a shameless Monday morning email from a small number of her direct reports who told her what they had accomplished and what they were going to do next.

1. Given that we spend one third of our time at work, it’s hard to feel like life is meaningful if work isn’t.
2. Sometimes it just requires a mental shift to make work meaningful. For example, a data center worker realized she wasn’t just connecting wires, she was connecting people, and even saving lives given all the industries that depended on the data center.
3. When a young guest at the Ritz Carlton left their stuffed animal behind, the workers didn’t just return the stuffed animal. They also took pictures of the stuffed animal enjoying an extra-long vacation at the resort.
4. To make work meaningful, strive for community, contribution, and challenge. And then try to help others experience meaning as well.

1. To help us work hard, Theresa suggests we “park downhill.” Each day, as we finish work, we can queue up the thing we need to work on first the next day, which can help us hit the ground running.
2. To help us have fun, we can reflect, each night, on the good things we did at work. The negative tends to be stronger than the positive, but by creating an “I did list” each night, we can improve our mood and even our health.
3. By being present throughout the day, for example, while walking to a meeting, we not only improve our attention quotient, but also can improve our relationships with others.
4. Though work can often feel like we’re digging a hole in water, Theresa provides great tools to reframe and restructure our days: work hard, have fun, choose kind, be present.

1. If we’re thinking about coulda shoulda wouldas, we’re in the past. If we’re thinking about what ifs, we’re in the future. But to help us be where our feet are, we can think about 3 things we see, 2 things we hear, and 1 thing we feel. Then add in a deep, diaphragmatic breath and we’ll reset and get our minds into the moment.

2. When Riley didn’t think he could make it through another 60 days of caring for his sick daughter, his mom asked him, “Can you make it through tomorrow.”

3. Greatness is achieved one day at a time, one rep at a time. And if we’re worried we can’t make it through one day, can we make it until lunch, or even just through the next ten minutes.

4. It’s never as bad as it seems, and it’s never as good as it gets.

1. When computer science classrooms changed the pictures on the walls, from masculine-associated pictures to more gender-neutral pictures, more women expressed interest in computer science.

1. The question Bob routinely asks himself: “What is the most important problem in my field and am I working on it?”
2. It’s nearly impossible to make meaningful contributions to important fields from the outside. But by placing ourselves in the heat and discomfort of the furnace, we give ourselves the chance to do our most important work.
3. By working on the most important problem in our field, we potentially give ourselves an advantage, because often there aren’t as many people working on that problem as we might think.

1. As Judge Sack told Kannon, all you can do in a career is stand by the hoop and hope that somebody passes you the ball.
2. There’s no substitute for hard work. At the top levels, everyone has great credentials. But what differentiates the very best people is they put in the work, in a profession where there are no shortcuts.
3. Surround yourself with great people, including great mentors. But not just older people. Kannon devoted a lot of time to finding the most talented young attorneys who were driven, smart, and enthusiastic.
4. Enthusiasm is one of the most important things Kannon looks for when identifying talented people: enthusiasm to work, enthusiasm to grow, and enthusiasm to learn.
5. If you love what you do, it’s easy to get out of bed in the morning and keep doing it.

1. To show people they matter we can ask them, “When you feel that you matter to me, what am I doing?” And then do more of those things.
2. We can show people they matter by providing evidence (e.g., pictures) of how their work benefits others.
3. We can show people we need them by pointing out what wouldn’t get done without them.
4. Just because something is common sense, doesn’t mean it’s common practice. But by taking simple steps to notice and affirm people, even scheduling our good intentions, we can help people know that they matter and close the knowing / doing gap.

1. When Kobe Bryant was struggling, Todd helped him create an alter-ego which would eventually become The Black Mamba. Though creating an alter-ego can feel inauthentic or weird, creating a model of the person we want to become can help us behave in ways that will allow us to reach our goals.
2. We all have multiple identities, but being thoughtful about the identities we adopt and create can help us become the best versions of ourselves, whether we’re creating a spiderman, fitness, public speaking, or business alter ego.
3. The highest performing, most capable people have powerful tools in their tool belts. And creating an alter-ego, like we once did as children, is a tool we can add to our own belt. There is power in using our identity to reach our most ambitious goals.

1. Though we often think of innovation as heroic, deliberate, and isolated, it’s often serendipitous, unpredictable, and social.
2. The idea of inventions as private property, which reinforces the often incorrect notion that inventions are made by single inventors, is a relatively recent invention in human history.
3. We never know the impact of innovation. The Like button blew up an industry and created a host of new challenges and problems to be solved.
4. Whether in the field of academic papers, the creation of the Davy lamp, or a simple Like button, innovation is rarely an isolated, independent event.

1. What an interesting story Bruce shared about the hospital that was responsible for a child’s death. Rather than lawyer up, the hospital admitted their mistake and took full responsibility. Sadly, in Bruce’s experience as a judge for decades, this sort of accountability is far less common than it should be.
2. Saying we screwed up is not a sign of weakness, but rather it’s a sign of strength and character. And speaking of character and ethics, we should follow the law, we should make sure our behavior benefits people and the planet, and we should never do anything that we’d be embarrassed to tell our mothers about.

1. As Ryan said, it’s okay to feel burned out by other people sometimes: 72% of parents say they’re constantly stressed, 75% said they’re too busy to enjoy their lives, and when workers quit, 57% say it’s because their relationships are too much.
2. Each of us has a different set point for how much alone time we need, so we should be thoughtful about how to cultivate solitude that energizes us.
3. For Ryan, cultivating solitude that energizes him means going to movies, restaurants, or even new cities alone. At his daughter’s elementary school, that meant providing a room for students to take a break from the dance and watch a movie.
4. Going to networking events can be overwhelming for some people. So a strategy Ryan recommends is to just try to have one meaningful conversation.

1. Rather than follow the traditional path in academia and focus on one specific, well-established research area, Peter pursued topics that were interesting to him. And then over time, Peter was able to see that there was a broad theme that connected his research, even if it wasn’t an off-the-shelf research program.
2. Peter realized that he had an inner voice that was guiding him. It wasn’t always clear where he was headed. Listening to his inner voice created challenges for him. But the importance of listening to his inner voice is something that has stuck with him ever since. And it’s something he still revisits to this day, because his inner voice keeps guiding him.
3. We can pursue any combination of the things we want that fit with what our inner voice is telling us.

1. In order for leaders to consistently make the best decisions, they need access to the best information. But all too often, employees who have that information don’t speak up.
2. To get employees to speak up, maybe the most important thing managers can do is proactively reach out and solicit voice. No good manager has ever said they have a closed-door policy. But if we don’t have systems in place that encourage employee voice, our door will feel much more closed to employees than we perceive.
3. Simple techniques can help employees speak up. For example, managers can use the two-question, two-word response check in at the beginning of meetings: How are you feeling? What’s going on? This gives people a chance to speak, while also creating an expectation that everyone has something to say.
4. Eye contact can also be important. When we give deference to people it signals we trust them and helps them feel like speaking up.
5. It’s also important for leaders to be consistent, otherwise it feels risky to speak up.
6. Finally, I love Ethan’s point that proactively seeking out voice comes at a cost. Many of the Type A+ people Ethan consults with feel like some of these things are too touchy feely. Some of the activities also take time that could be spent on other things.
7. By proactively seeking out voice, we signal that we value it and increase the odds that we get access to the best information from our employees.

1. When we view our challenges through an either/or lens, we limit our options, often leading to suboptimal decisions. Both/and thinking, on the other hand, enhances creativity leading to better outcomes.
2. Take fairness, for example. Some argue it means treating everyone the same. Others believe it requires treating people differently to ensure comparable outcomes. Both views have merit and represent a classic paradox. And this is where Wendy’s process is helpful. First, notice the paradox, notice the either/or. And then change the frame to see if we can accomplish both. Is there a win/win that allows us to do both right now? I love Wendy’s mule analogy here—the mule, a hybrid of horse and donkey, represents the power of combining two different paths. And if we can’t do both at once, maybe we can do both over time. Wendy’s tightrope metaphor was excellent. A tightrope walker stays balanced by making continuous, slight adjustments as they move forward.
3. If we stick to either/or thinking we risk getting trapped, incapable of adapting when context changes.

1. I’m so impressed with Dave and Melissa and their ability to face the uncertainty and challenges of moving to China with five kids, something that the system in China is not designed for. From three-hour entrance exams, two-hour daily commutes, and 16-hour days for their children, I can only imagine how difficult this was. And then of course they faced the risk of being separated from their children if any of them tested positive for COVID.
2. And I was especially intrigued by things I learned about China. Getting into a great first grade can be more difficult than getting into college. To reduce the pressure on kindergartners, teaching math was prohibited at schools. But then parents hired tutors to teach math to the kindergartners outside of school, often creating more stress. Many Chinese students are essentially forced to drop out of high school by 9^th grade. And Chinese culture doesn’t always reward problem solving so much as it rewards following rules.
3. I love the lesson Dave shared about what he learned. It’s important to hold off on judgements, because our assumptions about people are often wrong. However, people are generally pretty reasonable once we understand why they’re doing what they’re doing.

1. I’m truly inspired by Saxon’s drive and commitment. Though he started to surf at age two, it was his commitment in high school that set him up for his national championship. Waking up early each weekday to first attend seminary, and then get to the beach, Saxon refined his skill while also learning to surf all kinds of waves. And he was also flexible, willing to focus on long boarding to get on his high school team.
2. And what a wild story about his national competition: forgetting his board, borrowing his coach’s, nailing a buzzer beater on Saturday, saying a prayer to find his board, finding it with Dimitri, and then landing another clutch buzzer beater on Sunday for the national championship.
3. And most remarkably, Saxon is now giving up surfing for two years and moving across the country to share a gospel message in hopes of helping others.
4. As Saxon so perfectly demonstrates, sacrifice, persistence, and passion are key to success.

1. It’s interesting to hear Marty describe how leaders’ weaknesses are often just the flipside of their strengths. The leader who works hard, and sends emails at 2 am, might be unintentionally modeling a standard that isn’t possible for others to achieve. I also loved Marty’s advice for leaders to prioritize the things that only they can do. And lastly, I was especially intrigued by Marty’s point that the most elite performers get the most coaching.

1. I love Darren’s goal to remember why he’s doing it: to help his clients. And one way he does that is by continually challenging himself to be a student. When NFTs exploded onto the scene, Darren learned all he could and became an NFT expert. As NIL transactions ramped up, so did Darren, becoming one of the go-to attorneys for everything related to NIL. Rather than fear new technologies, Darren gets excited by them and then learns all he can about them.

1. I love Marianne’s insight that the best leaders are not tough or kind, but rather both.  Toughness and kindness are not opposite ends of a spectrum but rather two sides of the same coin. And any leader who pushes too hard on one, while ignoring the other, will not reach their potential.
2. And I thought it was especially interesting to hear about the creative geniuses who also appreciated tension and paradoxes: motion vs rest, particle vs wave, harmony vs discord, light vs. dark, life vs death. The magic is in the tension.
3. When it comes to leadership the best leaders are both tough and kind.

1. While I was intrigued by so many things in this interview, starting with how high-school Vivek preferred policy camp to sports camp, I was especially intrigued by Vivek’s perspective on living an integrated life: combining our values and passions, and then spending time with people who reflect those values.

2. Vivek is a master at building and maintaining relationships, and then constantly striving to learn all he can from others.

3. While Vivek’s professional achievements are remarkable, I’m most impressed by his commitment to doing good in the world.

4. As Vivek reminded us, to achieve anything worthwhile in life, we have to work really hard, all the while accepting the uncontrollable.

1. I love the Stoic lesson Brad shared about the prized cup. If we expect our prized cup to never break, we’ll be devastated when it does. But if we’ve already been through the mental exercise of the cup breaking, it can be much easier to stay calm and confident when our prized cups do break. And being an entrepreneur is constantly dealing with broken, prized cups.
2. I loved hearing how Brad tries to apply Jocko’s advice for dealing with setbacks by responding with a simple “Good.”
3. Brad’s emphasis on seeking out mindset coaching stood out. The best athletes get the most coaching. So it makes sense that we too need regular feedback and mindset coaching to reach our potential.
4. By jumping into the trench himself, Brad is giving himself more opportunities to deal with broken cups. And I love his advice for how we can deal with the broken cups in our lives.

1. When Adam graduated college, he had a prestigious job as an investment banker. It paid well. It was intellectually challenging. He liked the people he was working with. But he wasn’t excited to work every day. He didn’t have autonomy. And he didn’t have creative outlets. So he thought about the tradeoffs he was making by staying. He then considered the  tradeoffs he would make by leaving. By thinking about tradeoffs, Adam gained clarity on what mattered most to him. He ultimately chose to leave banking and found his way to academia, which has its own set of tradeoffs, but ones that Adam is happier with.
2. As Adam tells his students, there are three types of careers people can have. One they love. One they hate. And one they’re okay with, in the murky middle. And it’s this third kind of career that people need to watch out for so that they don’t drift, and wake up 20 years later realizing they should have thought more carefully about the tradeoffs they were making.
3. Remember to think about the tradeoffs we’re making, both when we stick with the status quo and when we decide to change.

1. I love Mark’s message, that the best leaders lead from the heart. They care about people, they support people, they trust people, and they have their best interest at heart.

2. I thought Mark made a really interesting point that we admire coaches who show that they love their players. But the conventional business leaders shy away from this type of heart-led leadership.

3. When we think about the best leaders we know, the ones who we’ll run through a brick wall for, they’re the ones who truly love us. The best leaders lead from the heart.

1. When Margaret’s boss told her that she wasn’t self-aware, she made a change. She learned more about herself and others—and since then, she has been teaching leaders to do the same.

2. Margaret helps leaders by asking questions such as: “Who’s thinking has influenced your life?” “What are your core values?” and “What type of leader would you like to become?” Answering these questions helps leaders see where they’re at and where they want to go. And then it takes thoughtfulness and intentionality to become the leaders they want to be.

3. We have to understand and manage ourselves if we want to understand and lead others.

1. I really appreciate Scott’s key insight that every innovation has heroes, plural. While Julia Child is one of the most well-known chefs, her first cookbook had two additional coauthors.
2. I thought it was especially interesting that even Scott’s book has multiple heroes, as it was his publisher that suggested the topic.
3. I also appreciated Scott’s insight on the shadow of innovation. Questioning the status quo and innovating can create winners and losers.
4. I love Scott’s advice that if we want to get better at innovation, we need to find ways to get to intersections. Attend trade shows in different industries, read magazines from different fields, and meet with people from all over the world.

1. To be a great leader, you have to be in shape. Leaders need energy and health, and sleep is a weapon. If you’re not rested, you’re not ready for battle.

2. Admiral Stavridis was Captain of a destroyer that failed inspection, it was his peers that had his back and saved him that day. Invest in our peer relationships because they will be honest with us and be unafraid to reach out.

3. Great leaders are readers. To be a reader is to lead a thousand lives. Every book is a simulator, whether we’re learning resilience from The Old Man and the Sea or leadership from the Godfather. Since conducting this interview, I have been reading The Admiral’s Bookshelf, and I love learning the lessons he learned from his top 25 books. And because of this conversation I created my own bookshelf of the 25 books that have most influenced me. I’ve pasted these in the show notes and on my website.

4. And the Admiral’s final lesson is timeless. Be humble.

1. We can’t truly feel successful until we define what success means for ourselves. If we look at the scorecard that is handed to us, which consists of accumulating money, status, titles, and promotions, we will always feel like we need to reach for more, a trap made worse by the arrival fallacy.
2. Our ability to achieve our goals is influenced by our surroundings. The goal to live a simple life is much easier to accomplish in small town America than New York, where Sahil sees extraordinarily rich people spend their time figuring out ways to impress even more extraordinarily rich people.
3. To help us reveal how much our decisions are influenced by external validation, we can ask ourself some version of the question, “Do I really want this job, or do I want other people to see me having this job?”
4. True success is built on five types of wealth (time, social, mental, physical and financial) rather than chasing society’s default measures.

1. The most common way to allocate scarce resources is through pricing. But other mechanisms exist: hidden markets. And by staying alert for these hidden markets, we can increase our luck.

2. One of the most common hidden markets is the race: first come, first serve. In Judd’s case, when he realized that demand was going to outstrip supply for his child’s after school program, he recognized he was in a race, so he made sure to sign up right when registration opened. And he increased his luck.

3. The lottery is another hidden market. If four friends wanted to attend Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, they increase their luck by each entering the lottery for four tickets each. Hunters increase their luck by entering the lottery in years when they’re not able to hunt. And people needing organ transplants increase their luck when they sign up through multiple transplant centers.

4. To get lucky in the dating app world, people can signal that they are worth investing in.  And then I loved Judd’s insight on settling for silver. Whether we’re trying to get lucky in college admissions, with restaurant reservations, or even in the dating market, we can increase our luck by pursuing a more attainable, less competitive option. And in many cases the silver turns out to be more desirable than the gold.

1. What often holds us back as leaders isn’t the ability to grasp some new tactic. Rather it’s the beliefs we hold about ourselves.
2. Many of the mindsets that helped us succeed early on—like needing to be involved in every detail, always being right, or not being willing to make a mistake—can hold us back later.
3. Overcoming our limiting beliefs starts with curiosity: noticing when we’re frustrated or blocked, asking what belief might be driving that feeling, and challenging whether it’s still true.

1. When Steph went through her horrific divorce, she realized that she had abdicated her personal financial independence, even though she was a sophisticated corporate finance professional.

2. Even if we’re in a partnership, we can be proactive in taking responsibility for our finances. That includes addressing the emotional and psychological aspects of money matters. Communicating openly about personal finance. Using frameworks that help us achieve our goals. And starting now, because time is our greatest ally.

1. What great advice Elyce gave about the value of writing thank you notes. Not only has Elyce written countless thank you notes, but also she has helped countless others write thank you notes through her stationery line at Kate Spade.

2. After this interview with Elyce, I ordered a box of thank you notes and a pack of stamps. I first wrote a note to thank my wife Keshia for being so wonderful. And then I wrote a note to Elyce, thanking her for coming on the podcast. And just like that, I’m on track for 25 notes in six months when I check back in with Elyce.

3. I encourage all of you to follow Elyce’s advice to write thank you notes to people you meet with. By doing so, you will make others’ lives better.

1. Ian sees himself as a steward, making decisions for the person who comes after him, recognizing that he’s caring for something that existed long before him and will continue long after him.
2. What a powerful example of long-term thinking Ian encountered with the Māori leaders, who asked, “How will this decision affect our great-grandchildren?’”
3. Not all leadership looks the same, and it’s perfectly fine for some leaders to focus on the short term. But the key is being intentional about what our role demands and what kind of leader we want to be.

1.  For the sports psychologist and 40-time national handball champ Daniel Zimet his best match ever was a loss.
2. Roger Federer, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, lost nearly half the points in his career.
3. Outcomes are noisy, and only loose signals of decision quality. True peak performance, whether in sports, investing, or life, isn’t always about winning. It’s about a relentless focus on the process.
4. At the highest levels, listening beats speaking, strategic patience often beats knee-jerk decisiveness, and the courage to quit can matter more than blind persistence.
5. None of this matters if we’re running on empty. The foundation of sustained excellence is sleep, diet, and exercise.

1. Trust is both a gift and a burden. When we trust others, we can increase their pride and opportunities but can also overload them with responsibilities and pressure.

2. Leaders routinely overload their most trusted people without taking anything off their plates, while under-investing in newer employees who could grow with smaller tasks.

3. Trust shapes how we interpret behavior: trusted employees get the benefit of the doubt; less-trusted ones receive harsh judgments for the same mistakes, which can make early impressions disproportionately powerful.

4. When people are forming those early impressions and deciding  whether to trust us, they are thinking about three things: Are we competent? Do we care about them? Do we have good values? So if we do our job well and help other people without being asked, we will tend to make a good impression.

5. About 25% of employees don’t actually want more trust—they want stability, not responsibility.

1. While Dorie was working grueling hours on the campaign trail for low pay, her boss was earning 10 times her monthly salary in one hour speeches—and that sparked Dorie’s curiosity. She realized that the massive pay difference came down to scale.
2. Even if Broadway actors are just as talented as Hollywood actors, the Hollywood actors reach millions more people, thus commanding a premium.
3. Dorie also saw that her boss had earned trust of other high status people who vouched for him. By building up social proof through brand affiliations, media appearances, and content creation, we make it easier for people to trust us. And we can also increase our scale.

1. Humble Inquiry is a philosophy about how to get along, gather information, and build relationships. The key is to ask people questions we don’t know the answer to.
2. If we tell people what to do, or guide them with questions we already know the answer to, we are telling them that we know best. But by asking people questions we don’t know the answer to, we communicate genuine curiosity while also gathering information that we don’t currently possess.
3. Remember to ask people questions that we don’t know the answer to.

1. When one of David’s students was falling asleep in class, a pep talk was the last thing she needed—she was working until 1:00 a.m. and catching a 6:30 a.m. bus just to get to school. What she needed was love, respect, and repeated check-ins over time.

2. Even when students have especially difficult lives, the answer isn’t to lower expectations, but to raise support through mentorship, consistency, interventions, and relationships.

3. Often, what people need most isn’t money, but guidance—someone to help them navigate systems and help them believe a different future is possible.

4. By applying the Heath Brothers’ Power of Moments framework and intentionally designing positive, celebratory experiences, David massively increased graduation rates.

5. In the end, it all comes down to relationships.

1. We covered a lot of ground with Josh, which is always great because he’s so full of insight. First the farm, as a metaphor for life. Raising a successful crop each year requires daily blood, sweat, and tears. But even when the uncontrollable weather actually cooperates, markets can suddenly change. It’s a never ending struggle. But farmers just keep showing up every day.

2. Water is the lifeblood of the farm, and it was fun to hear how Josh is engaging with community members and policy makers to figure out how to allocate water effectively, and potentially grow the supply. And I look forward to reading his upcoming book on water.

3. I also look forward to reading Georgia and Josh’s book, Other People’s Parties. As Josh said, he often finds himself at the last moment of things and I’m inspired by how he wants to memorialize and preserve the stories that are fleeting

4. I’m especially excited to both watch the film Bozwreck and read Josh’s novel on his cousin Nate Bozung. After the interview, Josh sent me a brief clip of the film, and I was blown away by the beauty and style of the film.

5. I always love talking to Josh because he teaches me about life and humanity. But he also inspires me. Whenever we create things, we never know the impact they may have. But like the farmer, we just keep showing up every day. And even though the world is confusing, violent, and unfair, let’s be good to each other, help each other, and be better.

1. I loved Maya’s insight about identity. When she injured her finger and could no longer play the violin, she was devastated because she identified as a violinist. But when she looked more broadly at the motivations that drove her,  she realized that connection, growth, care, and contribution were underlying motivations. And violin wasn’t the only way to accomplish her ultimate goals.

2. By anchoring our identity to deeper motivations rather than specific roles or activities, we create a more resilient sense of self while also creating more opportunities for us to achieve our goals.

1. I love how Tal flipped a common assumption on hit’s head: happiness doesn’t start with feeling good; it starts with giving ourselves permission to feel bad.
2. Painful emotions aren’t a bug in the system. They’re proof that we’re alive. The mistake we make is treating emotions as moral verdicts rather than facts of nature, and then trying to suppress what we feel. The key is to accept what we’re feeling and then choose to act in line with our values.
3. The real work isn’t learning these ideas. It’s applying them, and for that reason Tal wears a bracelet to help him bridge the knowing / doing gap.
4. In summary, to be happy, remember to let yourself feel bad. And then ACT.

1. When Hubert became CEO of Best Buy, he resisted the instinct to cut, cut, cut. Instead, as a first-time CEO, he chose to be a learn-it-all rather than a know-it-all—constantly asking, What’s working? What’s not? And what do you need? He then held himself to a strong “say-do” ratio, making sure his actions matched his words.
2. I was also struck by the hierarchy he emphasized at Best Buy: people, business, finance. Of course a company has to make money. But when meetings start with finance or strategy, the implicit message is that people come second. Best Buy ultimately clarified this by defining its purpose as enriching lives through technology by addressing human needs.
3. Another powerful idea was Hubert’s reminder that culture changes faster than we think—if behavior changes first. If you want to be customer-centric, don’t just talk about customers. Spend time with them. Behavior shapes culture surprisingly fast.
4. Give a name or brand to our behavior change goals.

1. At a time when our calendars are packed with meetings, Rebecca reminds us that meetings shouldn’t just happen—they should be designed. Her “Meeting Doomsday” experiment was interesting: a simple 48-hour calendar purge saved employees an average of 11 hours per month by forcing them to rebuild their schedules with intentionality.

2. A few simple strategies can go a long way: treat our meetings like a product. Fight our instinct to add, and instead use the “Rule of Halves” to cut the duration and/or attendees by 50%. Measure our “Return on Time Investment” (ROTI) with simple post-meeting pulse checks.

3. If we want to overcome organizational inertia and Parkinson’s Law—where work expands to fill the time allotted—we have to stop using meetings as a knee-jerk default and start seeing them as our most expensive, yet least optimized, business asset. And then design them carefully.

1. The most lasting impact of any business isn’t the product or the profit, but the evolution of people.

2. Starting a company or pushing through a tough career phase is like being trapped in a room with a monster that “bats you across the face” daily. While these periods are brutal and lack immediate gratification, they build a unique internal resilience that transfers to every other aspect of life.

3. By positioning ourselves on the “edge” of our industry—where technology or society is shifting—we face less competition and find breakthroughs that are obvious only to those standing there.

4. LLMs are a “ball of power” (massive but valueless without application), unlike prior tech with inherent value. Real value unlocks by bridging this power to businesses: save costs/efficiency or grow revenue/new offerings. Anyone can do this—not just AI experts—by understanding processes and creatively applying tools.

5. Life offers us only a few (maybe 5?) major doors we haven’t fully earned. When one opens (e.g., PayPal founders spotting Bob via his Oxford Entrepreneurs club and portfolio), “put the burners on” and do everything possible to walk through it. Bob moved to the US broke, on a student visa, working insane hours to prove himself among PayPal/Yelp elites despite feeling out of depth.

6. Bob landed his role at Yelp because he founded the first entrepreneurship club in Oxford’s 800-year history. If a community we need doesn’t exist, build it. Being the organizer puts us at the crossroads of talent and opportunity, naturally leading to “seat at the table” moments

7. When meeting the PayPal founders, Bob handed over a physical folder of his projects (graphic design, yoga publishing, etc.). By having a “portfolio” of our work—whether a website or a physical folder, it makes our capabilities tangible and interactive for potential mentors or employers.

8. At Yelp, engineers pushed non-sales-y Bob into cold-calling local businesses. Trial-and-error monetization (per-call → pay-per-click → impression-based ads) led to Yelp’s billion-dollar model. He discovered he loved the adrenaline, customer learning, and flywheel of evolving the business through direct feedback.

9. From a young age, Bob learned to motivate without pay (used fun, meaning, growth, shared wins). He applies this even in paid roles: erase “it’s your job” mindset; focus on gratitude, purpose, culture. Early-stage companies can’t always compete on pay. Instead offer learning, books budget, meaning for efficiency and loyalty.

10. Anxiety over redundancy is valid short-term (riots, upheaval—like lamp-lighters vs. light bulbs, horse care vs. cars). Long-term (100-year view): tech eliminates roles but invents industries. Practical advice: become “the bridge” to stay valuable (“doctors who don’t use AI will be redundant”). Embrace it; humans’ endless desires likely ensure new work.

1. I’m intrigued by Scott’s definition of intelligence: the dynamic interplay of engagement and abilities in the pursuit of goals. When we give people a chance to go deep into an area that they love, over a long period of time, they can develop expertise and brain structures that can override some of our IQ limitations.
2. The thing that surprised Scott most as he researched intelligence was just how predictive IQ is. Scott thought he was going to be on a vendetta against IQ but ended up falling in love with the science of IQ, intelligence, and the brain.
3. Differences in ability are both natural and valuable, and recognizing them—rather than denying them—creates better paths for growth and contribution.
4. Unlocking our potential requires intellectual honesty, patience, and environments that allow passion and skill to reinforce one another over time.

1. Tom’s experience reads like a case study in an ethics textbook. Tom felt like he was on the outside looking in. So when given an insider tip, he traded on it.

2. When Tom’s boss looked the other way, while simultaneously applying pressure, Tom started rationalizing his behavior. After all, he was trying to be a good dad and husband, which made him feel like he had moral credits to spend on illegal trades.

3. Once caught by the FBI, Tom turned his scars into service, contributing to an investigation that resulted in dozens of guilty pleas.

4. Our ethical failures rarely come out of the blue, rather they are the predictable result of surrounding ourselves with the wrong people and making seemingly small ethical compromises.

1. Hiring a star performer seems like an easy win, but Beth’s research shows that hiring stars can trigger status conflicts and envy.

2. Research suggests that “star power” hits diminishing returns once a team is composed of more than 20% high performers, as too many “hot shots” can lead to ego clashes rather than collaboration.

3. To avoid these pitfalls, leaders can look for stars who possess humility and high emotional intelligence, as they’re more likely to share credit and lift those around them.

4. Success isn’t just about chasing the best talent, but being thoughtful about the character traits of stars and the system they’ll be working in.

1. Hortense had been ignoring her inner voice and had become physically ill for not making the decisions she knew she needed to make. But thanks to a dream of her wise grandmother, Hortense decided to find her “path of roses” and make choices she knew she needed to make.

2. As CEO of her company, in a room full of engineers, she gained the trust of the engineers, not by pretending to be one but by honestly admitting what she didn’t know.

3. As Hortense said, the world doesn’t need a repetition of someone else. The world needs us to be courageous enough to be ourself.

1. I’m intrigued by Adam’s perspective on saying yes, which goes against much of the research and conventional wisdom about protecting our time. By saying yes to things, countless unexpected doors have opened for Adam.
2. But of course, we must be willing to cut ties with projects that lack purpose or a reasonable ROI.
3. Being “easy to work with” is not just the right thing to do. It also reduces friction for others and creates a psychological preference for us in our colleagues’ minds, making us the first person they think of for future collaborations.

1. As Sangeet said, “Yesterday’s advantages become tomorrow’s commodity.”
2. We should ask ourselves, “What are my enduring, unfair advantages that align with my skills, energy, and purpose?”
3. Don’t focus on what AI can do today—focus on what only you are uniquely capable of doing as AI continues to improve.
4. For magicians, it isn’t about creating tricks that can’t be figured out; it’s about recombining ideas in ways that inspire wonder.