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.

Based on who they are and what they want and what they know, everyone is right. Every time.

Try not to get caught up in the echo chamber. That is probably the toughest thing when you are trying to break out and do something original.

While it's calming to be reassured, it never lasts. As soon as we hear the words, the feeling begins to fade away. There's never enough reassurance to make up for a lack of commitment to the practice. We have no choice other than to trust ourselves enough to lead the way.

The key piece of leverage was this promise: follow these instructions and you don't have to think. Do your job and you don't have to be responsible for decisions. Most of all, you don't have to bring your genius to work.

This desire for external approval and authority directly undermines your ability to trust yourself, because you've handed this trust over to an institution instead. Now, more and more of us are seeing that it's a fraud. The institutions have no magical powers, as they're regularly proved wrong in their ability to select, to mold, and to amplify human beings who care enough to make change happen.

A curious person embraces the tension between his religion and something new, wrestles with it and through it, and then decides whether to embrace the new idea or reject it.