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1First, schools reward students who consistently do what they are told. Academic grades correlate only loosely with intelligence (standardized tests are better at measuring IQ). Grades are, however, an excellent predictor of self-discipline, conscientiousness, and the ability to comply with rules.
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3“Essentially, we are rewarding conformity and the willingness to go along with the system.” Following the rules doesn’t create success; it just eliminates extremes—both good and bad. While this is usually good and all but eliminates downside risk, it also frequently eliminates earthshaking accomplishments.
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5By dampening your intensifiers, you’ll be not only at odds with who you are but also denying your key advantages.And knowing yourself, in terms of achieving what you want in life, means being aware of your strengths.Research by Gallup shows that the more hours per day you spend doing what you’re good at, the less stressed you feel and the more you laugh, smile, and feel you’re being treated with respect.You were successful because you happened to be in an environment where your biases and predispositions and talents and abilities all happened to align neatly with those things that would produce success in that environment.you can best leverage your type, your signature strengths, and your context to create tremendous value. This is what makes for a great career, but such self-knowledge can create value wherever you choose to apply it. You can do this too: know thyself and pick the right pond. Identify your strengths and pick the right place to apply them.
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7When you take a job take a long look at the people you’re going to be working with—because the odds are you’re going to become like them; they are not going to become like you. You can’t change them. If it doesn’t fit who you are, it’s not going to work.
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9We need a bit of fantasy to keep us going.
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11Seligman found that when you shift your explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic it makes you feel better and you become grittier.
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13It’s the stories we tell ourselves that keep us going. They can be a higher truth. Or, in many cases, they don’t need to be true at all.
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15Stories, stories, stories. They remind us how to behave and help us persist.
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17Psychologist Shelley Taylor says that “a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies.” 
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19Vonnegut’s moral is that “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” 
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21We cannot help but tell stories. But which story are you telling yourself? And is it one that will get you where you want to go?
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23 Change the story and you change your behavior. Games are another kind of story: a fun one.
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25 Whether it’s optimism, meaning, or a simple game, the story in your head is always the answer to perseverance.
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27 “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
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29 If you quit the stuff you know isn’t working for you, you free up time for things that might.
30 A question can be solved intellectually, but a quest must be solved existentially.
31 A quest is about oneself. Man is seeking himself. He knows he is, but he does not know who he is. Hence, We can suppress that inquiry, we can divert that inquiry, we can change that inquiry for substitute inquiries, but we cannot kill it. There is no way to kill it, because it is intrinsic to human nature. It is intrinsic to consciousness to know one’s quest.
32 Who am I?” has to be asked in the deepest recesses of your being. You have to resound with this question. It has to vibrate in you, pulsate in your blood, in your cells.
33 When the real answer comes to you, it is so existential that it is inexpressible.
34 I myself am a question. I know not who I am. What to do? Where to go? Remain with the question. Don’t do anything, and don’t go anywhere; and don’t start believing in any answer. Remain with the question. That is one of the most difficult things to do—to remain with a question and not to seek the answer.
35 Because the mind is very cunning, it can supply a false answer. It can console you; it can give you something to cling to; and then the question is not answered but suppressed.
36 Remain with the question—alert, aware, not seeking, not trying to find an answer.
37 The very awareness, the fire of awareness, burns the question.
38 You have to ask very intensely. Ask the question, but don’t ask for the answer.
39 Theology gives you the answer; religiousness gives you awareness.
40 Theology supplies you answers—ready-made, manufactured, polished, perfect. Religiousness doesn’t give you any answer; it simply helps you to penetrate deep into the question. The deeper you go into the question, the more you find it is melting, it is disappearing. And when the question has disappeared, a tremendous energy is released within you. You are there, with no question.
41 Don’t go on moving around the periphery with questions like “Who made the world? Why was the world created?” A seeker has to be aware of ready-made answers. They are available; from every side they are being supplied to you. In fact, your mind has already been conditioned. The answers have been given to you before you even asked the question.
42 This is the only discipline I teach: the discipline of questioning, and without being in any hurry for the answer.
43 And it is beautiful to remain with the question, because answers corrupt you. They destroy your innocence; they destroy your pure ignorance. They fill your mind with words, theories, dogmas; then you are no longer a virgin. They corrupt you. A question is pure; it does not corrupt you. In fact, it intensifies your purity; it makes you more and more clear.
44 Do what your nature wants to do. Do what your intrinsic qualities hanker to do. Don’t listen to the scriptures. Listen to your own heart. That is the only scripture I prescribe. Yes, listen very attentively, very consciously, and you will never be wrong. And listening to your own heart, you will never be divided. Listening to your own heart, you will start moving in the right direction, without ever thinking of what is right and what is wrong.
45 many people helped out behind the scenes with feedback, suggestions, and encouragement, and I’m grateful for everyone’s involvement.
46 everyone feeding off of each other’s energy.
47 Looking over the crowd, I realized that every person took a different path to get here, but our paths somehow all managed to intersect with one another here and now.
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49 Look for opportunities beyond just the game you sat down to play. You never know who you’re going to meet, including new friends for life or new business contacts.
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51 Without conscious and deliberate effort, inertia always wins.
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53 To me, connectedness—the number and depth of my relationships—was an important element of my happiness, 
54 If you are able to figure out how to be truly interested in someone you meet, with the goal of building up a friendship instead of trying to get something out of that person, the funny thing is that almost always, something happens later down the line that ends up benefiting either your business or yourself personally.
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56 So my advice is to stop trying to “network” in the traditional business sense, and instead just try to build up the number and depth of your friendships, where the friendship itself is its own reward.
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58 “Envision, create, and believe in your own universe, and the universe will form around you,” 
59 your values and mission are unique to your own company’s thumbprint.
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61 As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer’s undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that 
62 the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.
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64 increasing the chances of serendipitous employee interactions.
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66 The problem when someone feels burned out, bored, unchallenged, or stifled by their work is not the job itself but rather the environment and playground rules given to them to do the job at hand.
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68 It may seem sometimes like we don’t know what we’re doing. And it’s true: we don’t. That’s a bit scary, but you can take comfort in knowing that nobody else knows how to do what we’re doing either. If they did, they’d be the Web’s most popular shoe store.
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70 So there are no experts in what we’re doing. Except for us: we are becoming experts as we do this. And for anyone we bring on board, the best expertise they can bring is expertise at learning and adapting and figuring new things out—helping the company grow, and in the process they will also be growing themselves.
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72 at the end of the day it’s not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most.
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74 best ideas and decisions are made from the bottom up, meaning by those on the front lines that are closest to the issues and/or the customers.
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76 Roadblocks aren’t a dead end here. They’re a welcome challenge.
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78 “In the pursuit of knowledge, something is added every day. In the pursuit of enlightenment, something is dropped every day.” 
79 Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).
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81 In The Happiness Hypothesis, author Jonathan Haidt concludes that happiness doesn’t come primarily from within but, rather, from between.
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83 Are you working toward maximizing your happiness each day? What is the net effect of your existence on the total amount of happiness 
84 in the world each day? What are your values? What are you passionate about? What inspires you? What is your goal in life? What are your company’s values? What is your company’s higher purpose? What is your higher purpose?
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86 When you walk with purpose, you collide with destiny.
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88 Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared. —BUDDHA In his own neat handwriting were these words, ‘Wasted a whole day fishing with Jimmy. Didn’t catch a thing!’ With a deep sigh and a shaking hand he took Jimmy’s journal and found the boy’s entry for the same day, 4 June. Large scrawling letters pressed deep into the paper read, ‘Went fishing with my dad. Best day of my life.’ 
89 We’re both devilishly young and good looking.
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91 upgrade-of-the-software-between-our-ears kind of way.
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93 is best described as having a short history with a very long past.
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95 ‘America has sneezed and we’ve caught a cold’.
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97 He described himself as ‘chairman of the bored’.
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99 What if your aim was to enjoy the week? Or what if your primary reason for getting out of bed on Monday morning was to inspire people?
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101 grin and coo at the loveliness of her
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103 The biggest reason why most people are a million miles away from feeling brilliant is that it’s easier to be negative. In fact, it takes no effort whatsoever to conform to ‘normal’.
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105 There’s nothing more important that you’ll ever do than spread positive, upbeat, energetic, passionate vibes. You’ll feel better for it. And, crucially, those around you will respond in a positive manner.
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107 Check out the questions below: 1. What would you do if the world was going to end one week from today? 2. Jump ahead to the end of your working life. Reflect back on your career. What are the three most important lessons you’ve learned 
108 why are they so critical? 3. Think of someone who inspires you. What exactly do they do that makes you feel so brilliant? 4. Who are you at your best? 5. It’s your 100th birthday and there’s a big family party in your honour. Someone is going to stand up and say a few words about you. What would you like them to say? 6. List 10 things you really appreciate but that you take for granted. 7 7. What are the most important things to have emerged from answering these questions?
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110 1. There is no longer time for celebration.
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112 Teams ‘over-communicate’ and ‘under-converse’. (You email the person sitting next to you) 
113 The pressures of day-to-day operations push aside our concern for vision and creativity.
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115 People speak of customers as impositions on their time rather than opportunities to serve.
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117 As adults we have possibly lost touch with one of the greatest gifts we have – the gift of curiosity. Have you noticed that children can get really curious about anything new?
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119 You kind of learned it via osmosis.
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121 Spend a few minutes thinking about your life to date – what has had a significant impact on you so far? 1. List milestones and events that have been important. 2. Who has been instrumental in shaping your thinking? 3. What achievements are you pleased about? 4. What ‘less than happy’ experiences have influenced you?
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123 5. Write a list of things you feel good about in your life. 6. Reflect on why you do the job you do. What’s the best thing about your job? (You’re not allowed to say ‘going home’.) 7. What is, for you, ‘success’? 8. Interviews with the elderly do not report that people regret the things they have done, but rather, people talk about the things they regret not having done. What are your thoughts on this? 9. What are the most important things life has taught you? 10. List 20 things you want to do before you die.
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125 Organisations over-communicate and under-converse.
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127 ‘How would the best dad in the world read this story?’
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129 some people are accidentally filtering out the nuggets and collecting the gravel!
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131 Check these out for starters: 1. Go on a favourite walk and try to look out for at least ten things you have never noticed before. Trust me there will be hundreds. Take pleasure in noticing them. 2. Look around the room you’re in. Now look at it again and this time notice the blue items. 3. Agree with a point of view that you wouldn’t normally agree with. Check out the world from this perspective. Marvel at it. Be fascinated. Find some pleasure in it. 4. Watch a TV programme you wouldn’t normally watch or listen to a radio station you wouldn’t normally listen to. Decide to enjoy it. 5. Ask your kids if you can listen to one of their CDs and be delighted with what you hear. Tell them how wonderful their taste in music is. (Ok, this may 
132 Complete the next few sentences. There’s no right or wrong. The aim is to begin to unearth your core beliefs and values: People are... Happiness is... Love means... Money is... Work is... Family is... Success is...
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134 Ultimately, this whole book is about language. Get the communication right and the results will follow.
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136 To change, we need to go beyond behaviour.
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138 thus: ‘You don’t change the tide by standing in the ocean. To change the tide you need to go to the moon.’ 
139 This book is a good example of what I’m talking about. We can’t order you to be happy and positive. But if we can get you to believe that by being happy and positive you will have a brilliant next 50 years, then our job is done.
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141 1. How might the above relate to your organisation? 2. Which habits – perhaps habits of mind – do you or your organisation have which are most cherished? 3. Which of these are you willing to give up in order to achieve what you want? 4. True or false: ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.’ 5. What three things do you need to start doing (or doing more of)? What would be the benefits to you and those around you? 6. What three things do you need to stop doing (or do less of)? What would be the benefits to you and those around you?
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143 ‘It’s common sense, but not common practice.’
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145 Number 1 thing that positive people do to make themselves happy, upbeat and full of life is that they (imagine a drum roll at this point, please, and maybe some fireworks...) Choose to be positive!
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147 1. What three words or phrases describe who you would like to be as a person? 2. When you’re living the words above, what do you: Look like? Sound like? Feel like? 3. How often are you at your absolute best? (Honestly.) 4. What’s stopping you? 5. When looking through the lens of the words in question 1, how would you act in the following situations? A team member needs your help when you’re busy.
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149 A team member accomplishes a goal or hits a target. You make a mistake. You disagree with someone. Somebody cuts you up at the traffic lights. There’s a 20-minute queue at Tesco. Your grumpy parents are coming to stay for a week. You’re camping and it’s pouring with rain.
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151 You cannot control a red light, but you can control how you feel about it. You may not be able to control the driver who cuts you up in the rush hour, but you can control your reaction.
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153 ‘What would the best dad in the world do when he opened the front door?’
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155 The principle is that the first four minutes of every interaction are the most important.
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157 Whatever job you are attending to right now, choose to do it with passion, energy and enthusiasm. And when you get home, practise parenting in the same vein. You’ll feel great – and so will those around you 
158 In the grand scheme of things as our planet hurtles through space, spinning on its axis, we are completely and utterly insignificant dots of life flickering on a tiny rock, lost among billions of 
159 other tiny rocks in the solar system. On this grand scale our lives are over in the blink of an eye. In this scenario, our insignificance is staggering. But to all those we live and work with (and our children in particular) we are incredibly significant because we form part of their world. We are shaping their character, forming their belief systems and affecting their quality of life. Boy are we significant!
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161 And for emphasis, he threw in a one finger salute,
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163 Consciously choose to be positive. And then take responsibility for making the positivity stick.
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165 I’d dare to make more mistakes next time.
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167 I’d relax, I’d limber up. I would have been sillier than I have been on this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice creams and less veggies. I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I’d have fewer imaginary ones. You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments and if I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments. If I had my life over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the autumn. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies. I’ve been one of those people who never go anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute.
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169 The biggest challenge we face is to lock horns with a mood hoover and win. By ‘win’ I mean we raise their levels of brilliance rather than letting them lower ours!
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171 The moral of this heart-rending story? Maybe it’s that we need to build in some rewards along the way. A huge goal (or goals) is the ultimate aim but plant some markers along the way – some points at which you can enjoy a small reward on the road to your huge goal(s).
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173 playing to your strengths
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175 1. What is your gut feeling about Linley’s observations? 2. What is your vision for a successful life? Describe a life well lived. 3. What is your vision for your relationships? Describe the sort of friend/partner/parent/son/daughter you want to be. 4. What is your vision for your work? Describe the contribution you want to make. 5. What kind of person do you want to be? 6. Think back to a time when you were allowed to play to your strengths. What happened and how did you feel? 7. ‘You learn most in your areas of strength.’ True or false? Why? 8. Is it possible to play to your strengths in the modern workplace?
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177 Choose to be positive. 2. Understand your impact. 3. Take personal responsibility. 4. Have bouncebackability. 5. Set Huge Goals. 6. Play to your strengths.
178 Success first, happiness second.
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180 I jokingly asked Salim why the children of Soweto were so weird. “They see schoolwork as a privilege,” he replied, “one that many of their parents did not have.” When I returned to Harvard two weeks later, I saw students complaining about the very thing the Soweto students saw as a privilege.
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182 Could patterns be teased out of their lives and experience to help others in all walks of life to be more successful in an increasingly stressful and negative world?
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184 This is very telling.
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186 what we spend our time and mental energy focusing on can indeed become our reality.
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188 What was going on here was that like so many people in contemporary society, along the way to gaining their superb educations, and their shiny opportunities, they had absorbed the wrong lessons. They had mastered formulas in calculus and chemistry. They had read great books and learned world history and become fluent in foreign languages. But they had never formally been taught how to maximize their brains’ potential or how to find meaning and happiness.
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190 I began meeting with students at my “coffice” in Starbucks to hear their stories.
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192 This principle teaches us how we can adjust our mindset (our fulcrum) in a way that gives us the power (the lever) to be more fulfilled and successful.
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194 helped inoculate these individuals against the negative effects of stress.
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196 This is a travesty because
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198 Without the wise counsel and insightful answers I’ve received to questions over those decades, I wonder where I would be today.
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200 “It is better to look uninformed than to be uninformed.”
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202 question I was able to open more doors of understanding into her experiences.
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204 Before we can communicate we must establish commonality. The greater the commonality, the greater the potential for connection and communication.
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206 Questions Cultivate Humility
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208 I mistakenly believed
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210 I adopted the ridiculous attitude of “fake it ’til you make it.” Unfortunately, that caused me to do a lot of faking but very little making.
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212 allow my weaknesses to humble me
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214 Any idea gets better when the right people get a chance to add to it and improve
215 What is the greatest lesson you have learned? By asking this question I seek their wisdom. What are you learning now? This question allows me to benefit from their passion. How has failure shaped your life? This question gives insight into their attitude. Who do you know whom I should know? This allows me to engage with their network.
216 What have you read that I should read? This question directs my personal growth. What have you done that I should do? This helps me seek new experiences. How can I add value to you? This shows my gratitude and desire to add value to them.
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218 Choose people who Understand the value of questions, Desire the success of others Add value to others’ thoughts, Are not threatened by others’ strengths, Can emotionally handle quick changes in the conversation, Understand their place of value at the table, Bring out the best thinking in the people around them, Have experienced success in the area under discussion, Leave the table with a “we” attitude, not a “me” attitude “The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation, not overturning it.” We believe people are good at the same things we are good at—they aren’t. We believe people are energized by the same things that energize us—they aren’t. We believe people see the big picture in the same way we do—they don’t.
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220 A wise leader once told me, “Before you attempt to set things right, make sure you see things right.” “When was the last time you had a good thought for the first time?”
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222 What is your passion? What have you achieved? What have you done uncommonly well? How are you wired? Where do you belong? What are the “shoulds” that have trailed you during the first half? These and other questions like them will direct you toward the self your heart longs for; they will help you discover the task for which you were especially made.
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224 Thankfully, they were persistent and wouldn’t stop asking the question. After many conversations over an eighteen-month period, I finally said yes.
225 In our early years, she helped carry a heavy workload and released me to pursue my calling with full-on commitment.
226 What has emerged for me since is not so much new information but new and deeper perspectives about why that information works as well as it does and how universally it can be applied.
227 my personal counselors, especially Michael Hayes, who have helped me stay
228 connected to my intuition and the bigger picture;
229 my editor at Viking, Rick Kot, whose intellectual rigor, laborious fine-tuning of my prose, and patience helped nurture the project across the finish line; and all the other sources of my inspiration—seen and unseen.
230 happen—to engage with our world so it will supply us with the experiences and results we seek.
231 to engage with our world so it will supply us with the experiences and results we seek.
232 Approaching work is a game, and one that’s fun to play, as long as we know the purpose, the boundaries, the contents, and the rules. When any of those parameters are unclear, we develop unnecessary stress and are ineffective. But if, on the other hand, a bullet-proof, trusted process is in place which you know you can apply whenever needed to clarify and align your thinking and resources—no matter what’s going on—it’s much easier to experience a heightened sense of freedom and spontaneity with how you spend your time in your job.
233 And winning at both work and life is not a matter of crossing some
234 distant finish line. It’s about internalizing a set of responses and behaviors that are consistently successful when applied to any aspect of life and work that could be functioning better.
235 Likewise, assessing the six distinct Horizons of Focus at which you have agreements and attention was, is, and always will be the way to trust your priority decisions.
236 midnight, as I struggled to get all the ideas and stories out of my head and onto the page.
237 Pink highlight | Location: 319
238 Credit must also go to Matthew Smith, Fiona Dempsey and Shareen Muhyeddeen at Kogan Page, publishers of this book, and freelance copy-editor Kevin Doherty. You have obviously done this many times before, and your guidance was invaluable.
239 conscripts
240 Note:Interesting word to use for paper review.
241 
242 They communicate tirelessly, and it is their skill at listening and talking that keeps us passionately connected to their vision.
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244 For many, it was a subject they had not been grilled on before, and they all enjoyed the chance to articulate their views.
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246 Clearly, my answer wasn’t compelling enough at the time, because I never got the interview. But it was a great question. It forced me to be crystal clear about my mission.
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248 Their ability to analyse a situation, quickly seize on the key issues and decide on the actions 
249 needed was breathtaking.
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251 Good communication, said the leaders in these pages, is about passion, empathy, simplicity, stories, conversations, great listening and compelling visions. It is about integrity and strong values, and a powerful sense of mission. It is about honesty. It is about building relationships, creating trust and enabling endeavour. Communication is what leaders do before, during and after decisions. It is what they do to achieve results. It is how they inspire us.
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253 why trust is essential to leadership, why that means you have to be authentic and why you have to learn to be more passionate in your communication; 
254 how they create leaders throughout their organizations by relentlessly communicating a framework of values that enable action and decision making; 
255 how they bring external views of their organization into the organization in order to drive change; 
256 how they use conversations to engage and motivate people.
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258 When you compare yourself with another, ideologically, psychologically, or even physically, there is the striving to become that; and there is the fear that you may not. It is the desire to fulfil and you may not be able to fulfil. Where there is comparison there must be fear.
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260 Society is so constructed that a citizen who has a position of respect is treated with great courtesy, whereas a man who has no position is kicked around.
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262 do you know your own particular fears? And what do you usually do about them? You run away from them, don’t you, or invent ideas and images to cover them?
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264 If the mind, in which is included the brain, tries to overcome fear, to suppress it, discipline it, control it, translate it into terms of something else, there is friction, there is conflict, and that conflict is a waste of energy.
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266 The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call fear.
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268 When you are confronted with something immediately there is no fear. It is only when thought comes in that there is fear. Therefore, our question now is, is it possible for the mind to live completely, totally, in the present? It is only such a mind that has no fear. But Intimacy brings you close to a stranger. You have to drop all your defenses; only then is intimacy possible. And the fear is that if you drop all your defenses, all your masks, who knows what the stranger will do with you? We are all hiding a thousand and one things, not only from others but from ourselves, because we have been brought up by a sick humanity with all kinds of repressions, inhibitions, taboos. And the fear is that with somebody who is a stranger—and it does not matter, you may have lived with the person for thirty years, forty years; the strangeness never disappears—it feels safer to keep a little defense, a little distance, because somebody can take advantage of your weaknesses, of your frailties, of your vulnerability.
269 But nobody wants to accept that “it is my basic need to be needed, to be loved, to be accepted.” is, “I am in love with you this moment, and I will give my totality to you. About the next moment, I know nothing. How can I promise? You have to forgive me.” As more and more of the unconscious is unburdened, your consciousness goes on becoming bigger. And as the area of the unconscious shrinks, the territory of the consciousness expands.
270 And that which is unapproachable creates a deep desire to acquire it, to possess it.
271 meditation is nothing but a cleaning of all the rubbish that has gathered in your mind.
272 Call it meditation, call it prayer, or whatever you will, but the essential thing is how to get rooted in existence again. We have become trees that are uprooted—and nobody else is responsible except us, with our own stupid idea of conquering nature.
273 else. The search is a projection, the search is a desire, an idea that somewhere else is what is needed—that it exists, but it exists somewhere else, not here where you are.
274 This parable is very significant. Have you ever asked yourself what you are searching for? Have you ever made it a point of deep meditation to know what you are searching for? No. Even if in some vague moments, dreaming moments, you have some inkling of what you are searching for, it is never precise, it is never exact.
275 This dichotomy has to be understood. The seeker is inside—but because the light is outside, the seeker starts moving in an ambitious way, trying to find something outside that will be fulfilling. It is never going to happen. It has never happened.
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277 So, when the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten; when the belt fits, the
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279 belly is forgotten; and when the heart is right, ‘for’ and ‘against’ are forgotten.
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281 And whatsoever you achieve through will, will always remain a burden to you; it will always be a conflict, an inner tension, and you can lose it at any moment. It has to be maintained continuously – and maintaining it takes energy, maintaining it finally dissipates you. Only that which is attained through effortlessness will never be a burden to you, and only that which is not a burden can be eternal. Only that which is not in any way unnatural can remain with 
282 you forever and forever.
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284 Chuang Tzu says that the real, the divine, the existential, is to be attained by losing yourself completely in it. Even the effort to attain it becomes a barrier – then you cannot lose yourself. Even the effort to lose yourself becomes a barrier. How can you make any effort to lose yourself? All effort is born out of the ego, and through effort ego is strengthened. Ego is the disease. So all effort has to be left completely, nothing is to be done; one has to lose oneself completely in the existential. One has to become again like a small child, just born, not knowing what is right, not knowing what is wrong, not knowing any distinctions. Once distinctions enter, once you know this is right and that is wrong, you are already ill, and you are far away from reality.
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286 That night there was no desire, no goal, nowhere to go, and no one to go anywhere – all effort ceased.
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288 understand the ‘facticity’
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290 Every child is born in Tao, then we cripple him with society, civilization, culture, morality, religion 
291 The mind is society within you.
292 The mystical Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that “the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” 
293 We’ll explore some heady questions.
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295 I said that I was honored, humbled, and excited.
296 
297 Every person, organization, and even society reaches a point at which they owe it to themselves to hit refresh—to reenergize, renew, reframe, and rethink their purpose.
298 
299 Hyderabad was truly formative.
300 
301 pace. Pace comes when you do your thing. So long as you enjoy it, do it mindfully and well, and have an honest purpose behind it, life won’t fail you.
302 
303 coursework. The classes I took with Steven Kaplan, Marvin Zonis, and many other storied faculty at the university on strategy, finance, and leadership influenced my thinking and intellectual pursuits long after I completed the MBA.
304 
305 Search Checkpoint
306 Note:Make Checkpoint Meetings for Research
307 
308 I realized that in a successful company it is as important to unlearn some old
309 
310 Leadership means making choices and then rallying the team around those choices.
311 
312 but he hadn’t built the shared context needed to make his leadership effective.
313 
314 My portfolio had no center of gravity,
315 
316 met with everyone on the STB leadership team individually, taking their pulse,
317 
318 our North Star would be a cloud-first strategy.
319 
320 rigorous root-cause analysis
321 
322 building new muscle as a service provider,
323 
324 A leader must see the external opportunities and the internal capability and culture—and all of the connections among them—and respond to them before they become obvious parts of the conventional wisdom. It’s an art form, not a science.
325 
326 build long-term value by being true to our identity and innovating.
327 
328 The Soul of a New Machine
329 Note:Read
330 
331 It’s what motivates and provides inner direction to apply your capability.
332 
333 “design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” 
334 We should only be in the phone business when we have something that is really differentiated.
335 
336 Communicate clearly and regularly
337 
338 grow the pie and delight customers.
339 
340 flywheel of change spinning. Sure, it took regular communications, but it also took discipline and 
341 Just saying interesting things wasn’t enough. I, all of us, had to do them.
342 
343 We will obsess over helping people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data, and social networks.
344 
345 Many wrote to me to say that after years of frustration they felt a new energy. I was determined not to squander that.
346 
347 there also has to be high-quality agreement.
348 
349 alignment on product plans, knowing that when we are an inch apart on strategy at the leadership level, our product teams end up miles apart in execution.
350 
351 Culture can be a vague and amorphous term.
352 
353 Culture is how an organization thinks and acts, but individuals shape it.
354 
355 Our culture needed to be about realizing our personal passions and using Microsoft as a platform to pursue that passion.
356 
357 The CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture.
358 
359 An organizational culture is not something that can simply unfreeze, change, and then refreeze in an ideal way. It takes deliberate work, and it takes some specific ideas about what the culture should become. It also requires dramatic, concrete actions that seize the attention of team members and push them out of their familiar comfort zones.
360 
361 First, we needed to obsess about our customers.
362 
363 deeper insight and empathy what they need.
364 
365 When we talk to customers, we need to listen. It’s
366 
367 We need to be insatiable in our desire to learn from the outside and bring that learning into Microsoft, while still innovating to surprise and delight our users.
368 
369 In every meeting, don’t just listen—make it possible for others to speak so that everyone’s ideas come through.
370 
371 Within the subculture of computer programmers, hacking is a time-honored tradition of working around limitations and creatively solving a difficult problem or opportunity.
372 
373 When I learn about a shortcoming, it’s a thrilling moment. The person who points it out has given me the gift of insight.
374 
375 It’s about questioning ourselves each day: Where are all the places today that I had a fixed mindset? Where did I have a growth mindset?
376 
377 We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make things happen, and overestimate what others need to do for us.
378 
379 The fundamental source of resistance to change is fear of the unknown. Really big questions for which there are no certain answers can be scary.
380 
381 Honestly, I left the conference inspired and energized, but I was mad at myself for blundering such an important chance 
382 Any advice that advocates passivity in the face of bias is wrong.
383 
384 In some ways, I’m glad I messed up in such a public forum because it helped me confront an unconscious bias I didn’t know I had, and it helped me find a new sense of empathy for the great women in my life and at my company.
385 
386 Whether cultural or attained wisdom, we felt that if we worked hard and kept our heads down, 
387 eventually good things would happen.
388 
389 A manager can be demanding, but must also have the empathy to figure out what will motivate employees. Likewise, an employee is right to put his or her head down and work hard, but they also have the right to expect a pathway to greater responsibility and recognition when they do.
390 
391 air fears and concerns.
392 
393 We all want a culture in which
394 
395 we’re heard and supported.
396 
397 prioritizing talent movement
398 
399 The first is to bring clarity to those you work with. This is one of the foundational things leaders do every day, every minute. In order to bring clarity, you’ve got to synthesize the complex. Leaders take internal and external noise and synthesize a message from it, recognizing the true signal within a lot of noise. I don’t want to hear that someone is the smartest person in the room. I want to hear them take their intelligence and use it to 
400 develop deep shared understanding within teams and define a course of action.
401 
402 Second, leaders generate energy, not only on their own teams but across the company.
403 
404 They create an environment where everyone can do his or her best work.
405 
406 Third, and finally, they find a way to deliver success, to make things happen. This means driving innovations that people love and are inspired to work on; finding balance between long-term success and short-term wins; 
407 Reasoned judgment and inner conviction are what I expect from myself and from the leaders around me.
408 
409 There was an audible gasp and more than a smattering of chuckles in the auditorium
410 
411 Steve Ballmer helped me deeply understand this with his three Cs. Imagine a target with three concentric rings. The outer ring is concepts. Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon may have an exciting product idea, but is that enough? An organization may have a conceptual vision—a dream or imagination filled with new ideas and new approaches, but do they have what’s in the second ring: 
412 capabilities? Do they have the engineering and design skills required to actually build that concept alone? And finally, the bull’s-eye, is a culture that embraces new concepts and new capabilities and doesn’t choke them out. That’s what’s needed in order to build and sustain innovation-producing and customer-pleasing products—smart partnerships. Concepts are better and capabilities more comprehensive when the culture invites partners to the table.
413 
414 One way to explain the logic is by turning to game theory, which uses mathematical models to explain cooperation and conflict.
415 
416 partnerships—particularly with competitors—have to be about strengthening a company’s core businesses, 
417 We have to face reality. When we have a great product like Bing, Office, or Cortana but someone else has created a strong market position with their service or device, we can’t just sit on the sidelines. We have to find smart ways to partner so that our products can become available on each others’ popular platforms.
418 
419 Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place.
420 
421 Do we always agree? Of course not. But we always seek to listen intelligently, seeking to understand not just the words we are hearing but the underlying intentions.
422 
423 Employees. Customers. Products. Partners.
424 
425 Employees and products command attention every day, as they are closest to us; customers provide the resources we need to do anything, so they also command energy. But partners provide the lift we need to soar. They help us see around corners, help us locate new 
426 opportunities we might not see alone.
427 
428 share these experiences in real time
429 
430 It’s been said we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in the short run, but underestimate what can be achieved in the long run.
431 
432 augmenting human capability with insights and predictive power that would be impossible to achieve on our own.
433 
434 A company has to have a complete vision for what it can uniquely do, and then back it up with conviction and the capability to make it happen.
435 
436 we decided to look at our investment strategy across three growth horizons: first, grow today’s core businesses and technologies; second, incubate new ideas and products for the future; and third, invest in long-term breakthroughs.
437 
438 how computing could displace time and space.
439 
440 storing the experience for later.
441 
442 through early forms of transfer learning,
443 
444 I believe that in ten years AI speech and visual recognition will be better than a human’s.
445 Note:Use in paper
446 
447 LEARN TO LEARN. Ultimately, the state of the art is when computers learn to learn—when computers generate their own programs.
448 Note:Can be used in Paper
449 
450 “You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.”
451 
452 Learning or improvement in one skill or mental function can positively influence another one. The effect is transfer learning, and it’s seen not only in human intelligence but also machine intelligence.
453 
454 The optimal state will be when those AI systems not only translate but improve—perhaps 
455 Hamaker’s quest is to capture every type of data from sources including GPS, email, calendar, and correlative data from the web and turn that data into understanding, and even empathy.
456 
457 Those kinds of uncertainties fascinate our engineers who focus on semantic ontologies, the study of interrelationships among people and entities.
458 
459 It’s a long way off, but might consciousness one day merge with computation?
460 
461 After all, our products may come and go, but our values are timeless.
462 
463 Throughout history, trust has had an economic as much as an ethical purpose.
464 
465 In the heat of conflict, the pendulum often swings toward a greater focus on security. When the moment passes, people want a more permanent equilibrium.
466 
467 There are many policy priorities competing for attention from lawmakers, but I
468 
469 would argue that getting the rules right for the digital revolution is among the most important.
470 Note:Use in paper
471 
472 those of us in the business of designing AI is to get not just the intelligence right, but also the human qualities—emotion, ethics, and empathy.
473 
474 not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic intelligence.
475 
476 the valuable education that comes with encountering social diversity of facts, opinion, and context? This is a driving question that needs much more work.
477 
478 EMPATHY—Empathy, which is so difficult to replicate in machines, will be invaluable in the human-AI world. The ability to perceive others’ thoughts and feelings, to collaborate and build relationships will be critical. If we hope to harness technology to serve human needs, we humans must lead the way by developing a deeper understanding and respect for one another’s values, cultures, emotions, and drives.
479 
480 Will automation lead to greater or lesser equality?
481 
482 long-term socioeconomic, legal, and ethical issues that may come with the rise of competent intelligent computation, the changes in perceptions about machine intelligence, and likely changes in human-computer relationships.
483 
484 First, we invent and design the technologies of transformation, which is where we are today. Second, we retrofit for the future.
485 Note:Use in research paper.
486 
487 But if we’ve incorporated the right values and design principles, and if we’ve prepared ourselves for the skills we as humans will need, humans and society can flourish even as we transform our world.
488 
489 But if we could zoom in, we’d see his muscles tense, his mind focus, and the very spirit of innovation flow as 
490 man and machine soared into the air for the first time, together. When history was made at Kitty Hawk, it was man with machine—not man against machine.
491 Note:Use in thesis
492 
493 The son of an economist and as a business leader, I am hardwired to obsess about these problems.
494 
495 late-stage capitalism—a theoretical time when economic growth and profits collapse—and get back to the returns enjoyed in early stage capitalism.
496 
497 This means every region—in both developed and developing countries—must grow industries in which they have comparative economic advantage 
498 Business leaders and policymakers need to ask: What do we have that others do not have? And how can we turn that unique advantage into a source of growth and wealth for all our people?
499 
500 exploiting valuable synergies to create a powerful ecosystem,
501 
502 As Professor Comin told me, you don’t have to invent the wheel, but you should adopt it quickly, because “societies that utilize new tools quickly are likely to be more productive.” 
503 Charter cities, on the other hand, are experimental reform zones engineered entirely to create jobs and growth.
504 
505 John Batelle, Wired’s co–founding editor, once wrote that “Business is humanity’s most 
506 resilient, iterative, and productive mechanism for creating change in the world.”
507 
508 These questions haunt me,
509 
510 and they motivated me to write Hit Refresh. Finding answers set me on an intellectual and introspective journey to discover what I uniquely can contribute to society and how to rediscover the soul of Microsoft, to define our role as a global company.
511 
512 Hopefully the stories and lessons along the course of my journey have produced something useful to you in your own life and work.
513 
514 I also hope these existential questions spark conversations among policymakers, business leaders, and technologists.
515 
516 In an often-divided world that is careening toward ever more dramatic technological, economic, 
517 demographic, and even climatic shifts—we have to redefine the role of multinational corporations and the role of leadership.
518 
519 Baldwin predicts a third wave of globalization will come when telepresence and telerobotics (like HoloLens)—really good substitutes for people crossing borders to provide services—become affordable.
520 
521 Real business success, in fact capitalism generally, cannot be just the surplus that you create for your own core constituency, but also the broader surplus that is created to benefit the wider society.
522 
523 We believe in the American
524 
525 Dream—both in living it out as employees and helping others do the same.
526 
527 I encourage feedback, debate, and ultimately commitment to building out the ethics that will govern our society going forward.
528 
529 humans will add value where machines cannot.
530 
531 The new jobs will be predicated on knowing how to work with machines, but also on these uniquely human attributes.
532 
533 You’re not going to have much of a stable business if you don’t think about the growing inequities around the world and do your part to help improve conditions for everyone.
534 
535 It’s the sum of a million decisions made by thousands of people every day. It’s about helping employees live out their own personal mission in the context of Microsoft’s.
536 
537 build something that will outlast themselves,
538 
539 I know that we are on the right track when I hear a colleague express an insight that could only come from empathy, or when a product breakthrough results from someone who used Microsoft as a platform for his or her personal passion and creativity.
540 
541 I’ve often said that the best lines of computer code are like poetry. The writer struggles to compress so much thought and feeling into the fewest lines possible while still communicating the 
542 fullness of expression.
543 
544 I have admired and learned from each of them throughout my career.
545 
546 Judson Althoff, Chris Capossela, Jean-Philippe Courtois, Kurt DelBene, Scott Guthrie, Kathleen Hogan, Amy Hood, Rajesh Jha, Peggy Johnson, Terry Myerson, Kevin Scott, Harry Shum, Brad Smith, and Jeff Weiner.
547 
548 John Thompson, Reid Hoffman, Teri L. List-Stoll, G. Mason Morfit, Charles H. Noski, Dr. Helmut Panke, Sandra E. Peterson, Charles W. Scharf, John W. Stanton, and Padmasree Warrior.
549 
550 Tina Brown and her husband, Sir Harold Evans, kindly hosted Anu and me at their wonderful home in New York City where we discussed Microsoft and 
551 Tim O’Reilly interviewed me on these topics at his innovative What’s the Future (WTF) conference in San Francisco, and I wish him the best of luck with his latest book.
552 Hence I am content to leave the story in its original form. I hope you enjoy
553 Spring Symposium a Festschrift to honor my seventy years,
554 Linda Carbone, an implacable enemy of prolixity, unclarity, and dullness.
555 Memory is overlaid with later memory, mangled by self-justification and self-pity, guarded by self-interest, rent by great gaps of forgetfulness.
556 It would be ridiculous for me to imagine that I could imitate Proust, and stupid of me to try.
557 Rereading my manuscript, I find that the offenses become more frequent as time gains on me.
558 why not offer several explanations of events, when none seems certain?
559 persistent heuristic search,
560 binds the roles together as they compete for those hours to pursue their searches.
561 We act out our lives within the mazes in which Nature and society place
562 My aspirations do not extend to achieving a single consistency in my life. It will be enough if I can play each of my roles creditably, borrowing sometimes from one for another, but striving to represent fairly each character when he has his turn on the stage.
563 Models of Man was a collection, published in 1957, of mathematical theories of psychological, sociological, and economic phenomena. Then, in 1977, I published Models of Discovery, a collection of my papers in philosophy of science. The first volume of Models of Thought, my papers in cognitive psychology, appeared in 1979, the second in 1989. Finally, the two volumes of Models of Bounded Rationality, collecting my papers in economics, were published in 1982. Even though this volume contains no mathematics or reports of controlled experiments, it is intended in the same spirit as those others.
564 I organized the story as a triptych. The first panel stretched from June 15, 1916, to June 15, 1937; the second, to December 15, 1955; the third covered the remaining twenty-odd years up to December 10, 1978.
565 In my two meetings with Herr Student Arthur Simon, I have let words fall from which the aforesaid gentleman felt that his honor was wounded. I hereby explain that it was absolutely not my intention to insult Herr Simon or in any way to wish to spite him. I present therefore to Herr Student Arthur Simon my apology for the insult offered to him. In attestation of which my own signature, Ernst Wassermann my father, who was not a feuding person,
566 Was “wine merchant” used as a subterfuge at a time when Jews could not own land?
567 
568 the whole thing is no longer a memory, just a memory of having once had such a memory.
569 
570 father’s quiet satisfaction
571 Are we being educated only for that? Surely, life is not merely a job, an occupation; life is something extraordinarily wide and profound, it is a great mystery, a vast realm in which we function as human beings.
572 We remain fearful, anxious, frightened of life.
573 where there is fear there is no intelligence.
574 Not to imitate but to discover—that is education, is it not?
575 That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living,
576 because in it there is fear, decay, death.
577 Living safely generally means living in imitation and therefore in fear.
578 you cannot be deeply aware, if you are afraid.
579 when each one of us is in complete revolt inwardly, psychologically, spiritually—then we shall give our hearts, our minds, our bodies towards creating a school where there is no such thing as fear with all its implications.
580 speculations. It is only when the mind is very quiet that you can really observe, for then the mind is sensitive to extraordinary beauty; and perhaps here is a clue to our problem of freedom.
581 But freedom is really a state of mind in which there is no fear or compulsion, no urge to be secure.
582 So freedom lies, not in trying to become something different, nor in doing whatever you happen to feel like doing, nor in following the authority of tradition, of your parents, of your guru, but in understanding what you are from moment to moment.
583 But there can be no freedom as long as you are merely trying to become somebody, or imitate a noble example.
584 Let us go into
585 the question very slowly, patiently, and find out.
586 an intelligent mind is one which is constantly learning, never concluding.
587 An intelligent mind is an inquiring mind, a mind that is watching, learning, studying.
588 Intelligence is something very subtle; it has no anchorage. It comes into being only when you understand the total process of the mind—not the mind according to some philosopher or teacher, but your own mind.
589 I may acquire the superficial polish of learning, I may be able to quote books, repeat passages from great authors, but basically I shall still be stupid. But if I see and understand stupidity as it expresses itself in my daily life—how I behave towards my servant, how I regard my neighbour, the poor man, the rich man, the clerk—then that very awareness brings about a breaking up of stupidity.
590 If the parents and teachers are really concerned that the young person should discover what he is, they won’t compel him; they will create an environment in which he will come to know himself.
591 It is not your own experience, it is the reflection of what older people have told you.
592 is there an
593 experience which is uncontaminated by the past?
594 This is a very difficult thing to avoid, because older people talk a great deal about all these inessential things that have no importance in life; so gradually they communicate to the children their own anxieties, fears and superstitions, and the children naturally repeat what they have heard.
595 So freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something—and it is only such love that can know freedom. But, you see, you are not educated for this. You are educated in mathematics, in chemistry, geography, history, and there it ends, because your parents’ only concern is to help you get a good job and be successful in life. If they have money they may send you abroad, but like the rest of the world their whole purpose is that you should be rich and have a respectable position in society; and the higher you climb the more misery you cause for others, because to get there you have to compete, be ruthless. So parents send their children to schools where there is ambition, competition, where there is no love at all, and that is why a society such as ours is continually decaying, in constant strife; and though the politicians, the judges, the so-called nobles of the land talk about peace, it does not mean a thing.
596 be open to this extraordinary movement called life—for
597 You want freedom from the bitter fruits of desire, not from desire itself, and this is a very important thing to understand.
598 our present society is built upon a relationship of acquisitiveness,
599 education must be a process of educating the educator as well as the student.
600 experience—to know the richness of life,
601 To know how to think requires a great deal of penetration, understanding, but to know what to think is comparatively easy.
602 If you are here merely to have confirmation, to be encouraged in your own thinking, then your listening has very little meaning.
603 in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.
604 when you listen to a song, you are listening to the tones and to the silence between the tones, are you not?
605 But it is only through real discontent that one has initiative.
606 Creativeness has its roots in the initiative which comes into being only when there is deep discontent. Don’t be afraid of discontent, but give it nourishment until the spark becomes a flame and you are everlastingly discontented with everything—with your jobs, with your families, with the traditional pursuit of money, position, power—so that you really begin to think, to discover.
607 To find out what is true you must be in revolt against the established order; but the more money your parents have, and the more secure your teachers are in their jobs, the less they want you to revolt.
608 Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.
609 You can be creative only if you are an individual,
610 Creativity is a fragrance of real health. When a person is really healthy and whole, creativity comes naturally to him, the urge to create arises.
611 We have lived the one-dimensional man,
612 Consciousness is being, compassion is feeling, creativity is action.
613 You have to be as meditative as a Buddha, as loving as a Krishna, as creative as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci. You have to be all together, simultaneously.
614 Logic is dry, poetry is alive. Logic cannot dance; it is impossible for logic to dance.
615 These are your three dimensions: being, feeling, action. Action contains creativity, all kinds of creativity—music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, technology. Feeling contains all that is aesthetic—love, beauty. And being contains meditation, awareness, Relaxation is like a flowering, you cannot force it.
616 And all the great teachers, teachers who have awakened to the truth of life, have come to realize that an empty mind gives space to the divine to enter in you.
617 Watch in yourself and see: ninety percent of your energy is wasted in activity. And because of this, when the moment for action comes you don’t have any energy.
618 And if you are afraid of silence that means you have an obsessive, feverish, diseased mind inside, which is continuously asking to be active.
619 Activity is your escape from yourself.
620 Watch, be alert, conscious, and you will come to a miraculous phenomenon: when something drops by itself, on its own accord, it leaves no trace on you.
621 Relaxation is a state. You cannot force it. You simply drop the negativities, the hindrances, and it comes, it bubbles up by itself.
622 Understanding is the only discipline.
623 All that is, is pouring into this moment—it
624 is becoming a passage so the whole can flow through you.
625 The ego is nothing but all the thoughts you have accumulated in the past.
626 “Life is occupied both in perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.” The essence of wisdom is to act in harmony with nature.
627 You have contacted the source.
628 whenever you are in harmony with the natural rhythm of the universe, you are a poet, you are a painter, you are a musician, you are a dancer.
629 But still, deep down there is no actor, no doer; there is only silence. Hence I say creativity is a state of paradox.
630 And when the ego disappears the wound in you disappears; you are healed, you are whole—the ego is your disease.
631 All that you need
632 God starts taking forms—then all is good.
633 When you are creative, desires disappear. When you are creative, ambitions disappear. When He takes in but he never gives out. He goes on accumulating and he has become incapable of sharing.
634 So if you are frustrated, in deep misery, remember: you are creating that misery. And you are creating it by a subtle trick: you are fighting against the whole.
635 Why? Because when you face a hard thing, your ego becomes subtle, sharp; there is a challenge.
636 You can be with the whole in harmony, or you can be in conflict with the whole in disharmony.
637 Try to make something perfect and it will remain imperfect. Do it naturally and it is always perfect. Nature is perfect; effort is imperfect. So whenever you are doing something too much, you are destroying.
638 Now the ego is at stake, you are trying to perform something.
639 Searching for money, what are you really searching? You are searching power, you are searching strength. Searching for prestige, political authority, what are you searching? You are searching power, strength—and strength is all the time available just by the corner.
640 Listening means forgetting yourself completely—only then can you listen.