Heretics must believe. More than anyone else in an organization, it's the person who's challenging the status quo, the one who is daring to be great, who is truly present and not just punching a clock who must have confidence in her beliefs. Can you imagine Steve Jobs showing up for the paycheck? It's nice to get paid. It's essential to believe.

Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about "let's see" and "try." If there's no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated.

Everything gets easier when you walk away from the hubris of everyone. Your work is not for everyone. It's only for those who signed up for the journey.

No one has a transparent view of the world. In fact, we all carry around a personal worldview—the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world.

Commit to the frightening work of flying blind.

What we're seeing is that fundamentalism really has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with an outlook, regardless what your religion is.

Seeing clearly means that you're smart enough to know when a project is doomed, or brave enough to persevere when your colleagues are fleeing for the hills. Abandoning your worldview in order to try on someone else's is the first step in being able to see things as they are.

only a tiny portion of the audience is looking for the brand-new thing. Most people are waiting for the tested, the authenticated, and the proven.

The factory is a dead end and so is compliance. More obedience will not make us better. That's why graceful is in such demand.

The connected economy of ideas demands that we contribute initiative. And yet we resist, because our lizard brain, the one that lives in fear, relentlessly exaggerates the cost of being wrong.

Sooner or later, each of us becomes (for a while) the kind of person who believes in the reptile people that control the earth. We're seeking our own little pocket of uniqueness.

It's easy to get caught up in the foibles of a corporate culture and the systems that have been built over time, but they have nothing at all to do with the faith that built the system in the first place.