You're (Probably) Killing Your Team's Morale! | Simon Sinek

Become a student of leadership. Study it, read about it, watch things about it, practice it every day. Be a parent, you know, like, join the movement means I'm gonna take care of my team. Sometimes I'm in a leadership position and sometimes I'm not, and it doesn't matter. I'm gonna practice leadership. If I'm a salesperson, if I work at the check-in counter of an airline, I'm gonna take care of the people I work with, I'm gonna take care of the customers as if they're my family. Practice leadership, learn about it, study it, because I do these things because I recognize I'm just a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Because my job in this movement, I'm the guy who points at the box, but I need lots of people to join me who say, I have a piece of the puzzle, I'm willing to lead this this way. I'm willing to lead with an infinite mindset and put their piece down and say, how can I help build that vision? We need the army. And so how people can engage in the movement is actually practicing all the stuff. More than anything else, that's what we need.

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Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because in my first business I was making $300 a month. I quit on my business partner, and the thing that saved me was studying the stories of super successful entrepreneurs. So I hope that this story today helps give you the motivation you need, because I I still need it too myself. So today let's learn from one of the best, Simon Sinek, and my take on his top 50 rules for success. Enjoy.

The best leaders are actually the best followers. In what ways? What do you mean? The best leaders never think that they're the final— that the buck stops with them. They always believe that they're in service to something bigger than themselves. And even if that leader, the person in leadership position, gets to the tippy top of whatever organization, they still feel that they're subordinate to something even bigger, right? So the Pope does— still thinks that he's in service to something bigger than him, right? A CEO of a visionary organization feels that they are still beholden to and following a vision bigger than them. So the best leaders actually are the best followers, even if they're at the highest levels of the organization, they're still in service, right? It may not be to a person, but to a cause, to a cause, an idea, a vision, something, whatever it is. There's still some some sort of something that they're beholden to and they're devoted to and they're in service to. So followership is a thing. And not to belabor the Marine point, but, you know, Marines, when they evaluate their leaders, they're looking for good leadership and good followership. So for example, when you go through OCS, Officer Candidate School selection, when somebody's for a task, you know, chosen to be the leader of that group for that task, the Marines are watching the others as well. So they're looking to see that everybody's contributing ideas, and they're looking to see that that leader takes in those ideas but is decisive. And they're looking to see that the members of the group, if their idea isn't picked, they still give their all to see that that the leader's idea is successful. And if it fails, give it their all to pick up the pieces and see what they can do, as opposed to going, "I told you, should have gone my way." Right, right. "I was right." Or sabotaging because their idea didn't get picked. So they go all in. So good followership is as important as good leadership, that we respect that when a decision is made, we will give our blood, sweat, and tears to see that the decision our leaders have made will be successful, and if it fails, we will help pick up the pieces because that's the deal. One thing, make them work together. Shared incentives is also a part of the thing. Usually all we do is give individual incentives, which means we're only incentivizing behavior to work individually. And by the way, incentives don't always have to be financial. It can be just recognition and reward, you know, catch people doing things right. So when you see people helping each other and sharing, Call it out publicly, you know, compliment publicly, criticize privately in front of the rest of the team. Give people promotions when there's a behavior that you want to promote, like teaming. But also ask people to solve problems together and thank them together. And if one person comes to you and complains, I'm doing all the work, you say, well, why don't you find out what's— maybe they're struggling, maybe they're like, we have to push back. And also, I think the most important thing is leading by example, asking for help. I mean, when the leader acts like they know everything and they have all the answers, then all it's doing is telling everybody else, you better know everything and have all the answers because that's how you're going to get ahead here. And so I think one of the most difficult things for anybody in a leadership position to get comfortable with is, is saying, I don't know, or I need help, or can somebody help me, or can you do this with me. I love working. I love teaming with folks on my team. It doesn't matter what the rank structure is. Bring in someone junior. Let's work together. Even if all they're doing is poking holes, you know, do you think this is good? No, I think it can be better. Okay, let me try again. So I think demonstrating the behavior that we want is a big part of it. Heck, man, I've disagreed with my own ideas. You know, I've been pigheaded and dogmatic about this is the way we got to go and everybody is wonderful and then 10 years later, you're like, "Oh, okay." Yeah, I kind of screwed the pooch on that one. But I take accountability, you know, or we find in the middle, somebody goes, "Hey, if we do this, we can probably be more successful," and we pivot. There has to be, at the decision-making ranks, there has to be a humility that the ideas don't always have to come from me. Bob Gayler, the 5th Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, has the best definition of humility I've ever heard. He said, "Don't confuse humility with meekness. Humility is being open to the ideas of others." So, you know, it's not about like, "Oh, shucks." That's not humility. You know, you and I know some remarkable leaders, people of great power and authority, and they have huge egos. Yes. You know, they know they're good, and they don't mind talking about how good they are. But when somebody says, "Hey, I got an idea," they lean in like they're little kids. They go, "Let's hear it." You know, I'm looking at some of the photographs on your wall and some of the folks that I know here, they have an insatiable curiosity for ideas. And even though they're unbelievably accomplished, if you have something to share with them, they want to talk about it. They want to hear about it. That's humiliating to me. You know? So it's not this, you know, "It's not me." It's, you know, self-confidence is a good thing. Thinking you're better than everyone else That's unhealthy. Ooh, that's good. Yeah. You know, thinking you're good is healthy. Thinking you're better than others is unhealthy.

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I'll see you there. What are your thoughts around courage? How do people get the courage to, to play the long game? To— It's not the long game, it's the infinite game. 'Cause a long game could be 5 years, right? True. Yeah, this is forever. How do people build that? Everything that we're talking about in the infinite game is really, really, really, really hard. It is so much easier to build a company based on short-term ambitions than it is an infinite cause. It just is, right? It's also fun, right? Until it's not. Less inspiring, but sometimes fun, right? Hitting a goal feels good. Right? It's much easier to just hire and fire people frequently, hire fast, fire fast, as to hiring slowly and firing slowly because we try and take care of our people as best we can. It's just, it's hard to build teams. All of that stuff we talked about leadership, like what am I supposed to do to build a trusting team? Well, I wish I could give you a list of 5 things. It's really, really hard to be a parent. It's much easier to be an uncle or an aunt or not have kids. Right? It's hard, right? So why do it? You know, it's fun and exciting to try and beat our competitors, you know? But to have to face our own weaknesses every day, oh, that's exhausting. You know, existential flexibility, I'd rather not. I just would rather not, you know? So the reason this takes courage to completely change our mindset, A, about, the game that we're actually players in, and how we want to approach these things, and do we want to shift our mindset and our organizations to prepare for the infinite game, to be organized for the infinite game, it takes courage because we're going to be swimming upstream in a world that is very finite-driven. You know, the pressures on us are overwhelming from Wall Street or our own egos or from internal incentive structures or our bosses, whatever it is. The pressures are overwhelming for us to play the finite game. And so how do you stand up to massive external pressure? Courage. And courage is something that comes from relationships. You know, it's external. A world-famous trapeze artist would never attempt a brand-new death-defying act for the first time without a net. They would never do it. So why do we think that we could do something difficult without external support too? I've had the opportunity to meet real heroes, people who've risked their lives to save the lives of others with the belief that they were gonna die, and they didn't. And when asked, "Why did you do it?" They all say something similar, which is, "They would've done it for me." It's external. And so we have to have, we have to take the time to foster and take care of people around us, to nurture our relationships, because when we're gonna be doing something difficult, when we're gonna be swimming upstream, when we're gonna be innovating and doing something different, There are days we're going to doubt ourselves. There are days we're going to get knocked on our ass. There are days that storms are going to rise, and we have to have people who say, I got your back. You need to do this. We need you. The world needs this. Keep going. I believe in you, you know? And so courage, courage comes from not only our willingness to do that for others, but then their willingness to do it for us. And if we commit ourselves to a just cause and we're willing to do those things, then, you know, the great thing is we take a lot of people with us and change the world for the better. And isn't that sort of the point of an infinite life? To leave this world in better shape than we found it? To leave the companies that we work for in better shape than when we started? To leave our families stronger and better capable than they can do without us? You know, isn't that what it means to live an infinite life? That we can live a life literally live on beyond our own lives. We take accountability away from people and we don't even realize it. So we're actually destroying people's confidence or ability to make decisions because we keep answering their questions or making decisions for them. I had a boss many years ago, one of the best leaders I ever had, Peter Intermaggio, and he wouldn't answer a single question I asked. It drove me absolutely nuts. Hey, Peter, you know, what should I do? Well, what do you think we should do? Well, I think I think we should do this. He goes, well, you should give that a try then, you know. Or he would just ask me questions. He goes, well, have you considered this? I went, no. He goes, well, maybe think about that, you know. But he would never tell me the answer. He'd always tell me the parameters. What he taught me was self-reliance. It was the most valuable lesson I probably ever, ever learned. Very often, you know, somebody will come and say, you know, should we go with blue or green? I'll go with green. Well, we just answered the question. Go with the one you think we should go with. Well, what should we do here? Make the decision that you think is the right decision to make, you know, and then let them make the decision. And when we give people accountability, the amazing thing is they rise to it. Yeah, but we keep taking the accountability because we keep answering all the questions. So there's a very easy lesson for everyone here is stop replying to all the emails that you're getting while you're away, right? Like, I know what happens. You know, in every break or right now, you know, there's an email that says, you know, should we go with this one or that one? And you're replying. And in every break, you're going to reply to all your emails and tell people your opinion of what you think they should do versus saying, I'm going away for a few days for this conference so I can learn to be a better leader. Hold down the fort while I'm away. If there's an emergency, figure it out, you know, or only call me if you absolutely do not know the answer. And stop replying to all the emails. And they now have to work. You're giving away responsibility. One of the reasons they don't take responsibility is because I don't give it to them. How do you develop self-confidence? We're kind of going off here now, but I'm— this is a topic I'm really passionate about right now. I believe self-doubt is one of the biggest killers to anyone's dreams. Yeah. So, how does someone develop self-confidence and sustain it with the ever-going changes and stresses and uncertainties that always come up? Yeah. Once you reach a certain level, there's a new uncertainty. Yeah. So, I think it's ironic that we call it self-confidence because I don't, for one, think it comes from the inside. I think our self-confidence comes from the outside. Right? You mean that's the wrong way of going about it, or you think that's where it comes from in general? We are being misdirected by the name. When we say build your self-confidence, that's the instruction is saying go inside, look inside oneself. But I think that's a false direction. Children aren't born self-confident. Their confidence is built from their parents and their friends. And their teachers, where they're rewarded when they do well and they're pushed when they fail, when they can do better. Simply, you know, we know this, that simply telling kids that they're great all the time actually doesn't build self-confidence, actually does the total opposite, right? And I, for one, I can tell you, in my own experience, my own self-confidence 100% comes from the relationships that I have. It's not some deep internal fortitude, you know. A world-famous trapeze artist is not gonna try a brand-new death-defying act for the first time without a net. So it's the people in my life. It's when I do doubt myself that somebody says, you got this, when somebody says I believe in you, when somebody says no matter what happens, whether it succeeds or fails, I'm going to be by your side, that's when I have the confidence to do difficult things. I don't have some natural battery that I— that just— that to me is bravado. I don't know if that's self-confidence. Being a huge risk taker is not an indication of self-confidence to me. You know, jumping out of a plane and jumping out of a plane with a parachute are two different things, right? Right. To me, self-confidence is measured, and there should be a degree of doubt. But I think true self-confidence, belief in oneself and belief in one's cause— you know, I could not do the things that I'm doing and I would not have the strength to have made the sacrifices that I've made or continue to wake up on a daily basis to drive to spread this message if I were alone. And so when we talk about building one's self-confidence, I think the mistake that we make is that we look inside. I think the reality is when we're trying to build our self-confidence, we should be looking to our friends. We should be nursing our relationships. When I'm looking to build my self-confidence, the question is who around me do I need to take care of? You know, the way we build our self-confidence is by helping somebody else build theirs, right? It's an act of— we will build our confidence with an act of service. Depending on the size of the organization, obviously, it's very common that other team members will go to the leader and say, we don't want to work with that person. I mean, that, that's usually a big highlight, you know, that's frequent. You can tell in meetings very often if somebody is domineering. But I'm also a great fan of peer reviews, quite frankly. The Army Rangers dealt with this. They called them Spotlight Rangers. When candidates were going through Ranger school, they had to— in the past, they had this issue where these very talented Ranger candidates and the instructors loved them. So they looked like they were great candidates. The problem is, as soon as the spotlight was turned off, they were horrible people. So leadership didn't know. And so they implemented peer reviews. So now you have to be good at your job, your instructor has to like you, and your colleagues have to like you. You're— and so— and by like, I mean respect. And you're, you know, you're seen as a team player and help each other out. So if all you're doing is reviewing annually someone's performance, that's insufficient. There needs to be regular feedback mechanisms and there needs to be an open, open dialogue and peer review, 360 review where you all come into a room and you get to give each other feedback in real time. But yeah, it's probably because there aren't enough metrics. What is your advice for somebody that's in a company that they, they don't have an infinite-minded culture? Don't. Don't be there? No. Don't try and influence that which you cannot influence. Don't control that which you cannot control. You know, an infinite mindset means that is something I can't do, but I can influence and take care of the people to the left of me and to the right of me. I can take care of the people who work for me. I can even take care of the person I work for. Sometimes we have a toxic boss, not because they're bad, but because we don't understand the pressure they're under. Sometimes to simply exhibit empathy to our boss Hey boss, you were really harsh on us today. Everything all right? What's going on? I'm worried about you. I'm here. We can succeed together. We're here to help you. No matter where we are inside an organization, leadership is not about rank or authority. Leadership is taking responsibility for the people around us. And so anybody on any team at any rank at any level can be a leader. The first choice is that we have to want to be. A dear friend of mine, Lieutenant General George Flynn from the Marine Corps, said that the first criterion to being a leader is you have to want to be one. So any of us can volunteer to be a leader. And that's what you do. You commit yourself to seeing that the people with whom we work on a daily basis love coming to work. They feel that someone's got their back. They feel supported. They feel that they have top cover. They feel someone cares about them as a human being, listens to them, knows their story, allows them to be themselves. We can be that leader. And what you start to see is those teams become really high-performing. Those teams become super tight. And you start to hear rumors across the company, because everybody wants into that team, because apparently it's a great team to work with, to work on. And before you know it, one of those people goes and moves to another team, and they take everything that they learned, because leadership is learned, and they do it for another team. And if we take that infinite mindset, then eventually the tail will wag the dog. And it doesn't matter if it's this CEO or another CEO because we will outlast whoever's in charge right now, and that's the goal. We're doing this for the good of the organization. We're doing this for the good of the cause, right? And the tail can wag the dog. Leadership and authority are not the same thing. Title affords you authority, affords you rank, right? But that doesn't make you a leader. I know many people who sit at high levels of organizations who are not leaders. We do as they tell us because they have authority over us, but we don't trust them and wouldn't follow them anywhere. And we— I know many people at low levels of organizations that have no formal rank, no formal authority, but they've made the choice to look after the person to the left of them and take care of the person to the right of them, and we would trust them and follow them anywhere. And so rank affords you the opportunity to lead at scale, It affords you the opportunity to take care of more people, implement systems and incentive structures and all the rest of it, reward behaviors to— you can influence culture with rank, but that doesn't make you a leader. And you still have to study the tenets of leadership, and when they align, it's magical. You know, when you have rank and you've been studying leadership, then you can actually affect the culture in a more robust way. And one of the primary responsibilities of any leader is to make more leaders, and you can do that at scale if you have authority. I get asked very often, you know, what are the most important characteristics of leadership? Vision, charisma, you know. I know plenty of incredible leaders that aren't big Steve Jobs visionaries, you know, they're just not. And I know some fantastic leaders who do not have charisma. They're quiet and super introverted, you know, and they're just not that exciting to talk to, spend time with. When I say charisma, I mean the traditional definition, which is more about energy. I believe charisma is undying belief in something, and that they have in spades. But I think courage, I think courage is the one thing that all great leaders have to have because we are surrounded by overwhelming forces every day of our lives pushing us to play the finite game. You know, if you're a public company, the markets, all they want for their own selfish gain is for you to make short-term decisions. The pressures are overwhelming. If you're a numbers-driven person, the pressures are overwhelming. If you're in survival mode, the pressures are overwhelming. If you have a spouse who's spends more money than you can make, the pressures are overwhelming. All the pressures around us, even the way we treat competition versus rivalry, like we feel like we have to win, win, win all the time. The pressures every day on us are absolutely overwhelming for us to be finite and to prioritize the short term over the long term, to prioritize the urgent over the important. And it takes unbelievable courage to put the important before the urgent. It takes unbelievable courage to resist all the pressures coming from selfish outside parties. It comes— it takes unbelievable pressure to do the right thing. How can we ensure that we're changing with times, technology, culture, politics, and tastes, rather than just trying to beat our competitor? And you see it across industries. You know, publishing, for example. You know, the internet showed up and they saw it and they thought it was nice, and they, you know, as it took on, they sort of I guess they were interested in it. They sort of played defense. And then Amazon showed up, and Amazon went to all of them and said, "Hey, you want to invest in us?" And they all said no. Well, now they're all playing catch-up. They're all playing defense. You know, Netflix went to Blockbuster and said, "Want to buy us?" And Blockbuster said no. The rest of the TV and movie industry were too busy comparing who had higher ratings, and they completely missed the fact that Netflix has now completely reinvented television. I find that fascinating. General Motors was destroying its own electric vehicles in a, in a, in a, to protect its old business, and now they're all rushing to catch up with Tesla. I think this is hilarious. And it's the little companies, the Netflixes, the Amazons, the Teslas, that get ignored, that aren't seen as a threat, that end up defining and redefining entire marketplaces. Now, this is not unique to small companies. Big companies can absolutely redefine. The problem is big companies are more obsessed with their finite goals. Big companies are more obsessed with beating their competitors, and little companies are obsessed with their vision. Little companies are obsessed with this outsized vision that outstrips the resources they have, right? Somebody says, we're gonna do this, and everybody looks around and goes, we don't have the money for that, we don't have the talent for that, I guess we'll have to be creative. And I think this is one of the opportunities for big companies. As they get big, their visions get smaller. They become goals that they can just do a back plan for. There's nothing inherent that a big company shouldn't be innovative. But to your point before, they become risk-averse, they become stable, and at the end of the day, it takes huge vision. What I imagine is a huge corporation, a multi-billion-dollar corporation that someone will say, we imagine a world that's so crazy and so idealistic that in this large corporation, they all look around and go, we don't have the money for that. We don't have the talent for that. I guess we'll have to be creative, which scares the heck out of the investor community. But remember, all of those companies were founded by, you know, whether it's your Steve Jobs or all of these companies, Salesforce, they all started by young people who had no experience and only had vision. And I think that's— there's no reason why big companies cannot be innovative, but I think it's about pushing their own boundaries and allowing for entrepreneurship. And inherent in entrepreneurship is failure. You can't experiment without failing. I remember talking to a CFO of a big company once, and he told me that he has two priorities for the company. Innovation and efficiency. I said, good luck with that. You know, there's nothing efficient about innovation because you have to keep trying something over and over again. There's nothing efficient about that. And for some reason, I don't know what it is, companies are obsessed with growth. And everybody, they brag, we're a hyper growth company. Show me one article, not 10, not 15, show me one article that shows any data that hypergrowth is good for business and good for the company. There is no data to show that companies who are obsessed with growth actually build stronger companies, because they don't. And so it is a fool's errand that is promoted usually by an incentive structure that rewards short-term benefits. I think what companies can do is start to look at their incentive structures and start rewarding things like teamwork, ethics, and long-term gain. And guess what? You'll get the behavior you reward. Find a friend you love, and, you know, one of those people who if you called them at 3 o'clock in the morning, you know they'd take your call and you would take theirs. Don't do this with a spouse. Don't do this with a sibling. Don't do this with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Those relationships are too close. But find a best friend and ask them this simple question: Why are we friends? And they're going to look at you like you're crazy. Because it's very hard for the human brain to put our feelings into words, because the part of the brain that controls our feelings doesn't control language. This is why we use metaphors and analogies and why we struggle to tell people how we actually feel. It's because it's a different part of the brain. And so they're going to look at you and be like, "I don't know. Why are you asking me this?" And you say, "Come on, I know you've been there for me my whole life." And then you actually stop asking the question why. Ironically, you actually ask the question what. You say, come on, what specifically is it about me that I know you'd be there for me no matter what? And they're gonna hem and haw because it's hard to put into words. Don't help them, don't let anybody else help them. And they're gonna start describing you. I don't know, you're funny, you're smart, you're honest, you've always been there for me. You go, good. You play devil's advocate. Good, that's the definition of a friend. What specifically is it about me that I'd know you'd be there for me no matter what? And again, they'll hem and haw, and some will get through this quickly and some will get through it slowly, and it will be a struggle. And you have to continue to play devil's advocate. Good, that's the definition of a close friend. What specifically is it about me? And eventually they'll give up. Eventually they'll stop describing you and they'll start describing themselves. Like my friend said to me, Simon, I don't know. All I know is that I can I can sit in a room with you, I don't even have to talk to you, and I feel inspired and I got goosebumps. In fact, I'm getting them right now. They will put into words the value you have in their life, and you will have the emotional reaction. You'll either well up with tears or you will get goosebumps. This puts you in the ballpark. This is where your why lives. And if you do this with multiple friends, they will say the same kind of thing. In fact, sometimes I'll say the same exact thing, because your why is the thing you give to the world, and amongst your closest and best friends, it is the space you fill in their lives. So that's a fun little way you can find your why. By ourselves as individuals, we are not very good. We cannot lift heavy weights by ourselves, and we cannot solve complex problems by ourselves. But in groups, we are remarkable. And so all of this stuff, whether it's life, whether it's whatever your job was in the service, whatever your job is out of the service, whether it's finding a new job, whether it's making your way, finding out sort of what your passion is, all of these things are incredibly difficult. They're all incredibly complicated, and the person who thinks that they can tackle any of these problems by themselves is a fool. Plain old, you're a fool. You cannot, I'm gonna tell you, you cannot do it alone. And so asking for help is perhaps the greatest single thing anyone can ever learn, especially where everything is new and the stresses are different and often feel overwhelming and scary, totally unfamiliar. And the longer you are in the service, the scarier it is, because this is— you had 15 years doing one thing, knowing one thing, learning a culture, and now not only is it new, people don't even understand what you did and what you know. People don't know. The military is one of the most misunderstood cultures in the world. It's so closed and insular that people just don't know it. So you're dealing with that as well. And so to ask for help in any form is brilliant. This is the single thing that completely transformed my own culture. I had a small business. I quit my job and started my own marketing consultancy a bunch of years ago. And for a few years I ran on force of personality, and it was great. But then if you have a little bit of success, force of personality doesn't work anymore. And all of a sudden things started crashing in around me, because I couldn't do it all. And I thought I had to know all the answers, and if I didn't, I pretended that I did, because I thought that's what I had to do. And I learned the very, very hard way, where I came— it was a dark period that I had to learn to ask for help. And it turns out I was surrounded by people who wanted to help me, they just didn't because they didn't know I wanted it or needed it. And it was the willingness to ask for it or accept it that transformed my life and put me on the path that I'm on now. Now I'm really open about, I can tell you stuff I'm really good at, and I'll tell you I'm good at that. And I'll tell you I am not good at that, I need help with that. If I'm struggling or if I'm stuck, if I'm confused, I say, can I ask you? I call up friends, I call up people, mentors, and say, "I need your help. Can you help me?" And here's what I've learned about the building of trust. We don't build trust by offering people our help. We build trust by asking people for help. That's what actually creates trust, 'cause it's an expression of vulnerability, right? It allows people to offer us safety and protection. And that's an act of service for the other person. The tension is healthy. The tension is good. You know, if all you have is empathy, then you have a hippie commune. And you're not actually going to cure anything. But if all you're doing is driving the numbers, driving the numbers, you're going to have a short lifespan and break the machine also. You might have a spike and then you'll disappear. Or all your best people say, "I hate it here," and they go work somewhere else and take all of their brilliance somewhere else. So there is a balance, but there's also a hierarchy. It's not 50-50. There's no such thing as 50/50. It doesn't exist. You can't say, well, we're 50% driven by performance and 50% driven by culture, because you will face decisions where one of those things will sacrifice the other. The question is, which one are you going to choose? There has to be a bias towards people. There has to be a bias towards the teamwork, the environment, and the will to succeed is driven by the belief in the cause. If the cause is clear and the metrics, and you're letting people see the metrics so they feel, they feel like we're making progress. Again, go back to that marathon analogy, right? Which is, you're exhausted, you're tired, but you're getting close to the finish line. You start running faster, not slower. That's a good point. It's keeping people included to know what the metrics mean and which ones are trending and which ones are absolute. But yeah, there's nothing wrong with the drive to succeed as long as there's a context within which that drive exists. When we are willing to put ourselves at risk to be there for someone, right? Don't worry if this goes south, I will be there for you. Which may mean working late, it may mean working extra hours, it may be putting our reputations on the line. I mean, there's a lot of things that that takes. But when we genuinely promise to be there for someone, and it has to be genuine, because if it gets tested, it's very easy to find out if it was genuine or not. But if it's genuine, then it's repaid remarkably. Let me give you a silly example. Let's say that— so I talk about this sometimes, which is the giving of time and energy is more powerful than the giving of money. You can't build trust with money. So paying somebody bonuses and giving somebody a big salary, though feels nice, is not earning or building any trust whatsoever. You cannot pay for trust. And here's the example. Let's say you're moving house. And one of your friends says, you know what, I want to help you. We've been friends for years. I'm going to pay for the moving van. Here's $5,000 and the moving van. Let me know how it goes. Have a great move. That's really generous, right? Another friend says, you know what? I want to help you move. And they come over the week before, and they're sitting in your house packing boxes. They're sweat dripping down their brow. They're there with you all day. They're there to help load the truck. They're there to help unload the truck. They're there to unwrap everything, right? They paid zero money. They gave you time and energy, which are non-redeemable commodities. Money— we make money, we spend money, we make money back. It's a redeemable commodity. Time and energy are non-redeemable commodities. And so when someone gives us something that they cannot get back, it has a much more powerful effect on how we feel. So now both those people call you another time and say, I need your help. Which one are you more apt to help? The one who gave you money or the one who gave you time and energy? And this is a good lesson for leadership as well. Giving our time and energy is often more powerful than simply just throwing money at someone. Let's say there's one person who started their own little business. A little consultancy, right? Got my shingle out. I'm a consultant, right? And everywhere they go, they keep telling you that they're better than everyone else. They keep telling you they're smarter than everyone else. They keep telling you that, you know, the big— the problem with the big companies is, is they don't have the flexibility. I'm— it actually gets to the point of being annoying, to the point that we don't want to actually work with them because we don't believe them, right? Because now let's, let's change the Change the scenario. You meet that same person and, and they introduce themselves. Look, there's a lot of good, good consultants out there. Some of them are a lot better than me, but I wake up every single day to be a better version of what I do today than I did yesterday. And I can tell you that the advice I give today is even better than it was yesterday, and the advice I'm going to give tomorrow is even better because for me, it's an education. And that's why I love working with open-minded, wonderful clients who are partners, because what we end up doing is growing together. Right now, that's one person. Think about how appealing that person is. They've actually told you that you may actually get as good or better advice somewhere else, but it's who they are and who they're being and the disposition that they bring that makes them way more trustworthy and us wanting to work with them. And it's the same for big companies. It's got nothing to do with the size of the company, which is— it's called humility and honesty. I remember young in my career, I experienced this myself when I went off and hung my shingle out and I was a little— I had a little marketing company, a little marketing consultancy. I remember going into meetings and the client would say, we want you to do all of this for us. And I'd say, I'm really good at that, pretty good at that, okay at that, really bad at that. I highly recommend you hire somebody else to do that, and I'm happily partnered with them for them to do that. And the clients wanted to work with me more, not even though I just told them I can't do that, only because I was the only one who was honest. Everybody else they talked to, big or small, told them that they were great at everything. Which is just not true. Nobody's great at everything. And so it's amazing when you take the risk to be honest, it pays dividends in the trust that you build. You have to be clear and open about what you stand for. And just like when you hire somebody, you want to make sure that when you hire them that they share your values, that they believe in your vision. You know, they don't just think it's corny. You know, or marketing, but rather that they buy into it. And sometimes we'll make mistakes, and sometimes people will come and they fall in love with it after the fact. But we, it's, you know, we try on balance to bring people that we believe will get along with the people who work here because of our values and our cause. And so too is it with suppliers. I think that, or customers. Clients, it's the same thing, which is we stand for what we stand for, and our goal is to attract people who believe what we believe. The more vocal we are about what we believe, those people literally will come to us or turn down a competitor who may even be cheaper because they would rather do business with us. And so it's okay to do business with a supplier that doesn't believe what we believe, but we have to go in with eyes open, knowing full know full well that this is just a transaction. You offer a decent product, you give me a decent price. This is not going to be a lifelong relationship. This is a transactional relationship. And when it's done, I'm just going to hold you to very different standards, right? Because when it's transactional, we're a little less patient when things go wrong. And sometimes we kid ourselves. You just can't do that too often. It's like if you're living a healthy lifestyle, you can have chocolate cake, just not too often. So yeah, I think the more vocal you are, the more you attract. And then you have to make decisions like you're hiring people because they're going to become a member of your family as well. This is the difference between the short-term finite-minded and the long-term infinite-minded. The finite-minded— is it the cheapest today? Is it the best relationship today? And pay no attention to the secondary or tertiary effects and definitely pay no attention to what will happen in 5 years, whereas that long-term minded, infinite minded player looks at something and looks at someone and says, well, you know, you're not the cheapest, but I think we're going to get along just fine. And over the course of time, the quality of work will far outweigh whatever you paid. A friend of mine who's a consultant loves to joke joke about her clients that they never have the time or money to do it right the first time, but they always have the time and money to do it again. And I think when you're infinite-minded, you consider those factors from the, from the beginning. If I ask you, do you need to change, and you said to me no, I'd be worried. You know, like, you think you've figured everything out, like emotionally, professionally, all your relationships, everything's golden. Oh, okay, how's that working out for you? You know, I think the answer is always yes, which is to view ourselves or our organizations as works in progress. That is an infinite mindset. Infinite mindset is fundamentally constant improvement. There's big change, there's little change, there's tweaks, there's dramatic change. Sometimes it's reacting to changing cultures, changes in culture, politics, technology. Sometimes the change is our own. Sometimes we have to react to it. The honest answer is yes, we have to change. There's always opportunity to improve something. So there's this notion in businesses that people fear change, which is just fundamentally not true. People fear sudden change, you know, but incremental change is not threatening. People fear change that threatens them, right? And very often the way we change manage is we do lots of PowerPoint presentations about what's coming and don't worry, and we have all these things, and we treat it very rationally. What we're ignoring is the emotional response. Now, there are some people who love change. It's an infinite-minded thing to embrace uncertainty, to see opportunity in surprise. For some people, especially people who have gotten good at doing something for 10 years, 20 years, that all of a sudden you say you're gonna change it, they fear, again there's that emotional word, they fear that they won't know how to or it will set them back. And so no number of rational assurances will help them get over that. At some point we have to just let them go through the process. We bandy these words around a little too quickly these days. They all kind of mean the same thing, authenticity, intention, Purpose, flow, all these things. Of course it matters. What is the birth of this motivation? Is it for PR? Is it to hire millennials because that's what they want, so we'll give it to them? Is it because the street demands it? Or is it because it's something I fundamentally believe in? I'm very for what the roundtable announced. The statement's a bit pablum. But, you know, reads like a, you know, the generic values they put on the wall of a generic company. I would have liked to have seen them, the people who they attribute the work to in the press release, to folks like Kip Tindall from Container Store or Jim Senegal from Costco, who've been leading this way for decades and have been outspoken about the way business has been done and been criticized for it for decades. It's like they're better messengers for it because they're deeply— they have that deep intention. They fundamentally believe business should be done this way. And the true infinite-minded player wants to build a business not just to build a better business for themselves. It's they want to build a business because they want to build business better. So they don't just come up with an idea and then hoard it. They come up with an idea and share it because it's good for the game. It's about perpetuating the game. So if the intention is to see all ships rise, then I'm very open to what these companies are saying. If the intention is to see our ship rise, I become a little cynical. So there's another guy who does what I do. He's extremely well respected. He does extremely good work. I hate him. I have no— He's always been very nice to me when I've seen him professionally. It's just I have an irrational hatred of him. And whenever his name comes up, I like— it drives me nuts. Like, people bring it up, like, "We hired him." And I was like, "Good." You know? And because I hate him, I'm really competitive with him. And so I will go online and look at my book rankings, and I'll immediately check his. And mind you, I don't look at anybody else's. Just his. And if I'm ahead, I've got this, like, smug feeling, and if he's ahead, I get really pissed off, you know. So anyway, we had the opportunity to speak at the same event. I don't mean like me in the morning, him in the afternoon. Like, we were interviewed together on the stage, and the interviewer thought it would be fun if, if we introduced each other. And so I went first, and then I looked at him and I said I said, "You make me really insecure. All of your strengths are all of my weaknesses, and when your name comes up, it makes me really uncomfortable." And he looked at me and he said, "Funny, I feel the same about you." The reason I had such an irrational hatred of him had nothing to do with him. It had to do with me. He's my worthy rival. His strengths revealed to me my own weaknesses. And instead of confronting and taking a hard look at myself and evaluating those weaknesses and working on those weaknesses, it was much easier to take all of that negative energy and direct it towards him. In other words, to be competitive, to want to beat him, right? It was a very cathartic experience. We've since become very close friends, have worked together. I no longer check his book rankings. And because we share the same cause, we can actually work together. And so what I recognized was so often in business we have these competitors, sometimes on our own teams, that we want to beat them. We've all had the experience where One of our colleagues got a promotion and we got upset. We got angry. We got angry at somebody else's success. Think about that for a second. Why couldn't we share in the joy, right? What is it about them that's being revealed in us? That's the problem, right? And so having worthy rivals instead of competitors. Competitors are other players we set out to beat. But the problem with that is there's no finish line. And so we're obsessed with beating the other company, then at some point, Sure, you're ahead in whatever metric you chose. Until when, right? At what expense? At what cost? That's not sustainable. But rather, the other players inside our industry, outside our industry, on our own teams, we can choose our own worthy rivals. Their strengths reveal to us our weaknesses, and by having our weaknesses revealed to us, it means we have the opportunity to grow and improve. And the infinite game at its core is basically a game of constant improvement. And so our worthy rivals reveal to us our weaknesses. And our opportunities to improve. When you're trying to build trusting teams, it's— you recognize that you cannot enforce certainty on people. You can offer goals. People like goals. But what's important is how we get there, not just that we got there. Think of it like— think of it like trying to lose weight, right? There's nothing wrong with setting arbitrary goals or with arbitrary dates, which is, by the way, how we build our businesses. We want to hit X amount of dollars in revenue by probably the end of the year because that's when we pay taxes. It's a completely arbitrary number. Somebody might say, we could do better than that. And you're like, you're right. And then we change the number, right? Complete works of fiction. So we're striving to hit a work of fiction, right? And it's the same when we want to lose weight. I want to lose X amount of pounds by X date. Arbitrary, right? And we're doing all the things to do that. We're exercising, eating well, all the things. We love standing on the scale. We love the number. A metric, there's nothing wrong with that. Human beings need that. We can't run in a marathon without mile markers. It's actually unnerving. We need to know how fast and how far. So the metrics are good. And let's say you hit your goal, right? You hit your performance goal just as you had articulated. Amazing. You feel incredible. You feel like you've succeeded. Here's the problem. You have to keep exercising for the rest of your life, right? In other words, you don't stop doing the things that you were doing. So the game hasn't ended, it was simply a waypoint. But what I think is more interesting is what happens if you miss your goal? What happens if you don't lose the amount of weight that you wanted on that date? And the answer is nothing. Nothing happens because you're probably way healthier than you are now than you were. You're probably on the— easily you can see the trend data, you can see you're well on your way to hitting your goal, you just picked the wrong date. You're easily gonna hit it in another month if you just stick to your regime. Business is the same, which is sometimes we miss our goals, but the question is how, what's the trend data? You know, is the team working well together? Is morale high? Is some of it out of our control, you know, market conditions and things like that, things we didn't know about? And so if we happen to miss the number, the problem is, is how are we rewarding our people? And so many of us only reward our people based on if they hit the number. But what if they're begging, borrowing, and stealing? What if they simply rush at the end of the quarter to drop their prices or have some sort of promotion or have some trickery? They'll hit the number and then we bonus them, which tells everybody else, I don't care how you hit your numbers as long as you hit them. Well, guess what kind of behavior that's gonna reinforce inside our organization? Whereas if you look at the data, the trend data, and you reward somebody who's well on the path, What we're telling you is, as long as you're doing a good job, you'll do well in this organization. Leaders understand that they are not responsible for the results. They are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results. And that skill set is very, very different than just trying to get people to do the thing that you know how to do better than them because you've been doing it your whole life. When the pandemic struck, I mean, my book came out a few months before the pandemic. And so for someone like me who loves to observe and like whether this stuff is true or not, you sort of go, you know, you sort of wonder, is everything going to hold up or not? And existential flex is something that I predicted would happen either zero, once, or at the absolute most twice in a career. But when COVID happened, we all went through it at the same time. Existential flexibility is that you're able to make a profound 180-degree strategic shift in order to continue to advance your cause. In other words, stay relevant. This is not about the daily flexibility of business. This is— we're talking profound strategic shift here. And sometimes brought on by pandemic, sometimes brought on by changing technology or politics or culture or tastes, but you're able to adjust. So for example, it's Apple, Steve Jobs, when they're developing technology in one direction, and they discover this thing called the graphic user interface that they did not invent, and they decide to walk away from millions of dollars spent and countless man-hours in order to focus on a different strategic position because Jobs believed that that was a better way to advance his cause of empowering individuals to use personal computers. That's existential flex. How do we replace our judgment with curiosity? So there's a simple technique. There are simple techniques to do this. One is write yourself a little reminder. Put a little sticky on your computer that says, "Be curious," or "Ask questions." You'd be amazed how well that works. But especially in times when we're judging, especially when we're in groups of leaders, we're in meetings, you know, we can snowball into judgment really quickly. Let's say someone's performance is in decline. Immediately, they're lazy, you know, they're stupid, they don't understand, they're a problem child. All it takes is one person to break that judgment and say, well, maybe they're going through something. And there is a technique where when you believe, when you start to form a narrative about someone or about something, that you force yourself to come up with 21 possible alternatives of what could be going on in their life. So are they lazy? Absolutely. That's absolutely a possibility. Are they a problem child? Are they toxic? Absolutely. Are they going through— are their kids Is struggling at school? Maybe. Do they have problems in their family? Maybe someone's sick? Maybe. Do they have medical issues that they're hiding from us, that they're too embarrassed about? Maybe. Like, my point is, is can you go through the exercise of writing 20 or 21 alternative stories of what could be happening, and all of a sudden we find ourselves talking about and treating that person differently? And it doesn't just come about people, it's also about decisions we're making at work. And all again, in a meeting, all it takes is one person to raise a question of what if. And as leaders, the more we start asking each other and ourselves what if, or what are the opportunities, what are the possibilities, we'll find ourselves doing that with our people. That when they come to us, instead of us correcting them and telling them that they're wrong, raising questions. But believe it or not, simply having a little reminder to be curious is really important. First and foremost, we have to understand that there's no such thing as certainty of outcome. And this is why, this is one of the, this is a huge difference between finite mindsets and infinite mindsets, right? A finite-minded leader is afraid of surprises and does not like uncertainty, which is why they like to work in very short timeframes. 'Cause you can actually affect quite a lot of certainty if you only think quarter to quarter maybe year to year, but if you start thinking in 5 and 10-year increments, we all know we have zero control over those outcomes. So finite-minded players like to play with very short timeframes because it makes them feel better, even though the game is infinite. So it's actually, again, sort of a stupid idea. Infinite-minded players embrace uncertainty and find opportunity in surprise. And so where something goes wrong or different, And just as an aside, I got such a kick out of when COVID struck, you know, everybody was talking about during these uncertain times. Newsflash, all times are uncertain. There's never been a time in history ever that was certain. All that happened was something that we didn't expect took place that reminded us that time is uncertain. And for the finite-minded players, the immediate reaction was panic, right? What am I gonna do? How am I going to survive? And try to double down on the old way of doing things, hoping that if I just did it more or at least attempt to do it online, that it would survive, right? The more infinite-minded players, and this has nothing to do with stress, we can still have high stress with what was going on, but the more infinite-minded players saw the sudden change in their business and thought, ooh, okay, this is an opportunity, what can I do with this? And instead of doubling down on the way they used to do things but doing it online, they said, okay, the times have changed, the way I operate my business have changed, all the things that I used to be able to do, like having lunch with people, can't do anymore. So given what I know now, if I was starting from scratch, I have something really valuable and important, how would I build my business today to still provide the value to the people who are looking for the thing that I offer? And that was their mentality. Their mentality was very entrepreneurial. Their mentality was very creative. And though it may have caused stress, there was an appreciation for the opportunity. One of the nice things about the infinite game is two players or more who sell basically the same product for basically the same price for basically the same quality can all be wildly successful at the same time. Like, no one wins. And remember, we're deciding the metrics, so we could decide that it's market share or revenue or profit, and we're making these arbitrary comparisons to arbitrary other players, and we can be all high and mighty about ourselves. You know, General Motors decided that market share was the thing, and they were obsessed with being number one in market share. Meanwhile, they were losing money hand over fist year after year after year. Not sure if that's a very infinite-minded focus, because you're clearly going to you put yourself out of the game. Remember, when Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't win anything. If anything, they had to change the way that they played because Amazon became a much more dominant force in the industry, and so they couldn't actually do the things that they used to do. And this is what it means to be an infinite player. It means you understand that it's not simply about repeating the same thing that's always worked, but it's adapting with politics and culture and technology. And it's not actually about competing against another player on, in the field, but the only true competitor in an infinite game is actually yourself. How do I make my product better this year than it was last year? How do I give better advice this year than I gave last year? How to become a better leader this year than I was, than I was last year? And it's a constant, constant education of constant, constant improvement. I can tell you a funny story which you'll recognize from the book, which really captures the difference between a finite and infinite mindset, and it comes from a personal experience. I had the opportunity to speak at an education summit for Microsoft, and then a few months later, I was asked to speak at an education summit for Apple. Now, this was back in the Steve Ballmer days, when Steve Ballmer ran Microsoft. And at the Microsoft summit, the vast majority of the executives spent the vast majority of their presentations talking about how to beat Apple. Ballmer at the time was obsessed with beating Apple. At the Apple Summit, 100% of the executives spent 100% of their presentations talking about how to help teachers teach and how to help students learn. One was obsessed with their mission, the other one was obsessed with beating their competition. Guess which one was struggling with issues of trust, cooperation, and innovation? So, at the end of my talk at Microsoft, they gave me a gift. They gave me the new Zune when it was a thing. This was Microsoft's response to the iPod. And again, there's plenty of evidence and footage of Ballmer talking about he was going to beat the iPod and this was going to be the best product ever. And I have to say, this little piece of technology was quite good. It was very user-friendly. It worked very well. It was a really nice little product. At the end of my Apple talk, I was sharing a taxi with a senior Apple executive, and I couldn't help myself. I just had to stir the pot. So I turned to him and I said, "You know, Microsoft gave me their new Zune, and it is so much better than your iPod Touch." And he turned to me and he said, "I have no doubt." And the conversation was over. Because an infinite player understands sometimes you have the better product, sometimes they have the better product. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes you're behind. The goal is not to beat your competitor. The goal is to outdo yourself. Where Microsoft was obsessed with beating Apple, Apple ignored Microsoft and was obsessed with outdoing itself. A year later, Apple introduced the iPhone, which rendered both the iPod and the Zune completely obsolete. Listening is a trust-building exercise, right? If you've— if you're in a real— take it down to a personal relationship. If you've been in it, if you've ever had a romantic relationship, a loved one, right? Making someone feel heard doesn't mean you're wrong. Saying sorry doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means you take accountability for your actions. And I think it is important that when somebody objects to vaccination, that we don't demonize or villainize them, but we attempt to hear them, make them feel heard. Doesn't mean we have to agree, but they have to feel heard. And listening is not hearing the words. It's making the other person feel that they were heard. It's— we don't get to decide when hearing has happened, when listening has happened. They do. And by the way, it's not 100% successful either, you know, because some people are just hell-bent on it. But that's a minority. And so I think the exercise of sitting down with people and say, tell me, tell me what you're going through. Tell me what you're afraid of. I want to understand because we're trying to make everyone safe. I want to I want to hear what your thing is. And let them tell their story. We have no answers. We're not there to object. We're not there to react. We're not there to fix or tell them that they're wrong. Women are better at this than men. And I think that has to happen. And it can happen simultaneously. They are not mutually exclusive. I'll give you one example. I have a friend who refused to get vaccinated. And I sat down with her and I said, tell me your reasoning, right? She goes, well, this new technology, like, I don't want to— we don't know. It hasn't been out long enough. Like, we don't know. So what I hear is fear of the unknown. OK, I go, go on. And she— I let her talk and say her thing and explain all the things. And I— and then— and I simply said, so you're afraid of the mRNA technology, right? Yes. I don't want them screwing with my DNA. I said, well, just so you know, it's 20-year-old technology. But then I found something I could agree with her. But— but you're right. It is the first time it's been commercialized. You're absolutely right. This is the first time we've put it in the market. So I affirmed her fear. And then I said, do you get flu shots every year? She goes, I do. I said, okay, Johnson Johnson is a good old-fashioned flu shot. It's a different technology. It's not mRNA. So you're 100% right. If you're afraid of, of the new technology, don't get Moderna or Pfizer. But Johnson Johnson is— it's just like a flu shot. It's the same old tech. And she went, it is? And it is. She went and got a Moderna shot. Because she just wanted to be heard. Because most of her friends, when she said, I'm not getting vaccinated, yelled at her, told her she was stupid, told her she's an idiot, told her she's letting her friends down, told her she's making other people sick, told her she's a risk to society. That doesn't make somebody's mind open up. All I did was let her feel heard. I think we do— we can't— we have to do that. We don't have to like our jobs every day, but we do get to love our jobs every day. It's like you don't like your children every day, but you love your children every day. Every day. So having a hard day, you know, that's fine. But the question is, is what do we fall in love with? And at the end of the day, the reason that we stay or leave a job is because of how we feel about that job. You know, I think we misunderstand when we think people just leave for money. If they just leave for money, then they never really had strong feelings of the company in the first place, right? Because when people feel loyal to the company, they turn down jobs that offer them more money. Or if it's so tempting and the numbers are so high, then they go to their company and say, listen, I was offered this job. It's very tempting. There's a lot of pressure, but I don't want to leave. Is there anything you can do to help me stay? Right. So, and you, and there's the point is, is they're open about it. And what makes people want to have that conversation, like I said, is that they're seen and heard. The best companies have all kinds of programs inside the company to help the person grow as an individual. Now, we talked about, you know, listening skills and these kinds of things. These are valuable for the work that we do, but it turns out that those skills also help us as parents, and they help us as spouses, or as boyfriends and girlfriends. These are valuable skills in life, you know, um, and I think that we forget that. We talk about hard skills and soft skills as if those things are opposite. It's a ter— I hate the term soft skills. Hard skills and human skills. And the more that we invest in human skills in addition to the hard skills that we're teaching, the more people feel like they're growing as individuals. I'm a better version of myself now than I was when I started at this company because the company is actually helping me on a— in personal growth. WD-40, which is a company that I admire their, their culture, the lubricant company, they train their managers to be coaches. So literally, like executive coaching training, that kind of thing. But they train their own people to do— to have that skill set so that they're equipped to help their people who have challenges. And especially with younger generation, you know, the younger generation is asking companies to provide everything. You know, we want to have our sense of belonging, our sense of community, our sense of personal growth, our sense of purpose to come from work. It didn't used to be like that 40 years ago. And so, and so there's a huge pressure on companies. And so I think what entices people into the company and into the industry is not just come and do cybersecurity. You know, there's a percentage of people who are, you know, de facto interested in that, but rather tell them the kind of experience they're going to have, tell them what they get from the company, and you'll find it remarkable how many people will all of a sudden be interested in the, in the category and the company because of what they get holistically, not just what they get from the product. As a leader, our responsibility is to make the people feel that we have their backs and actually have their backs. So there's a sort of a nice anthropological— if you want me to go down this rabbit hole, there's a nice anthropological— I find it fascinating. There's a nice anthropological explanation, which I actually explained in that book, which raises the question, why do we have leaders? Human beings are naturally hierarchical. We self-organize all the time. It's got nothing to do with whether you have formal hierarchy like in an organization. We're constantly self-organizing, like in a sports team. Who's the better player? We self-organize and we pay deference to the one who is better. You know, the scientist who publishes more or the Nobel laureate, all the other scientists pay deference, right? This is not by accident. There's a very good anthropological reason for it. Going back many years, you know, human beings have only been farming for the past 10,000 or 12,000 years, but we existed for tens of thousands of years on the planet before that. And we lived in populations that were about 150. We maxed out at about 150, which raises a very interesting question. We— they lived in austere times. People are hungry. Somebody, you know, brings back some food to the tribe. We all rush in to eat. Well, if you're built like a football player, you can shove your way to the front of the line, right? But this is a bad system because if you punch me in the face this afternoon, I'm probably not going to wake you and alert you to danger tonight. And so it's just a bad system for cooperation, which is if we leave every person to themselves. And so we evolved into these hierarchical animals. We're constantly assessing and judging who's higher in the pecking order, who's the alpha of the group. And when we assess that someone is alpha to us, we naturally step back. We naturally defer and allow our alphas to eat first. We get fed later, and I don't get an elbow in the face, right? Good system. This has survived to this modern day. There's not a single person on the planet, absolutely zero, who has any moral anger, who is offended offended by the idea that somebody more senior in the organization makes a higher salary or gets a nicer office or a better parking space. It offends nobody. Now, we may think they're useless at their job, but the fact that they make more money than us because they're higher up in the organization offends zero. If you're senior and you leave your coat in the other room, someone will go get it for you. If you're junior and you left your coat in the other room, you get your own coat. In other words, you get treated differently. And this is why people want to get promoted, because they like the perks. But the perks don't come for free. And that's the point, which is, as you make your way up the hierarchy, as you achieve that alpha status of the tribe, there's an expectation that, sure, we'll give you first choice of meat and we'll give you first choice of mate. But if danger threatens the tribe, you're going to be the one who runs headfirst towards that danger first to protect us, which means you might die first. Right? That's why we gave you first choice of mate, because we want to keep your genes in the gene pool. We're not stupid. And it's when leaders shirk that responsibility that we start to have moral outrage. So, for example, nobody has a problem with the CEO making more money than they do. The problem we have is when you're willing to lay off your people to protect your salary, to protect your bonus, rather than find other ways to protect the people. This is what morally offends us. We have— we made a deal. There's a deep-seated anthropological deal that we've made with our alphas that you have to protect us. You have to— and you have to do what it takes, sometimes putting your own interests second. And then you can— but if you're willing to do that, we're proud, we're happy. Go enjoy. You've earned it. And so I think this is a large part about building trust. Which is it's not just about saying nice things and being trustworthy. It's that people feel that you actually have their backs and that you would be the one to take responsibility, take accountability, look for other ways to protect us if it meant we're going to get hurt. One of the things we have to remember is that just because the business can function with a distributed workforce, with an online workforce, We know that there's a sacrifice. You know, it's harder to build trust. You know, if you, if you've joined the company during COVID you've never physically met any of your, your colleagues or co-workers, you know. And, you know, it's much harder to build trust when we don't meet each other. We take for granted that when we go to the office that, you know, the little brief interactions we have at work where you walk past somebody in the hall and say hello, or the talk going into the meeting and the talk coming out of the meeting, and bumping into somebody going, oh, I meant to tell you something, or do you want a grab of coffee? No one of these things by themselves does anything, but over the course of time, they contribute to the building of trust, to the building of human relationships. In an online context, we don't have any of the in-between. All we have is the meeting. We log on, we log off, that's it. And so what a lot of companies haven't recognized is that building trust online is possible, but it actually requires more work. What used to happen just relatively organically now has to happen prescriptively. So, for example, I'm a huge fan of the Monday morning huddle. We do one on our team where on Monday morning the whole team comes together and it's— there's no discussion of work or deadlines or workloads or anything. It's a human call where we simply say, what's on your heart and mind? And then we answer some funny or poignant question that's posed to us by the person who's leading the huddle that month. And we simply talk about ourselves. And you learn a lot about somebody. Somebody will say, oh, I had a great weekend with my kids and we went hiking. I didn't even know that they had kids. Or somebody will say, to be honest, it was a really hard weekend. My father has cancer and he's in the hospital and he took a turn for the worst. And we start to see each other as human and we start to empathize and we start to create relationship. And we start to get to know each other, but it's done prescriptively. We make it happen. I'm also a huge fan of, of turning on a Zoom, for example, and just working. Like, we're not actually working with each other, we're just in each other's screens as we're getting our own work done. It's nice to have somebody there. I'm also, believe it or not, a huge fan of the telephone. You know, Zooms are tiring, especially when you have them all day. You know, it's fake. You know, very often, you know, I'm looking at a dot at the top of my screen so that you'll think I'm making eye contact with you, but really I'm just staring at the dot at the top of my screen. Or if I'm staring at you, sometimes the placement of the camera and the screens, what you see is this, but I'm looking right at your eyes, you know. And so I think a telephone, believe it or not, is actually a much better way to connect with somebody, especially when someone's distracted. When you can see that someone's doing email, you know, while you're talking to them, there's no actual polite way to say, can you stop doing that and listen to me, please? You know, and we just sort of do it. On the telephone, if you hear someone's distracted, you go, hello, you there? They go, sorry, sorry, sorry. You know, you can actually catch people. And I find that those interactions, you know, I'm a pacer. I like to pace when I'm on the phone, when I'm thinking. I can't pace on Zoom, which means my thinking is junk, right? When I'm on a phone call, I can walk around I can walk around wherever I go and I can talk to somebody and I can be much more engaged. I think we, especially for salespeople, use the phone, pick up the phone. How are you? Wanted to check in with you. You know, have a conversation without Zoom. I actually think it's actually much better for building relationship, believe it or not. Having Zooms occasionally is great too, but I think we've forgotten how good the phone is. Finite mindset is everything is about this transaction, this listing. An infinite mindset is I may win or lose this game. I may win or lose this deal. Lose this transaction, it'll be another one. And the goal is not to win this one. The goal is to be better. And what happens is you win more often. See, and where I struggle with that, honestly, is I want to crush it every time. You're a highly competitive A-type personality, I get it. But if that's all you do, you're not going to be in the game for very long. But this is my point. In the infinite game, the infinite mindset is about having the strength, the will, and the resources. Will is I really still enjoy this industry, and the resources is I got the money to stay in the game. If you run out of will, you run out of resources, you find a different line of work, right? The goal is not to win every game. The goal is to stay in the game as long as possible, and you're more likely to stay in the game as long as possible if you're enjoying it and if you're making money. Think of those agents who are better than you, whether they're better marketers or better salesperson, or they have more recommendations. And again, you don't have to like them. You have to thank them and study them and learn what they're doing, as I said, because their strengths are revealing to you your weaknesses. And sometimes partner with them because you're actually stronger together. But hating them is stupid. All it does is make you focus on them rather than focus on yourself. All it does is make you focus and sit around with your friends and be like, but they don't do this. Well, you're not doing any of that either, you know? So it puts all your focus in all the wrong places. You know what it's like if you ski through trees? Every skier knows this. If you say don't hit a tree, you hit a tree because all you're doing is looking at trees. Where when you're skiing through trees and you say follow the path, you don't hit a tree because you're only looking at the path. So your mindset is, if all you're doing is focusing on them, then you're hitting trees is what you're doing. You're focusing all the things that make you weak rather than focusing on all the things that make you better. A term that's been overused in business, this concept of authenticity, right? All that authenticity means is the things you say and the things you do, you actually believe. And there's a lot of room for cynicism in the financial advisor world because every financial advisor says the right thing. I'm here to help you. I'm here to help you find your nest egg, to achieve your financial goals, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, every financial advisor I've ever met tells me the same thing. But then the way they make me feel, not always consistent. Where they may say the right things, but then they're not actually listening to the things that I want. I can feel that they're just trying to hammer a product. They're not actually trying to do what I talk about, but rather I can feel that they have an agenda, that they're pushing something on me. And so, you know, we're highly attuned social animals. We can tell the difference. And if somebody's gonna put their agenda, their commission, their interests first, then stop saying, "I'm here to help you and achieve your financial goals because I care about you." Stop saying those words. I don't have a problem with somebody being selfishly minded when they approach their business, just stop pretending that you're not. Because the ones that truly do care will be way more creative, If they say, "I'm truly trying to help you," they'll be offering advice and forwarding articles that have nothing to do with the financial tools that you can buy from me. I might send you an article about, you know, your teenagers and screen time, for example, because that's one of the things you're concerned about and I'm here to help you live a better life. Like, I may be more curious about all of the aspects of about helping you, of which some are the things that I can deliver on with the financial advice and some financial tools. So I think if you got into this business to help people, then help people. I think that's really, really important. I think one of the things that the pandemic revealed, quite frankly, was the weakness of so many corporate cultures. I mean, we're seeing the great resignation happening. And if you read articles or listen to some of the talking heads, you know, the prevailing thought is, well, they're getting, you know, checks from from the government, so they're not encouraged to come back to work, or they're pursuing their dreams, which we've seen as well in our own company. Somebody wants to go be a screenwriter, and even though we have a great relationship and they love their job, they want to pursue their dreams. But the other thing that I think is underlying that it's missing, that these commentaries are missing, is that the cultures may have been weaker than we like to think they are. That the sense of belonging that people have when they would come to work is actually a lot more tenuous than we'd like to believe. So the bond that's allowing them to go off and do other things is easily broken. I think strong cultures, when there's a strong corporate culture, we recognize that I can pursue my dreams and work because I love it here and I know my team is supportive of me becoming a screenwriter or something and I can do both. Or even though I'm making money, potentially even more money, there's so much more I get from my work, you know, the camaraderie, the love, the support. I get all of this training on how to be a better listener and a better communicator, which is helping me in my marriage and helping me with my kids, and I don't want to lose that. Plus, I have my— I have close friends at work, and I can speak up and say, hey, I'm being offered more money from the government. Is there anything you can help? You know, the point is it becomes a conversation rather than a rather than a resignation. So I think one of the things that we're missing is this might be a wake-up call for a lot of companies, that our cultures are just not as strong as we think they are. You know, it's been spoken about for years that millennials, you know, and now Gen Z are just not loyal to work. They bounce around from job year to year to year. Well, is that them or is that us? Maybe if we had stronger cultures, they wouldn't want to leave. Maybe if we offered them more than simply financial incentives for hitting certain numbers, that they'd want to stay. Maybe if they felt that they were growing, like, as human beings, there would be things that were more appealing to them than simply a bigger paycheck somewhere else. So I actually think it's a big wake-up call, frankly, that we should go back and look at our cultures and say, are we as good as we think we are? We always talk about being a stable company, and we talk about investing in stable companies, and, you know, are you stable? And you think about stability. Stability is— is an immobile object, you know? And so companies that are built for stability, yes, they're able to weather storms, but they don't come out stronger or better. They just come out. They get through. Building a company for resilience means that you go into darkness, but you're actually able to adapt for new times, new technologies, new cultures, new politics, new tastes. and you come actually out of the hard times stronger than you went in. Victorinox is a great example. Victorinox, many of us know them by their signature product, which is the old Swiss Army knife. And this company made, basically made a name for themselves on this basically one line of product. They had other product, but this was the core. And then something happened that they couldn't predict nor could they prepare for, which is September 11th happened. And overnight we were banned from taking their product in our bags, in our hand luggage, or in our pockets. So many of us used to carry a Swiss Army knife in our pockets or just throw one in our hand luggage. Like, we all had one. You know, every birthday for every teenager, they got at least one, right? Every corporate gift, you had a couple of Swiss Army knives. And now we were banned from carrying them, which means you're less likely to buy one to give as a gift. And so their business plummeted overnight through no fault of their own, through no market conditions, nothing predictable. But the genius of Victorinox is that they were built for resilience. And what they did was, they, in good times, instead of giving away all the money in big bonuses, in good times they actually saved a ton of money. And their attitude was, Good times don't last, but neither do bad times, and if we want to get through bad times, we need to have— we need cash. And so instead of panicking and taking loans or whatever it is, they had their own stack of cash that they'd been hoarding. So they had a little financial resilience. But then they looked at other products and they asked their people to help build up, and they started investing heavily in watches. Now we have Victorinox watches, which are much more— and it's still Swiss-made. Everything that they could do, everything that they knew they knew how to do, clothing, everything. They leveraged their brand heavily and they built it back up. Also, they protected all of their people. They actually made deals with companies prior that if bad times ever happened that other companies would borrow their employees, which I thought was genius. So they didn't lose their jobs, they just did their jobs somewhere else. And they completely reinvented their company. Now, to this day, their Swiss Army knife never really recovered. It came up back a bit, but it's now not the major product. It is a minor product that they sell because they actually came out stronger and reinvented. And to be able to do that, think about that, coming in as one kind of company and coming out of it as another kind of company, very, very rare and very, very special, but very infinite-minded. I think some people turn off the humanity when they go to work. You know, they may be, you know, loving parents and loving friends and loving children to their own parents, and yet for some reason, there's a switch that they think that that's irresponsible to do at work. Now, I'm not talking about necessarily wearing your heart on your sleeve every day. There is something called emotional professionalism. If you're having a bad day, you can say, "Listen, I'm a little off my game today," but you can't sit in a meeting with your arms folded and be grumpy and give one-word answers. That's emotionally unprofessional. You can have hard feelings, but you can't go around screaming yelling at people. You know, you can have— so I think there's emotional professionalism. But I think for some reason, especially as people make their way up the ranks, they think that expressing any kind of emotion is a sign of weakness. Even that word vulnerability— we talk, you know, it's such a common word now being talked about in the business world that you have to be vulnerable. To this day, it makes some people feel very uncomfortable. I don't want to be vulnerable. Well, all vulnerability vulnerability means is saying things like, "I don't know," or, "I need help," or, "I'm overwhelmed," or, "Can you help me do this because I don't know how to do this?" Or, "I've been promoted to this position where maybe I need more training." And the reason we're afraid of saying that is for fear that it makes us look weak, which will then damage our careers. The reality is the total opposite. By saying, "I don't know," means someone can help us. But instead, we choose to lie, hide, and fake very often, which eventually gets revealed. Enough stress piled on, and that lying, hiding, and faking collapses either professionally or personally. We either feel the stress, or the projects that we're working on start to go haywire. And very often, when we get to those points, everybody knows anyway. And the amazing thing that I've learned is when you say, "Can somebody help me?" We're surrounded by people who would love to help us. They just didn't think we needed it because we acted as if we didn't. So I think a large part of it is quite frankly fear. Fear that if I express these things, that people will think I'm not qualified for my job, where the opposite is true. And remember, when you are in a position of leadership, you don't actually have to be better at doing the job than the people you lead. You have to be responsible for taking care of them to make sure they're good at their job. But for some reason, we think that I have to be better than you at your own job because I'm the leader. Completely false. I just have to make sure that you're equipped, you have the tools, the training, and the psychological safety to come to be the best you can be, even if it's better than me. One of the things that we do is creating a culture in which people understand that the reason we're giving feedback is not to quote-unquote criticize them, but to help them grow as human beings. And that has to be established. Like, this is what we're going to— the advice I offer is it's not just a checklist that you do and everything goes fine. You know, you create a culture in which difficult conversations and critical feedback are welcomed or at least understood. But it's also how we give it. Usually we give it by pulling out a piece of paper and pointing out the thing that's wrong. And, you know, and saying you've got to fix something. Right, we usually point to the evidence first, as opposed to starting by the human being, which is, you know, there's stuff I want to share with you. I don't know what it means, but I wanted to raise it with you in case there is an issue, because I care about you and I want to see that you grow here. But there is some evidence that things are going a little sideways, and I want to address them with them to see what opportunities there are, or if there's anything wrong, because I don't know the reasons behind it. "Here's, for example, the way you talked to your teammates the other day was a little harsh. And ordinarily I'd be one to say, 'Oh, you know, you're having a bad day. It's no problem. You know, everybody gets a bad day.' But you've been really beating up on people. I don't even know if you're aware of that, right?" And sometimes they'll say, "I'm having a hard time," and it opens up, or they'll say, "I wasn't even aware. I didn't even know." Or it reveals something, as opposed to saying, "Stop yelling at people." Nobody wants to work for you if all you do is yell at people. You know, it's hard for people to receive. And so good feedback is not just about conveying the point we're trying to make. It's about creating a condition in which the person is more likely to listen and hear it. So we're all proud of ourselves once we've told them. Did you give her the feedback? Yeah, I told her, right? Did they hear the feedback? Different question. I think one of the essential skills of being a good coach is listening. And this is a skill that is not taught in school. We don't learn it at home, unfortunately, and we don't learn it at work. Listening is not hearing the words that are spoken. That's like my favorite quote that you say. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Listening is— I thought I was being original. The listening is not about hearing the words that are spoken. It's not about being able to parrot back what somebody said to you. Listening is listening for meaning, right? You are a good listener. The test for being a good listener is if the other person feels heard, right? Say that again. Write that down. So, I mean, we've all had— we just take it out of the context of business, right? We've all had an argument or wanted to share our feelings with a friend or a loved one, right? Spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, you're sitting on the couch and you say something's bugging you and you say, "Can I just tell you something that's bugging me?" And they respond by trying to fix it or they respond by pointing out the facts that may or may not align with how you feel, right? "Well, that's impossible because this is what happened." And what they're missing is you are not looking for them, you're not looking for them to compare the facts of what's being said, you just want to feel heard. You just want somebody to go, "Oh my God, "Ah, that's really hard. Yeah, I hear that. Thank you for sharing that with me. That must be difficult." "Thank you, that's all I needed," right? I'll give you a very funny example of bad listening. So I used to date a girl who's an air traffic controller. Air traffic controllers are a breed unto themselves, and it's only about the facts. And I woke up one morning, I had something in my eye, and I couldn't open my eye, it was hurting. And I'm like flushing it out with water and nothing's working. And I mean, I couldn't even open my eye. I have her come, I'm like, "Come here, come here." I mean, I'm like, "Look in my eye. Do you see anything? Do you see anything?" And she looks in, she goes like this, and she goes, "There's nothing there," and then walks away. And I eventually, you know, whatever it was, I eventually was okay. And I went up to her, I was like, "WTF?" Right? I'm like, "I had something in my eye, you just walked away." And she's like, "There was nothing there, so what do you want me to do?" I was like, "A little sympathy?" She's like, "Well, that's not gonna get anything out of your eye." Listening is standing by my side while I'm flushing it out with water and go, "Oh my God, that must hurt so much." "Yeah, it does. Thank you." Right? That's listening. And if somebody can learn to listen, And now this is where it gets actionable. This is not me just waxing philosophical and telling funny stories about listening. My friend Will Guidara, how many of you are restaurant people? Have you ever heard of Eleven Madison Park? So at some point in New York City, Eleven Madison Park was the best restaurant in the world, right? Ranked number one. And Will believes in this, he was the former owner, he believes in this concept of unreasonable hospitality, which is going to what good service is and then going way, way, way beyond. And one of the core tenets of unreasonable hospitality is learning to listen. And I'll give you an example that directly impacts your business. Most agents don't listen. And I'll give you an example. What do you do for your clients after they close on a home, right? It's very common. We've all bought a home too, right? Which is you walk into this new home that you just bought as a buyer. Buyer and there's a bottle of champagne in the fridge, there's a basket of flowers on the dining room table. The same basket of flowers that you gave to every other client, the same bottle of champagne that you gave to every client. Generic. I'm a number. It's just rote. But if you were listening while they were looking at all those homes and they saw this one little room that was too small to make a bedroom, it was just sort of a a stupid little nook that nobody really understood why that room existed in the house, and your client walked in and goes, "Oh, I could make this my yoga room," and that's the house they bought. Instead of putting a bottle of champagne in the house, this is what Will talks about, instead of putting a bottle of champagne in the fridge, why not put a yoga mat in that room with a little note that says, "It's perfect," right? That's called listening. And every single time you go out, Every single time you go out with clients, they are telling you things. They're telling you stories, they're waxing philosophical, they're telling you what they don't like and what they do like. The problem is you're listening to whether they like big windows, you're listening to whether they like the view, you're listening to whether they have 2 cars and they need 3 cars, or whatever it is, but you're not listening to the reasons why. The why. You're not listening for the meaning, and that's— those are the little notes you want to make that make someone feel feel seen and make someone feel heard. I had the opportunity to work with the Navy SEALs, and within the Navy SEALs, there's actually a more elite group within the SEALs that's much harder to get into. You have to be a SEAL for like 5 years before you even can get into this even more elite group. And I asked the director of training for this group, you know, how do you choose who gets into this more elite group within your own, within your own culture? And he drew an XY-axis, he drew a graph for me, And on the vertical axis, he wrote performance. And on the horizontal axis, he wrote trust. The way they define performance is how good are you at your job, right? Your skill set. The way they define trust is what kind of person are you? And the way they put it is, I may trust you with my money, I may trust you with my life, but do I trust you with my money and my wife, right? So, there's— Clearly nobody wants the low performer of low trust. Clearly. Clearly everybody wants the high performer of high trust on their team. Clearly. What they learned is that a high performer of low trust is actually a toxic team member. And they would rather have a medium performer of high trust, sometimes a low performer of high trust, it's a relative scale, over the high performer of low trust. And this is one of the highest-performing organizations on the planet. And they put huge credence in the trustworthiness and the character of the team member over their simple performance metrics. In business, we're the opposite. We have a million metrics to measure someone's performance, and we have negligible to no metrics to measure someone's trust. And so you may have a selfish-driven toxic team member who, if they're high-performing, what do we do? We promote them. And sometimes you get to the point where leadership knows that this person is toxic and you say, you know, you probably should do something about this. You maybe want to remove them from the team. And they say the same thing. They're like, yeah, I know, but their performance is so good. You are literally just waiting for something to collapse, meaning either other people will leave or the culture will start to crack or there's a scandal. Or that person will leave because they get a better job offer. They're not loyal. So they may be your highest performer, but they're not loyal. What the SEALs learn is sometimes these medium performers of high trust are your best natural leaders. The irony is, you know, if you go to any team, it's actually really easy to find these toxic team members. That's the irony. Even though we don't formally measure it, go to any team and ask them who the asshole is. And they'll all point to the same person. Okay? And that's an opportunity to coach them. I don't believe in firing them. I believe in coaching them. We let people go when they prove to be uncoachable. And by the way, if you go to that same team, you say, who do you trust more than anybody else? Who's got your back no matter what? Who's always there to help you? They'll probably also point to the same person who might be your best natural leader, and they may not be your best individual performer. We don't teach difficult conversations. We don't teach conflict resolution. We don't teach de-escalation. And we don't teach how to give and receive feedback. We don't teach how to treat ideas. We don't even teach people how to have a meeting. Like, we don't teach any of these things. And so we're just leaving it up to chance to hope that somebody knows what they're doing, which we would never let somebody on the front line do. We give them tons of training on how to do their jobs. So part of it is is, is, is the skill set that we, that we can train. Um, the other thing is, um, a lot of leaders I think are afraid of doing things for fear of saying the wrong thing. And again, this, this really lends itself to the training we need to give our leaders. And especially, I think this was really exaggerated after the murder of George Floyd, um, where so many leaders did nothing. Um, they're not bad people, uh, they were just so afraid of saying the wrong thing or flaming a situation or triggering someone that they chose to just do nothing. And so one of the things we need to do is teach people how to lean into tension and to learn how to de-escalate one's own anger or one's own trigger. And again, you brought it up before, which is, and replace it with curiosity. Tell me more. What else? I'm struggling to understand. Let me tell you the story that's going through my head I think is a really big one that I've learned, which is because I'm reacting based on my own narrative, right? And so they're reacting to my words or my reaction. And so one of the things that's really helped me is to share what's going on in my head so that people have the context of where my reaction's coming from. Let me, let me tell you what my history is and what my background is. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, I'm just telling you my story. And I'll say, I had this happen in the past where X, Y, and Z, and so I I'm nervous at your suggestion because in the past this has happened. Can you help me resolve this, or do you understand where I'm coming from? And I think the more we can share what's going on in the process rather than simply, you know, responding with our answers or our reactions helps the other person see the way we're trying to see it, and it also encourages us to see the way they're trying to see it. So I think the more we share— it's that vulnerability word again, right? Let me tell you my history. Let me tell you my baggage. Let me tell you my background. Let me tell you my experiences. Let me tell you where my opinion is coming from. The worst thing, the one that drives me up the wall, the one that triggers me is, this is how we've always done it. Well, why do we do it that way? Because this is how we've always done it. And my rule is, if you cannot tell me why we're doing it this way, that means it's on the chopping block. That doesn't mean it has to change, but I want real explanations of why we do something this way. If somebody can't tell me, then, then, then it's open to being changed. I try and read news from both sides of the political aisle, not to find the one I agree with, but I want to understand how it's being reported. I want to know the different narratives that are being told so that I can understand those narratives, so I can speak to those narratives, I can learn those narratives and find hypocrisy in both sides, by the way. I think that the one, the one mistake that we we all fall into is to decide that the ones that I agree with are right and the ones that I disagree with are wrong. And this binary notion of right versus wrong is what's gotten us into this mess in the first place. Life is not so black and white in no respect. It's nuanced and gray and complicated and messy. And to understand that, we are hypocrites in our own opinions, and so is the other side. And simply pointing out the hypocrisy of the other side is of no help whatsoever. What's more important is to point out our own hypocrisy and to try and understand that. Like I said, it's a worthy rivalry thing, right? It's not trying to dominate or be right, but it's rather trying to improve and to grow. And so one of the things that I default to are values. I'm very proud of the fact that some of my friendships are with people who have very, very, very different political points of view, who we voted very, very differently in political elections. And we can go to blows talking about some of the things that the government is deciding, whether we agree or disagree with it. But at the end of the day, their values are like mine. And we believe in taking care of each other and we believe in looking out for each other. And at the end of the day, more than their politics, they are my friend. And I learned this lesson the hard way where I was walking, I was going for a walk with a friend who has very different political views than me. And she said something and I definitely thought it and I fear I may have said it, how can you be so stupid? And I realized I just called my friend stupid and she completely got angry at me, not because I disagreed with her, it's because I judged her and insulted her. And you know what? I was 100% right. And what I had to learn in that moment was to listen, was to replace my judgment with curiosity, and to understand where her point of view comes from. And that the more curious I became to understand that there were actually things that we did agree upon, and though we may not have agreed upon everything, we actually could find common ground. And that common ground always boiled down to our values. And the more that I got good at listening to her she actually became much more open to listening to me. And so as opposed to me hammering my opinion at her, we started to have conversations. And so I think when you go to a values level, politics becomes secondary. But when we let go of our values, then all we have is the politics, which is upsetting. You cannot have innovation or progress without failure. It doesn't exist. And if you truly aren't failing as you're trying to innovate, then you're probably not pushing very hard because you haven't broken anything. You're making very, very safe bets. Choices. We could never have put a person on the moon without a bunch of rockets blowing up first. Like, I met a CFO once. I asked him the priorities of the company and he said efficiency and innovation. And I laughed and said, well, good luck with that. You know, innovation is inherently inefficient because it requires experimentation. Experimentation requires failure. Much is said about fail fast. I actually don't like the term failure. The problem with the word failure is it's like the word cancer. It's too broad. Like, if you have stage 4 liver cancer or you have a mild melanoma, those things are both cold cancer, but they are clearly not the same thing. And the same thing is when we hear the word failure. Some people think failure means experimentation, but a lot of people think failure means catastrophe. And so when we tell our company failure is good, fail fast, that literally scares people. We don't want to fail. So I think we need a new word. We want to avoid failure. Failure is catastrophic and it should be avoided. But falling, I think we should encourage. When a kid falls off a bicycle, we didn't tell them they failed. We tell them they fell. And what do we tell them get back up and try again. So I don't want to tell people they failed, I want to see people they fell, and I want to encourage them to try again and brush off their knees. So I think we should fall and fall often, and I will judge the quality of innovation not necessarily by if you fell, but how quickly you can pick yourself back up and try again. Let's reinforce that point because I think it's an important one, that fulfillment is a right and not a privilege. And when we go out with our friends for dinner— or when we used to be able to do that— you know, you sit around and when somebody says, "I love my job," and everybody goes, "Oh my God, you're so lucky," like they won something. That statement should be the norm, not the exception. We should all get to go to dinner and say, "I love my job," and it's the one person who says, "I don't," that we can intervene. So yeah, I believe it is a right, and we have a responsibility ourselves to find a place where we want to work with the people that we would work with rather rather than just taking the biggest salary, that we have a responsibility to take care of the people around us, and we have a responsibility to speak up and ask our leaders to work with us and create a place where people want to come to work, where there's a safe space for us to take care of each other and feel taken care of. So, there's mutual responsibility all around. So, when you say, you know, how do we do it? It requires constant work. It's like, how do you stay healthy? Well, I can give you a whole list of things you have to do. You have to eat right. You have to nurse your personal relationships. You have to get enough sleep. You have to exercise. You have to meditate. You have to be mindful. There's like 30 things. And you can't do all those things well all the time. It's a striving. And when one's doing well, sometimes one thing falls off. It's a striving. And it's the same. But the pursuit of fulfillment is a striving. I think it's— this is why I make the distinction between fulfillment and happiness. To seek happiness is a lot easier because happiness is fleeting. You get a new job, you're happy. You get a raise, you're happy. You win a new piece of business, you're happy. You're given a gift, you're happy. Somebody says something nice to you, you're happy. And that feeling goes away. Nobody walks around with a sense of happiness for a job they got 4 years ago. It's gone. Where fulfillment is different. Fulfillment, you can feel fulfilled by your work even if you're not enjoying it today. You can feel fulfilled by your work even if you're having a bad day or one of your colleagues is grumpy. You can still be fulfilled by the work. It's more infinite. It's more constant. Whereas happiness is, you know, the things that lead up to it, it sounds more like an event. Fulfillment is a striving. It's a lifestyle. And you do all these things like having a just cause, like building trusting teams, and working to be the leader you wish you had. In other words, you see your life as a life of service to those around you, whether you're in a company, whether you're an employee, whether you're a leader, or if you're just a parent, that you see your life in service, you know, to your spouse, your partner, or your— and your kids, and indeed your community. What makes a community highly functional is that we view that every single person within that community sees their responsibility to serve the community rather than standing around demanding the community does something for them. I think courage is external, right? The reason someone has courage to jump out of an airplane is because there's a parachute on their back. It's the external thing. A world-famous trapeze artist would never try a brand new death-defying act for the first time without a net. It's the net that gives them the courage. You know, the Navy SEALs are considered one of the highest performing organizations on the planet, and a former SEAL was asked, what kind of person makes it into the SEALs? And he said, I can't tell you the kind of person that makes it in. But I can tell you the kind of person that doesn't make it in. He said the star college athletes who have never really been tested to the core of their being, none of them make it in. He said the preening leaders who like to delegate everything, none of them make it in. He says the guys who show up with hulking muscles covered in tattoos because they want to show you how tough they are, none of them make it in. He said some of the guys who make it in are skinny and scrawny. He said some of the guys who make it in, you see them shivering out of fear. He said, but every single one of the guys who makes it in, when they're emotionally exhausted, when they're physically exhausted, when they have absolutely nothing left to give, somehow, some way, they're able to dig down deep inside themselves to find the energy to help the guy next to them. In other words, the reason these organizations and these people have the courage to do remarkable things is not because of their internal strength. It's because they have the absolute confidence that there is someone to the left of them and someone to the right of them that cares about them. And they all know that. And it's the quality of the relationships that we maintain, professionally and personally, that give us the courage to do difficult things. Isaac Stern, the famous violinist, said, "Music is what happens between the notes." Well, something like trust happens between the meetings. You know, few people think about the importance of building trust when they go to work. Or the, "What do I need to do today to build trust with somebody?" Like, that doesn't really go through people's minds. But we have chitchat as we walk into the meeting. We have chitchat when we walk out of the meeting. And we see somebody in the hall and they're like, "Oh, meant to tell you something." Or you knock on someone's door and be like, got a minute? And all those little innocuous interactions over the course of time, like any relationship, build trust. It's about setting up the computer and setting up Zoom and having a work session with somebody, you know, like we're not working on the same thing, but I want to work with somebody, a work buddy, or having a lunch with somebody over Zoom, or a Monday morning huddle where we talk about what's on our heart and minds, but we do not talk business. On purpose, or Friday cocktails that are just voluntary. But the most important one is to just pick up the phone and call people and say, "How are you?" That level of empathy. Just check in on someone. And I think we neglect it because we get mired in the day-to-day. But if you're organized or disorganized, literally keep a list of your team on a little card next to your computer. And just, you know, go through it and have I called this person in a while and talked to this person? I'm just going to call and check in. It doesn't matter if something's wrong or not wrong. Just check in on them. You know, don't wait for something to break. And let people know that there's connection and there's a way to reach out and say I need help. Because if— and the most important thing is for leaders to be honest and open about their need to ask for help. And that, that'll work. They happen to have a coffee bar in the lobby of the Four Seasons in Vegas. And so one afternoon I went and bought myself a cup of coffee, and the barista working that day was a kid named Noah. Noah was funny and charming and engaging, and I spent far too long buying a cup of coffee because I just so enjoyed talking to Noah. So as is my nature, I asked Noah "do you like your job?" And without skipping a beat, Noah said, "I love my job." Now, in my line of work, that's significant. Like is rational. I like the people, I like the work, you know, I get paid well, I like my job. Love is emotional. It's a higher-order connection, right? Like, "Do you love your wife?" "I like her a lot," right? Clearly, it's clearly a different standard, right? So when Noah said, "I love my job," my ears perked up. This kid has an emotional connection to his work. So immediately I followed up and said, "Tell me specifically what the Four Seasons is doing that you would say to me you love your job." And again, without skipping a beat, Noah said, "Throughout the day, managers will walk past me and ask me how I'm doing, ask me if there's anything that I need to do my job better. Not just my manager, any manager." And then he said, I also work at another hotel, and there the managers walk past us and catch us when we do something wrong. There the managers are always trying to drive performance and make sure we hit our numbers. He said, there I'd like to keep my head below the radar, get through the day, and just collect my paycheck. Only at the Four Seasons do I feel I can be myself. Now, this is the exact same human being working at two different companies, and yet our experience of him will be profoundly different, not because of him, but because of the leadership environment in which he works. You know, I get this question all the time. You know, Simon, how do we get the most out of our people? People are not a towel that you wring them out to see how much you can get out of them. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's— that's a good one, man. It's a flawed question. The question is, how do we create an environment in which our people can work at their natural best? And that is the art of leadership. It's creating environment in which relationships can thrive, in which trust can thrive. And we all know what it feels like to be on a trusting team, right? It means that we feel psychologically safe enough to raise our hand, and say, um, I made a mistake, or I need help, or I'm having trouble at home and it's affecting my work, or I'm scared, or I don't know what to do, without any fear of humiliation or retribution, but rather to say these things with the absolute confidence that someone on our team will rush to support us. Unfortunately, we also all know what it feels like not to work on on a trusting team, where admitting any of those things could hurt your chances of promotion, could hurt your chances of— you could be humiliated. And so when we work on teams where leadership is creating an environment where trust is at a premium, we force our people to come to work and lie, hide, and fake, where they're pretending that they've made no mistakes. They're lying, hiding, and faking, and eventually things Things will crack and things will eventually break. And when you talk about reinvention and you talk about innovation and you talk about challenging the status quo or whatever it is, necessarily there's risk and necessarily there are mistakes and necessarily there's stupid ideas. And you have to create an environment in which that's good. The alternative is everybody playing it safe, which is not the way that leads to vast or significant improvement. There's no such thing as a perfect job and there's no such thing as a perfect person. Of course, there are things that we are doing that hold ourselves back. And of course, there are things about the environment in which we work, whether it's the people or the job or the whatever the circumstances that may also be holding us back. I mean, but to see ourselves as victims is not, is not the, is not the thing, but rather to seek opportunity. And it goes back to that growth mindset, which is it's what I've learned is one of the best ways to grow oneself is to to actually help somebody on the team grow. Service. You know, there's an entire section in the bookshop called self-help, and there's no section in the bookshop called help others. And I think what we've done is we've over-indexed on the whole rugged individualism sort of self-helpy thing. How can I be successful? How can I grow my business? How can I lose weight? How can I find love? And yet we forget, how can I help somebody else grow their business? How can I help somebody else How can I help somebody else lose weight and find love, et cetera? And the irony is, is the more that we set out to help somebody else, because we have more objectivity with other people, ironically, we actually learn to help ourselves. I tried this out. I did a little experiment. A dear friend of mine was going through a hard time, a solopreneur. Work wasn't going well. Her marriage was shaky, and she was in a bad place. And so she knows what I do for a living, so she called me up and says, would you spend some time with me? I said, of course. So every single week, religiously, we spent about 90 minutes together. She'd come over, and we would talk, and I would offer some perspective and some ideas, and she'd feel great for like a day or two, and then she'd go back, and we'd get together the next week, and she'd feel great for a couple of days, and then go back. And this repeating pattern went on for quite a while. And then I remembered my own work, which is the idea of service, and had a little idea, which is to switch it around. And I called her up and said, look, I would like some coaching too. And it was genuine. I said, you know me better than anybody else. I trust you completely. When we get together for one of our sessions, I said, "Can I use up some of the time? Can I tell you what I'm going through?" And what ended up happening is we spent all 90 minutes talking about my stuff. And this went week after week after week where she was just the advice giver. And strange things started to happen. She started to get more stability in her work, more stability to her marriage, her confidence went up. And it was because she was helping me that she was gaining all the insights and perspective because it wasn't personalized. It's like sales training, and anybody who's ever gone through sales training, you know this, which is you always do it with 3 people. You know, the person who plays the role of the salesperson, the person who plays the role of the person you're selling to, the buyer, and an observer. And it's the observer that does the learning, not the people playing the roles. Well, in this case, she got to see herself not be so close to it. It gave her objectivity. So I'm I'm a great believer in if you have a problem to solve at work, try and help somebody else solve that same problem. There's another guy who does what I do. He writes books, he gives talks, etc. His work is extremely well respected, and I admire his work as well. I happen to hate him. He's never done anything mean to me, and we've always had a very cordial relationship when we see each other professionally. I haven't arbitrary hatred of him. And as a result of my hatred, I'm extremely competitive with him. I would log on to Amazon on a regular basis. No. And check my book rankings and then immediately check his. And keep in mind, I checked no one else's, just the two of us. And if he was ahead, I was angry. And if I was ahead, I I was smug. And whenever his name came up in polite conversation, I would seethe underneath. We were invited to speak together at a conference where we would be interviewed together. And I don't mean like, like literally, we would be on the stage together. And the interviewer thought it would be fun if we introduced each other. And so I went first. And I turned to him and I said, you make me really insecure. And I said, all of your strengths are all of my weaknesses. And whenever your name comes up, I get really uncomfortable. And he looked at me and he said, funny, I think the same thing about you. The reason I was so competitive with him had nothing to do with him. It had everything to do with me because his weaknesses revealed to me— because his strengths revealed to me my weaknesses, it's more difficult to take a hard look at myself and say, here's all the work you have to do. It's much easier, and dare I say, more fun to direct all my energies at beating him. That turned out to be an extremely cathartic experience. And I learned the value of a worthy rival. The funny thing is, after that experience, I've never checked mine or his book rankings since. I applaud his work, celebrate him, want him to do well because it turns out working together, we actually are stronger. And I think this is the same folly in business, right? I like, you know, which is we decide who our competitors are and then And we obsessed with beating them, like ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox were obsessed with beating each other. And all they did was look at Nielsen ratings every morning. And then Netflix came up and didn't, like, who cares? They're all— Blew them out of the water. Blew them out of the water, because they weren't even looking. They weren't even watching. Because that's the arbitrariness of, if you— I remember back in the early days when I first started my career, I was in the ad business and I was junior dog's buddy to the junior dog's buddy. And I was on the— competitive analysis team. And basically what that meant was we studied the competition and we put together decks to the executives of look what the competition is doing. And we sometimes would hire outside consultants to run, you know, research for us. And if it was too expensive to study 7 of them, we'd cut it down to 4, which is hilarious if you think about it. So you're making decisions based on 4 and ignore— anyway, you get my point. My point. So I think the value of the other players in your industry, of the other players in the game, is not to beat them because there's no such thing. As I said before, you know, Best Buy didn't win anything when Circuit City went bankrupt. But it's to recognize and respect them. There are some players who do some or many things better than you. Maybe they have a better leadership, stronger culture, better marketing. Maybe their products are better designed. Who knows what? And instead of trying to beat them, which could mean you choose underhanded things or just drop your price, you actually say, okay, let's make our product even better. They have revealed our weakness. Let's now work on that. Because the ultimate, the only competitor in an infinite game is yourself. A just cause is something a lot more idealistic. It's a statement of the world that you wish the way the world you wished it worked. It's a world that you imagine. Like we imagine a world as PwC, we imagine a world in which, and then we devote our practice, we devote our energy, we devote our resources to advance towards that cause. And we're gonna bring our clients with us. The work that we do takes us closer to that cause. So I'll give you an example. So my just cause, our organization's just cause, We imagine a world— so you can see there's that forward thinking, which as an aside, which is why we call it vision, is because you have to be able to see it, right? So we imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do. That is our cause. That is a cause so just that we would be willing to sacrifice in order to advance closer towards that ideal. We will never get there. It is an ideal. And you can look at organizations or leaders that have made profound impact in their industries or in the world. You'll see these just causes, whether it's all men are created equal, right? It's a just cause, imperfect in its own way, but you can see a nation striving. I have a dream, literally imagining. That one day little black children will hold hands on the playground with little white children, imperfect in its own, in reality, but you can see a nation striving. When Apple and Steve Jobs used to talk about empowering individuals to stand up to Big Brother, you can see the attraction to the personal computer because it literally gives power to an individual to compete against a corporation. Imperfect, but a striving striving, and all of these things become striving that become incredibly inspiring for, for a workforce because they feel like they're contributing to something bigger than themselves. But when you think about innovation, if you say provide greater value for our clients, and it's not wrong, I have to stress it's not wrong, but, but, but when you say innovate around that, the innovation tends to be more features and benefits. Tends to be tweaking inefficiencies. When you say be the best, I don't even know how you innovate around that, right? You can't say some— to say somebody, you know, make— innovate. So we're better. But when you say innovate a way to advance this, the ideas can come from anywhere inside the organization and the ideas tend to be a lot bigger. So it's not that those things are wrong. It's that what I'm— what I'm offering are what a clearer path to embracing an infinite mindset. Okay, right. It's not that the other doesn't work, it doesn't have value, it just has less value in the infinite game. I was, uh, during COVID um, I worked out with a friend of mine who lives somewhere else. We worked out on FaceTime together. We would just turn on FaceTime and just do the same workout together, basically. And one day we were doing a particularly difficult workout, and I said to her, I have some good news and I have some bad news. She says, well, what's the bad news? I said, the bad news is we're only halfway done. She says, well, what's the good news? I said, the good news is we're already halfway done. And that simple, the simple way in which I present the information literally profoundly changes the way in which we do the second half of the workout. We're only halfway done. The rest of the workout's a slog. It's difficult. It's hard. And we don't want to do it. We're already halfway done. I mean, it's all downhill. We've already done this once. We can easily finish this off. And it's amazing how easy it is to change our mindset. And so it's the same thing here. We've done it in our own organization where we see another organization who, you know, I mean, I hate to use the word, I'll use it just for the example, but outpaces us. I mean, we don't care about that. But, and instead of getting all angry and hot and bothered and trying to beat them, we say to them, worthy rival. What strength do they have that's revealing a weakness in us? And we're like, oh my goodness, our website sucks or our e-commerce sucks or our, you know, customer service sucks or whatever it is. You know, we spend a lot of time time looking at people who we admire, who are in our space, who do some or many things better than us. We like look at their websites, we look at their product, we look at their ease of use. We're like, wow, that's really good. You know, we don't have to like it, we don't have to agree with it, but we can still compliment it. And I think that's the big thing. People think that, you know, that you, you know, that you have to hate everything that somebody does. Nonsense. You don't have to agree or like, but you do have to respect. And quite frankly, to put on blinders and go through the world with blinders on that there's no one else out there and they definitely can't do anything better than you is quite frankly just stupid because it's just not true. You're not great at everything and you never will be. It's an infinite game. It's a game of constant improvement, just like every person. There's no such thing as a perfect person. You know, we should be in a growth mindset, constantly trying to improve every day of our lives. It's the same thing. And even that's difficult. Even that you can't grow every day. Even that's hard. You know, it's messy and human, and that's the fun. And that's why you go back to trusting teams and why the teamwork matters so much, because sometimes we can beat up ourselves or get stuck in a negative mindset, and all you need is one person to walk up and be like, hey, worthy rival, right? So the nice thing about worthy rivals is it's subjective. You can choose whichever person, whichever company you want. You don't have internal competition, but you can have internal rivals. Where there are other people that you compare yourselves to and you're trying to get better, but you don't wanna stab each other in the back, get angry when somebody else gets a promotion. Like we've all had that. We've all had that. Deep down inside, we seethed when somebody gets a promotion when we didn't, right? Even if we weren't even up for it. That's a sign where necessary change needs to happen in our mindset. It's easier to do than you think, and when you get in the habit of it, it's absolutely wonderful. Tell someone, "I need help." Like, I think it is one of these skills that is becoming fast lost, especially amongst a younger generation, which is the skill to ask for help. You know, we're all trying to act so tough. You know, this nation over-indexed on the whole rugged individualism thing, you know, where we define success as individual success. Most of our metrics, most of our incentives in almost every job are individual incentives. There's no team bonus. There's an individual bonus if you hit your numbers. I think we overdid it, quite frankly. I think the pendulum needs to come back. We have to remember that we're a team. We're members of teams. We're members of families. We're members of communities. We're members of societies. This is where Maslow got it wrong, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. He says, you know, fundamentally at the bottom of the pyramid is food and shelter. And he put, you know, third, you know, third up the rung, he put relationships. Well, I've never heard of anyone dying by suicide because they were hungry. I've heard of people dying by suicide because they were lonely. So in other words, it can't be right. And at the top you have self-actualization. How? Oh, like I'm all self-actualized looking down at the rest of you who aren't at the top of the pyramid. What about shared actualization? You know, and the mistake he made is that there's a paradox, which is every moment of every day, we are both individuals and members of groups. And every day we have to reconcile that. Do I put myself first at the expense of someone else, or do I prioritize someone else at the expense of myself? And the answer is you're right and you're wrong. And there's a whole group of people that says, no, no, you always take care of yourself first, because if you're not healthy, you can't help others. And there's another group of people that says, no, you always help others first because unless you help them, they won't be there for you. It's a paradox. It doesn't work. It's not so clean. And this is what we have to reconcile every day. And this is why finding balance and managing it and the stresses and strains, but the challenge of asking for help and relying on our community really, really matters. My definition of faith is that knowing you're on a team even when you don't know who all the players are. We are surrounded by people who love us and will take care of us. You just have to ask sometimes, because sometimes they don't know that we need it. There are so many lessons that we've learned over the past year and a half to 2 years that I think prepare us to be ready for the next future. I got a kick out of, during the height of COVID the number of pundits who said, "During these unpredictable times." I would smile and say, "All times are unpredictable. There's never been a time that was predictable ever." All that happened was something that we didn't expect happened that reminded us that our lives and our work is unpredictable. And to future-proof ourselves means being ready for the unpredictable. There's something called an infinite mindset. And those with an infinite mindset embrace surprise. They find opportunity in the unexpected. That when something goes haywire, they go, "Ooh, what could we do with this?" Versus a finite mindset, which likes to exert control and keep things very, very close and timeframes short because they fear the uncertain. They fear anything that's off the plan. And one of the things that we have to do to future-proof ourselves is to embrace things that are surprises and embrace the opportunity in uncertainty. The other thing that I think we have to learn on how to future-proof ourselves is how to deal with stress and how to deal with trauma. Whether somebody did well during COVID business-wise or whether they struggled business-wise, all of us suffered some sort of trauma. And when COVID first showed up, I called a friend of mine who's active duty military, and I asked him, "During— when you're in combat, what do you do to compartmentalize your emotions so you can stay mission-focused?" My business blew up right in front of me, and I had to focus on my mission of rebuilding my business. I wanted to know how to control my emotions so I could get the work done that I had to get done. And he gave me a very sobering warning. He said, no one can compartmentalize their emotions. He says, we can do it for a short period of time, but everyone will suffer the trauma of combat, sometimes many months after we get home. And he said, you will go through it. Maybe not now, but you will go through it. And sure, sure enough, about 4 or 5 months in, I started to feel extremely off my game. And I called him up and I said, can I just ask you, you know, what are your symptoms when you go through the trauma of combat? I asked no leading questions. I simply said, what are your symptoms? He said, well, "1, I fall out of my sleep pattern. For some reason, I go to bed late for no reason, and I don't want to get up in the morning." And I thought to myself, "Yep." And he said, "I become unproductive, and I rationalize it, like, 'Oh, you've been working hard. It's okay if you have an unproductive day or two.'" But then I have another and another and another, and I thought to myself, "Yep." And he said, "I also become extremely antisocial. I don't want to talk to anyone. I definitely don't want to ask for help." And I thought to myself, "Yup." And I realized I was going through depression. I was afraid to use that word for fear that it sounded like a diagnosis, but it was little d depression. That's exactly what I was going through, which is why things weren't working. And so, I asked my friend again, "So, how do you overcome it?" He said, "One, you have to force yourself to get back into your sleep pattern. And two, you have to force yourself to ask people for help." And that's exactly what I was doing. And I reached out to friends that I trusted, friends that I loved, people who I knew were dispensers of good advice. And I called them one by one and said, I'm going through this, what can I do? I also reached out to friends who I knew were going through similar things and offered my support for them, because that's one of the things I've learned in my career, which is the best way to solve your problems is to help people who are going through the same thing. And so to understand how to react under extreme stress, to understand and build the relationship so that when you do go through something, you know who to call. My rule during COVID and I called all my A-type personality friends and gave them my rule, which is there's no crying alone. And the question I would ask every one of you is, if you start to cry, who are you going to call? Who will you pick up the phone and just say, "I need to cry," and tell them what's going on? It is much healthier to know that someone will give you a shoulder and be there to support you no matter what you're going through. What I think is really interesting is think of a date like a job interview, right? And think of a job interview like a date, right? So if you went on a first date with someone and they sat down, they said, you know, I'm extremely rich. I've made lots of money. I do lots of cool things. I've met a lot of famous people. I go on TV all the time, which is good because I'm really good looking. Yeah, yeah. Would you want to go on a second date with them, right? Not very appealing. It's also not very appealing when we sit down for a job interview and just tell people how great we are and all the things that we've done. It's the same kind of thing. Now imagine if you knew your why and you're making conversation with someone and they say, so, you know, where are you from? Would you know, tell me a little bit about you. And you say, you know, I love what I do. I love my life. I love my job. You can say, I wake up every day to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. And for me, the challenge is finding all the different ways that I could do it. And I've been really, really grateful for the path that it's taken me on. I've made some money and I've got to go on TV, which is fun because I'm really good looking. And you can see how all the same jokes and all the same things now have a context. And that's what why does. It provides context. It also helps you connect with somebody that when somebody's telling you about themselves and you ask some questions and you get to know them a little bit and you realize that maybe their values are completely different than yours. So why gives you clarity and confidence in who you are and what you need around you, but it also helps you present yourself in a way that's way more authentic. Now, there's a rub to the why that I don't talk about that often. Because you really have to get good at giving your why before you can deal with this. But the difficult part about knowing your why is the thing that you give to the world, the value you give and offer to other people, is also the thing you need the most. So, one of the ways to understand the people in our lives, partners and mates, is can they actually give us the thing that we give to other people?

Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So as a special celebration, if you put a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. For 10 more amazing rules from Les Brown, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe. I'll see you there.

As you sell yourself every day, every day, every day, you will begin to see a difference in the things that you're doing. Selling yourself on your ability to perform a job, to achieve a certain objective,