Best Inspirational Moments ft. Brene Brown, Kim Scott, Seth Godin & More @ INBOUND

There's a special place in hell for people who kiss up and kick down.

If you say that failure is not an option, then success is not an option.

I want to know the worldview of people who do not see the world as I do. That way, I'm better able to understand.

The world, show up for the right reason to make change happen.

There is no excuse for hurtful behavior, period. I believe people are doing the best they can, even the people who made the mistakes, the people who shame the shit out of people who make the mistakes. I believe everyone's doing the best they can. So my question becomes, what boundaries need to be in place for me to be in my integrity and be generous with my assumptions toward people? And so I just can't participate in it or see it. If someone writes something really ugly on my Facebook page, which happens, it used to, within seconds, my community would just annihilate that person. I mean, like, so what did you think about that? Oh, I said, come on, take a deep breath, people. That's not who we are. I'm deleting this comment because it's my Facebook page. If you want to have this stuff on your Facebook page, go for it. But if you really want to do something meaningful, it can't involve hate and rage. So if it's hateful or if it's full of rage, it's not helpful. And in the world today, you're either making the world a better place or you're making the world a worse place. And when you sit back and do nothing, that silence is also a contribution. What is it? The quote from, when you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Nothing like a good Rush lyric to bring home the point. But, I mean, really. And so I think for evil to.

Succeed, it takes good people to do nothing.

To do nothing.

And I really noticed that people don't realize when 10,000 people are telling a single person that they're disgusting and they need to get out and they're not good enough to be in society, like what happened with Justine Sacco, it's profoundly traumatizing. It's way more traumatizing than the shamers like to think it is. And it mangles up your mental health. And then if one person comes along, like I did with Justine Sacco, and say, I think you were really poorly treated, I think you're a victim here. You're not the perpetrator, it's really healing, you know?

Oh, yeah.

The cure for shame is empathy.

Yeah. I mean, I always say if you put Shame in a petri dish. It needs three things to grow exponentially. Secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a petri dish and you douse it with empathy, you've created a hostile environment for shame. Shame absolutely can't survive empathy, and it can't survive being spoken. And the people who rage the loudest and blame the most usually lack the courage it takes to truly hold people accountable.

We are spending an enormous amount of our time, you and me, in social media world, trying to get these ducks in a row. You know, I just need a little bit more juice on Facebook. I need some more followers. Our funnel needs to be adjusted. We need to figure out how to have more interactions with these people. Like, if you watch Mad Men, it's positively relaxing. They make an ad, they run it, they're done. And we. You guys are constantly getting all these ducks in a row. The question is, once you get them, what are you going to do with that duck? What's the duck for? Who are you trying to change? Are we trying to win this tiny little race, or are we trying to make a bigger difference in the world? Ellen Langer writes about the idea that some people are walking around with a giant bowl of frogs. And what they're trying to do is keep all the frogs in the bowl. And if you're sitting there focusing and wondering about your boss and your boss's boss and all those people are following you, you can't possibly do that work that you are actually here to do that. Sometimes we've got to let some frogs jump out, because keeping the frogs in the bowl isn't the point. The point is to make change happen. And somewhere along the way, when you try to make change happen, someone's going to come up to you and say, you're not as good as you think you are. How dare you do that? Who gave you the authority to say that or make that or do that? When Brene Brown wrote her first book, she had never written that book before. When Brene Brown gave that magical TED Talk, she had never given that talk to that audience before. That. When we think about anyone who has touched us, who has moved us, who has made something that mattered, that person was completely unqualified to do the work they had just done because they had never done it before. All the things that get you hired for a job, the resume, the proof that you've worked for, the famous brands, the proof that you can follow instructions, none of those things are actually relevant to you doing great work. We spend hours Every day in meetings. What are we doing in those meetings? What we're doing in those meetings is waiting for someone else to take responsibility. It's a whole bunch of people sitting in a circle waiting for one person to say, I'll do it. 1. And then the other thing we do is we compromise, and then we compromise again. So I want to talk for a minute about the difference between quality and deluxeness, and then contrast it with its enemy. Deluxeness means super fancy, expensive. That's not what quality is. Quality means meeting specification. Quality means being good at what it's supposed to be good at. And all of us would like to believe we make a quality product, and then we go to meetings. What happens in meetings is our quality product becomes crappy, because crappiness is about compromising so you can get it out of the meeting. Crappiness are all the edges we sand off to make everybody happy, but we make everybody happy. We don't do anything for the people at the edges. We don't do anything for the people who care. And when we sand those edges off, we lose. My friend Michael Landau and his sister started a chain of stores called Dry Bar. And if you go to Dry Bar and say, would you cut my hair? They will say, no. And if you go to Dry Bar and say, can you please give me a blowout? The place next door is half the price. Can you give me a discount? They will say no. And if you go to Drybar on a Thursday afternoon without an appointment, they'll say, we're sorry. We're taking care of people. There are a lot of edges at Drybar. Drybar flies. The same architect that built the first store to every single city they build a new one in. If you talk to Danny Meyer about how he built Shake Shack into a billion dollar company in just a few years, he didn't do it by figuring out how to be McDonald's, but cheaper. He didn't do it by figuring out how to be Chipotle, but hamburgers. He did it by being Danny Meyer. He did it by making something that some people won't wait in line for, which is how you make something that other people will wait in line for.

A lot of people make a mistake with radical candor, thinking that they have to take a bunch of time to be radically candid. But the origin story for me with radical candor happened in less than a minute on the street of Manhattan. I had just gotten a new puppy, and I loved this dog. Had never said a harsh word to the dog. And as a Result, it was out of control and had no idea how to behave. And it jumped in front of a cab. I pulled it out of the way just in time. And all of a sudden, this man, perfect stranger standing next to me looks at me and he says, I can see you really love that dog. It's all he has to say to move up on the care personal axis. Doesn't have to know my name, doesn't have to have schmoozed with me, just, I can see you really love that dog. And then he says to me, but you're going to kill that dog if you don't teach it to sit. Now he's got my full attention. Then he says, sit. The dog sat. I had no idea the dog knew how to do that. And I kind of looked at him in amazement. The light changes, he looks back at me and he says, it's not mean, it's clear. And he crosses the street and leaves me with words to live by. Right? Didn't have to take him forever. And he changed my life in just that brief amount of time. So. So radical candor can be quick. Doesn't need to require a lot of schmoozing. Next, obnoxious aggression. I will tell you, I will assert for the record, I'm not an asshole, but I do occasionally behave like one. And I bet all of you have just occasionally done the same thing. So this also comes from a time shortly after I joined Google. Amazing I lasted there as long as I did. I had a disagreement with Larry Page about an adsense policy, and I wrote an email to 30 people that said, larry claims he wants to organize all the world's information, but if it'll make us a buck, he's willing to create clutter sites that muddle the world's information.

Right?

Not my most politically astute move. Worth taking a second to understand why I did it. I did it because I believe there's a special place in hell for people who kiss up and kick down. But it doesn't mean doing the exact opposite. Makes a ton of sense, right? Caring personally is something that you owe to every human being you interact with, either at work or in life. So that was my foray into obnoxious aggression. As with all things, the COVID up is worse than the crime. Larry didn't actually mind that. In fact, I learned later that he thought it was funny. But what happened next was where I got into real trouble. When instead of moving up on the care personally axis, I moved over in the wrong direction on the challenge directly axis. I Bumped into Larry a couple of days later. A friend of mine was like, wow, that was pretty stupid, Kim. And so instead of looking into it and actually understanding the challenge that he had made and caring personally, I just went and said, I lied. I said, oh, Larry, I'm sorry about that email. I realize you're right, I'm wrong, and Larry's got a pretty good bullshit meter. And he kind of looks at me like I'm a pigeon that pooped on his shoulder and walks off. A friend of mine patted me on the shoulder and said, he likes it better when you disagree with him, so don't move in the wrong direction when you realize you've been a jerk. Last but not least, ruinous empathy. The quadrant where most of us make most of our mistakes. To explain what I mean by ruinous empathy, I'm going to describe probably the most painful moment in my career. I had just hired this guy Bob. I really liked Bob a lot.

He.

He was funny, he was quirky. There was just one problem with Bob. His work was terrible. Absolutely terrible. I learned later the problem was he was smoking pot in the bathroom, which maybe explained all that candy. But anyway, I didn't know it at the time. I kept trying to buck Bob up with false praise and say, bob, you are so smart. This is not quite there yet, but I know you can do it. And he had no idea how bad things were until 10 months later, it became clear to me that if I did not fire Bob, I was going to lose half my team. And when I sat down and told Bob, explain Bob the situation. When I finished, he pushed his chair back from the table, he looked right at me, and he said, why didn't you tell me? And as that question is going around in my head, with no very good answer, he said, why didn't anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me. And I realize I'm having to fire Bob now because of mistakes that I made. Six really important mistakes. I didn't ask him to tell me what was going well, and I never asked him for criticism. Maybe I was doing something that was driving him to toke up in the bathroom. I don't know. I didn't find out, and I should have. I never gave him praise that was meaningful. I basically just gave him praise that was a head fake. I never told him when his work wasn't good enough. And worst of all, I failed to create the kind of environment in which everyone would tell Bob what was truly good. And when he was going off the rails. And all I could do in that moment was to make a very solemn promise to myself I would never make that mistake again. And I would help everyone whom I worked with never to make that mistake again. And that is why I spent the time to come up with this radical candor framework.

So this happened at another university. The commencement exercises were done. There was a lovely luncheon for people who'd been honored and our families and I had some Nigerian friends come and join my husband and my family. And being Nigerians, we spend a lot of time talking very loudly and we don't necessarily respect time constraints. And so in the end, we were the last to leave the venue of the luncheon and the other well behaved honorees had, you know, they left when they were supposed to. So it was me and my family left. And the organizer said to me, oh, there's a shuttle waiting for you. And you know, the shuttle driver knows that the honorary degree recipient is coming, one more person is coming. And so when I was done, we go and we find the shuttle and a white man driving it. He's waiting there. So I tried to go in and he says, no, no, no, this is not for you, this is reserved. And I said, yes, but I'm. It's actually me, I got the honorary degree. And he said, no, it's for the honorary degree recipient. And I said, yes, that would be me. And he goes, no, this is for the person who got an honorary degree. So at this point, I'm actually wanting to bring out the thing and say, well, here, look, it actually wasn't pleasant. I can laugh about it now, but I remember thinking, genuinely thinking and wondering, how is it possible that this man's view of what an honorary degree recipient should be is so narrow and so hardened that he resisted even in the face of evidence. Sometimes we're held back by what we carry in our head, by what we think should be instead of what actually is. I believe that we can truly hear each other's stories. I believe that we can create a world where everyone truly feels that they matter. But the reason it's difficult to do is because we have long had a world in which we did not hear each other's stories and where everyone did not feel that they truly mattered. And so to truly hear one another, we need to create more space. We need to extend the boundaries. We need to widen our ideas of everything or we will be left behind.

You know how often we go through life acting as though everything is rigged against us, Acting from a kind of victim conscious, as though things are happening to us. And that's a very disempowered place from which to live and from which to lead. You cannot lead from that place because you know what? Every day things are going to happen that you don't like. I'm predicting that everybody here will have things happening to you today, tomorrow, the day after that. You are not happy they are happening to you. So the only thing we're in control of is our attitude to what is happening to us. And if we can move to a place of imperturbability. It's a big word for a Greek girl, but it's a fabulous word because you can really practice to be in that place and whatever happens, deal with it from that place. It's an incredibly powerful place to lead from, because whatever happens, you kind of expand to include it. You are bigger than whatever happens to you. The alternative is to contract the minute something happens, and then you are smaller than what just happened to you. And you see, leaders are able to take the most adverse circumstances and turn them around. They are able to take criticism and move on despite that. And it gets easier and easier and easier. Trust me, I know. When we launched the Huffington Post on day one, who had terrible reviews? One of them, I've learned by heart, it said, the Huffington Post is an unsurvivable failure. It is the movie equivalent of Gilly, Heaven's Gate, and Ishtar all rolled into one. And the person who wrote that review a year later sent me an email saying I was wrong. The habitat has become an indispensable part of the Internet. Can I write for you? And I said, yes, because you know what is the worst thing you can do that totally saps your energy is to hold grudges. Holding grudges is like drinking poison. I mean, one of the worst, worst little needlepoint pillows that if I see it in anybody's living room, I'm really tempted to take it away and burn it. Says living well is the best revenge. Really? That's such an undirected way of living your life. That's again, how people lead their lives in some way based on what somebody else wanted them to do. You know how when people change careers, which I love, sometimes when they decide, you know what I'm not happy in doing that I'm doing that because that's what my mother wanted me to do, or my neighbors wanted me to do, or a magazine I wrote in my teens. It's not who I am. Updating our images of ourselves is absolutely key. And defining success according to what is important to us because that's our life, and we can't live anybody else's life. You know, I had an amazing mother who taught me a lot of things, including the fact that failure, as she used to say, is not the opposite of success. Failure is a stepping stone to success. And as Seth Godden said in his speech here, if you say that failure is not an option, he said, then success is not an opt option. Increasingly today, when everything is constantly changing and evolving, we need to be able to create teams that are willing to fail. And as leaders, we need to be able to say, failure is part of the process of leading to great products, great companies, and if you're not willing to do that, you're not really willing to do something great.