This principle comes from a powerful Marine Corps tradition where leaders demonstrate through actions, not words, that they prioritize their people's needs above their own.
This principle reveals that:
<ul>
<li>Leadership is a responsibility, not a privilege</li>
<li>Authority alone doesn't make someone a leader</li>
<li>True leadership involves sacrifice and service</li>
<li>Trust is built through consistent demonstrations of placing others first</li>
</ul>
This concept stands in stark contrast to corporate cultures where executives prioritize their own comfort, compensation, and security while expecting sacrifice from those below them.

The Marine Corps Way

The Circle of Safety is an invisible boundary that great leaders create within their organizations. Inside this circle, team members feel protected from external threats, allowing them to:<ul><li>Focus on opportunities rather than dangers</li><li>Collaborate instead of competing internally</li><li>Speak honestly without fear of reprisal</li><li>Take calculated risks without fear of punishment</li><li>Trust each other enough to ask for and offer help</li></ul>When the Circle of Safety is strong, energy is directed toward external challenges rather than internal politics. This concept is based on how our brains evolved during prehistoric times, when belonging to a tribe meant survival.

The Circle of Safety

Leadership is not about being in charge. Leadership is about taking care of those in your charge.

Four primary chemicals drive our workplace behavior:<ol><li>Endorphins: Mask pain, enabling persistence (the runner's high)</li><li>Dopamine: Reward achievement and completion (the got it done feeling)</li><li>Serotonin: Released when we feel respected or valued by others</li><li>Oxytocin: Generated through trust and connection (the bonding chemical)</li></ol>The first two drive individual achievement, while the second two foster cooperation. Most organizations focus only on achievement chemicals, but exceptional cultures balance all four, emphasizing the social chemicals that build lasting commitment.

The Chemistry of Leadership

Great leaders serve as buffers against external threats, providing cover that allows their teams to focus on work without worry. This means:
<ul>
<li>Absorbing pressure from above, not passing it down</li>
<li>Taking responsibility for failures, giving credit for successes</li>
<li>Protecting people during difficult times, even at personal cost</li>
<li>Filtering non-essential demands and distractions</li>
</ul>
This protection creates psychological safety—the primary characteristic of high-performing teams. When people feel protected, they're willing to experiment, speak up, and take appropriate risks.

Leaders Provide Cover

The Responsibility Paradox describes the balanced relationship between a leader's responsibility and an individual's responsibility:
<ul>
<li>Leaders are responsible for the people (creating environments for success)</li>
<li>People are responsible for the results (performance and outcomes)</li>
</ul>
When this balance exists, organizations thrive. Two common breakdowns occur:
<ol>
<li>Leaders abdicate responsibility for people while demanding results</li>
<li>Leaders take over responsibility for results through micromanagement</li>
</ol>
Great leadership requires creating conditions for success, then trusting people to deliver while maintaining accountability. This balance fosters both safety and excellence.

The Responsibility Paradox

Empathy—the ability to understand and share the feelings of another—is not just a nice-to-have skill but a fundamental requirement of effective leadership. Sinek argues that:
<ul>
<li>Leadership begins with understanding the emotional needs of those we lead</li>
<li>The modern corporate environment often rewards sociopathic behavior that ignores human needs</li>
<li>Empathy requires proximity and face-to-face interaction, which technology and hierarchy often reduce</li>
<li>Truly understanding your people means knowing their challenges, aspirations, and circumstances</li>
</ul>
The most effective leaders actively work to counter the abstraction of people into numbers, deliberately spending time with those they lead to maintain their empathic connection.

Empathy Matters

A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.

Many modern workplaces create conditions that trigger our body's stress response, flooding our systems with cortisol and adrenaline. While these chemicals are designed for short-term threats, corporate cultures often create chronic stress through:<ul><li>Job insecurity and unpredictable layoffs</li><li>Arbitrary performance metrics and constant evaluation</li><li>Internal competition for resources and recognition</li><li>Lack of control over one's work environment</li><li>Cultures of fear and blame</li></ul>The biological impact of sustained cortisol exposure includes:<ul><li>Suppressed immune function</li><li>Cardiovascular damage</li><li>Impaired cognitive performance</li><li>Depression and anxiety</li><li>Reduced creativity and collaboration</li></ul>Leaders must recognize when their decisions and cultural norms are creating unnecessary cortisol responses in their organizations.

Cortisol Culture

The abstraction of people into numbers creates dangerous leadership blind spots. When decisions are made at a distance:<ul><li>Empathy diminishes as psychological distance increases</li><li>Harmful choices become emotionally easier (spreadsheet thinking)</li><li>The same mechanism that enables warfare enables harmful corporate actions</li></ul>Effective leaders counteract this by regularly interacting with people at all levels, hearing impact stories, and creating feedback loops that include human outcomes, not just numbers.

Abstraction Kills Empathy

The number of rules in an organization is inversely proportional to its cultural strength. Weak cultures rely on extensive rules because they lack shared values and trust.Strong cultures, by contrast:<ul><li>Establish clear values that guide decisions</li><li>Hire people who align with these values</li><li>Trust people to use good judgment</li><li>Focus on principles over prescriptive rules</li></ul>This explains why successful companies often have surprisingly few formal policies, while struggling organizations add rules that never fix their underlying cultural issues.

Weak Cultures Need Rules

The core message of this leadership concept is that humans perform best when they feel they belong to a group that values them. This sense of belonging:<ul><li>Activates positive neurochemicals that enhance cooperation</li><li>Reduces stress and its damaging effects</li><li>Enables focus on collective goals rather than self-protection</li><li>Creates environments where people willingly contribute their best</li></ul>The simple act of leaders literally eating last symbolizes putting people's needs first—creating psychological safety that unleashes human potential.

Belonging Drives Performance

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

People perform best when they understand why their work matters. Great leaders:<ul><li>Articulate purpose beyond profit</li><li>Help each person see how their role contributes</li><li>Connect daily tasks to their impact on customers</li><li>Share stories that make contributions emotionally resonant</li></ul>Research shows meaning correlates more strongly with engagement and performance than compensation. Leaders who neglect purpose miss their most powerful motivational tool.

The Why of Work

Ever wonder why some teams would run through walls for their boss while others can barely get through the day? Simon Sinek reveals the biology and anthropology behind great leadership. Turns out, when leaders create safety instead of fear, our bodies literally reward us with the same chemicals that make us fall in love. It's not about perks or personality—it's about creating environments where people can truly thrive.

Finally in paperback: the New York Times bestseller by the acclaimed, bestselling author of Start With Why and Together is Better. Now with an expanded chapter and appendix on leading millennials, based on Simon Sinek's viral video "Millenials in the workplace" (150+ million views). Imagine a world where almost everyone wakes up inspired to go to work, feels trusted and valued during the day, then returns home feeling fulfilled. This is not a crazy, idealized notion. Today, in many successful organizations, great leaders create environments in which people naturally work together to do remarkable things. In his work with organizations around the world, Simon Sinek noticed that some teams trust each other so deeply that they would literally put their lives on the line for each other. Other teams, no matter what incentives are offered, are doomed to infighting, fragmentation and failure. Why? The answer became clear during a conversation with a Marine Corps general. "Officers eat last," he said. Sinek watched as the most junior Marines ate first while the most senior Marines took their place at the back of the line. What's symbolic in the chow hall is deadly serious on the battlefield: Great leaders sacrifice their own comfort--even their own survival--for the good of those in their care.      Too many workplaces are driven by cynicism, paranoia, and self-interest. But the best ones foster trust and cooperation because their leaders build what Sinek calls a "Circle of Safety" that separates the security inside the team from the challenges outside. Sinek illustrates his ideas with fascinating true stories that range from the military to big business, from government to investment banking.

Simon Oliver Sinek is a British-born American author and inspirational speaker. He is the author of five books, including Start With Why and The Infinite Game.

Simon Sinek

Leaders Eat Last

We’re overwhelmed by all the things we have on our plates, all the interruptions and messages and emails, all the things online and on social media, all the news, and chaos of the world, and all the things going on in our relationships. It’s a lot! We can celebrate the abundance of our lives, but often we bemoan it.The problem isn’t the abundance, but our fear and anxiety about all of it. Actually, for most of us, the fear is that we’ll let people down. We’ll drop one of the many balls we have in the air and let people down, or worse yet, we’ll drop them all and we’ll be exposed as inadequate!

Why We Feel Overwhelmed

We often have too many commitments.  We say Yes to too many things, partly out of optimism, but also because we are uncomfortable saying No to people. When your boss, spouse, child or parent asks you to do something, there is an expectation that you’ll say Yes. The idea of saying No to them and protecting a boundary can bring up a lot of fear of letting that person down or upsetting them. This plays out even with people who are not as central to us: coworkers, neighbors, friends. We don’t want to say No to them, out of fear of letting them down or upsetting them, so we say Yes. This creates a <warningtag>Huge Pile of Things we can’t do.</warningtag>

Fears That Drive Our Overwhelm

<ul><li>Soothing the Fear: The first practice is simply noticing your fear and anxiety in all of the above situations, and soothing them. Can you notice how it feels in your body?</li><li>One Breath at a Time: take one thing from the Huge Pile and focus completely on it. One at a time. That’s all we can do. It’s so simple.</li><li>Protecting Your Time & Commitments:  start saying No more. A Sacred No, that honors our boundaries and honors that we want to be a Hell Yes to things. </li></ul>

The Simplicity Practice

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

mindfulness

Mindfulness

problemsolving

Problem Solving

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

When You're Overwhelmed, Simplify

<ul><li>Boundaries are statements that make you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships. They can be either behaviors or statements</li><li>Some people think of boundaries as saying no or cutting people off, but there are 1,000 other boundaries we can set before cutting someone off.</li><li>There's a lot of space that you can give both yourself and the other person when you're putting in a boundary. In general, we feel best when people do as we do.</li><li>It's important to acknowledge that boundaries are preferences. They are not a rule, they are just what we choose to do.</li></ul>

On Boundaries

When people habitually disrespect our boundaries, we have to try something different.A solution to this is to not tell this person anything that's secret because they've demonstrated that they cannot respect that boundary.

Disrespecting boundaries

<ul><li>Especially when you're putting up a boundary with someone that you love and that you really care for, you're changing the way that something's going to go. You're changing a dynamic.</li><li>You have to grieve the loss of who you thought that person could be for you and reconstruct what's possible with the person that you actually have.</li><li>Usually, when a person isn't respecting your boundaries it's because they can't. It is really on us to change the way in which we engage.</li></ul>

Boundaries and Relationships

Relationships aren’t always easy to preserve. Boundaries can help.

communication

Communication

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

How to set an effective boundary

To say that our plates are full would be an understatement. The reality of contemporary living requires our attention and efforts to be divided between demanding jobs, essential familial caregiving, replenishing social gatherings, and fulfilling political and community engagements — not to mention any hobbies or creative endeavours. According to <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/05/how-americans-feel-about-the-satisfactions-and-stresses-of-modern-life/">Pew Research Center surveys</a>, 60 percent of adults said they were sometimes too busy to enjoy life. Busy-ness, unsurprisingly, intensifies once you have kids: 74 percent of parents with children under the age of 18 reported being too busy to enjoy life.

Too Busy To Live

The myth of perfectionism keeps many in a cycle of feeding into external pressures: the illusion of “having it all,” gleaning self-worth from the validation of others. Of course, it is worthy and noble to be passionate about people and causes you care about. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of attempting too much in the pursuit of trying to have it all.Instead of being everything to everyone and everything all the time, what would life look like if you cared a little less? What if we aim for good enough?

Aiming For Perfection, Always

Much of our desire to take on extra tasks and responsibilities comes from a sense of obligation to others, experts agree, but even that can be self-directed. Seventy-five percent of the time, the guilt is coming from inside the house. You are making it up in your own head.Before making a decision about whether to care a little less or to turn down a favor that’s asked of you, you need to ask yourself whether saying no would have a negative effect or comes from a mean-spirited place

Manage Your Personal Expectations

Caring less doesn’t mean negligence. To care less about inconsequential matters, you need to zero in on what is worth caring for. Consider taking stock of to-do list items and obligations and asking if these responsibilities make your day feel more spacious or more confined. Does it nourish your sense of creativity? Is it the best use of your time and talent? Does it make you feel exhausted? Do you want to spend your time and energy on this? If you feel compelled to care about something out of fear or wanting to be accepted by others, it may not be worth placing emphasis on it.

Find Your Priorities

Just because you excel at something — be it creating detailed spreadsheets or making complicated desserts for dinner parties — doesn’t mean you have to agree to it every time you’re asked or volunteer to do it to impress others.Being subtly pressured to do something you are good at is a common mistake as we don't want to disappoint people. The truth is you need to let people know you are not okay with something.

Don't Be A McD Burger

In the thick of the daily grind, minute conflicts can often get blown out of proportion: Your kid didn’t do the dishes when you asked, you were 10 minutes late to a doctor’s appointment, a friend forgot she was supposed to bring snacks to game night. People are quick to ascribe meaning to these ordinary events — jumping to conclusions and thinking a friend is inconsiderate, say, by not answering your phone call in the middle of a workday. If you pause and take a step back, none of these things actually have a profound bearing on your life.

Zoom Out

Many people’s values and self-worth are intrinsically tied to their jobs. But if you zoom out and consider who you are outside of your job, you may realize other areas of life where you might be lacking, like spending quality time with family or practising art or music — parts of life you decided you want to prioritize.When you’re constantly stressed and in a fight-or-flight state of mind, finding this perspective is difficult.You need to prioritize rest and centring yourself, which looks different for everyone: meditation, taking a walk, no email before bed.

We Make Our Job Everything

Once you’ve defined what is and isn’t worth your time, you’ve got to set, and express, boundaries. Boundary-setting can seem like an amorphous buzzword, but it isn’t as simple as learning how to say no. Boundary-setting is outlining what you need and what is important to you and protecting those desires. This can be as simple as writing a list of things that make you happy (reading, going to the gym, cooking, a life with minimal stress), allow you to earn a living (your job), and other areas of importance (friends, family, getting a good night’s sleep).

Set Boundaries

If we really sit down and think about it for five minutes, they’re going to realize the biggest, unwanted drain on their time, energy, and money, It could be a relationship in our life — it could be a parent, it could be a friend, someone we are dating — and that the boundary that we need to set to preserve our time, energy, money, sanity, mental health, is to fence that person outside of all of that basically.Time is finite and shouldn’t be dictated by others or how you believe others perceive you. Caring a little less means you’re saving time and energy for the things that matter

Take Back Your Time

"Don’t sweat the small stuff" is actually great advice.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

The case for caring less

More and more companies are offering their employees the option to “work from anywhere,” whether in their home office, in another state, or even halfway around the globe. A growing group of remote professionals are taking the “anywhere” in work-from-anywhere to new lengths. These “digital nomads” leverage their remote jobs to allow them to live in tourist hotspots or tropical destinations for months at a time. Others engage in months-long “work-cations,” combining periods of working and tourism.

Working From The Beach

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries — especially those with significant tourism sectors suffering from reductions in global travel — began offering specific visas to these digital nomads. It’s abundantly clear that digital nomads, and remote workers in general, can be a boon to any economy— spending money, facilitating collaboration and spurring innovation — a win-win for both the digital nomads and the economies where they choose to live and work.

The Power Of Remote Workers

Work-from-anywhere, where workers enjoy the flexibility to live in a geography of their choice, is <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/11/our-work-from-anywhere-future">here to stay</a>, and countries around the world are in a race to attract the growing class of international remote workers known as “digital nomads.”

The Revolution Of Working From Anywhere

These visas act as a temporary fix for immigration policy woes and visa delays around the world.  Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/business/dealbook/h1b-visas-us-jobs.html">knowledge workers faced long wait times for visas</a>, rising rejection rates, and great uncertainty. The pandemic <a href="https://www.rollcall.com/2021/12/22/limited-operations-at-us-consulates-keep-visa-holders-on-edge/">compounded these issues</a>, adding travel restrictions from Covid-19 hotspots, embassy closures overseas, and even longer processing times for all visa types.A digital nomad visa provides short-term access to countries around the world. The geographic mobility of digital nomads could spur business travel in the short to medium term.

Benefits Of Digital Nomad Visas: Fixing The COVID Drought

Digital nomads could act as catalysts for knowledge and resource flows between regions, benefiting themselves, their organizations, and their host countries. A longstanding <a href="https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=327154&view=publications">research</a> on geographic mobility and innovation has shown that short-term travel and even short periods of co-location with geographically distant colleagues <a href="https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=52163">can help workers access information and resources</a> that <a href="https://academic.oup.com/joeg/article-abstract/16/3/585/2364677">can help grow new ideas and projects</a>, which benefits both the mobile worker and their organizations.

The Catalyst For Knowledge Sharing

Local inventors engage in “knowledge recombination” by combining their existing knowledge to knowledge transferred by migrants. A new research showed that migrant inventors not only “import” knowledge from home countries, which translates into more patenting; the migrant inventors actually boost patenting in the same technologies their home countries specialize in. As a result, a country is likely to have migrants as inventors of the first-ever bulk of patents in any new technology.

Knowledge Sharing

Digital nomads might play a key role in fostering entrepreneurship and the creation of technology clusters around the world. Foreign entrepreneurs congregating in a shared space for even a few months can spur new connections and new enterprises.It is clear that digital nomads, and remote workers in general, can be a boon to any economy — spending money, facilitating collaboration and spurring innovation.

The Bottom Line

More and more companies are offering their employees the option to “work from anywhere,” whether in their home office, in another state, or even halfway around the globe. A growing group of remote professionals are taking the “anywhere” in work-from-anywhere to new lengths. These “digital nomads” leverage their remote jobs to allow them to live in tourist hotspots or tropical destinations for months at a time. Others engage in months-long “work-cations,” combining periods of working and tourism. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries — especially those with significant tourism sectors suffering from reductions in global travel — began offering specific visas to these digital nomads. It’s abundantly clear that digital nomads, and remote workers in general, can be a boon to any economy— spending money, facilitating collaboration and spurring innovation — a win-win for both the digital nomads and the economies where they choose to live and work.

remotework

Remote Work

travel

Travel

How “Digital Nomad” Visas Can Boost Local Economies

The biggest economic stories of the last two years were a pandemic no one saw coming.
It always works like that. The biggest risk is what you don’t see coming. The fact that you’re not prepared for it is what makes it so risky.

The Biggest Risk Is What You Don't Expect

Some people save money for a down payment on a house, a new car, or retirement. That’s great, of course. But saving does not require a goal of purchasing something specific.You can save just for saving’s sake. And indeed you should. Everyone should.Only saving for a specific goal makes sense in a predictable world. But ours isn’t. Saving is a hedge against life’s inevitable ability to surprise the hell out of you at the worst possible moment.

The Biggest Lesson: You Don’t Need a Reason to Save

Everyone knows the tangible stuff money buys. The intangible stuff is harder to wrap your head around, so it tends to go unnoticed.But the intangible benefits of money can be far more valuable than the tangible things that are obvious targets of our savings.Savings without a spending goal gives you options and flexibility — the ability to wait and the opportunity to pounce. It gives you time to think, and lets you change course on your own terms.Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself.

Money Buys The Intangible

Saving without a spending goal has many benefits, including control over your time.

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

Why you don’t need a reason to save

When communication technology makes a new thing (like responding on the go) possible, doing that thing can be a way for people to signal how dedicated they are as workers or family members—and, crucially, not doing that thing can suggest that they aren’t dedicated enough. Now when people feel they haven’t responded sufficiently quickly, they think they owe their correspondent an apology. Example: When Blackberry phones became popular, people thought it was a kind of superpower to respond to texts and email messages on the go.

The Spiral Of Expectations

With the mass adoption of email and smartphones, is that the “acceptable” window of response time has gotten much smaller. Someone could conceivably apologize for their delay when responding in the afternoon to an email sent that morning.All of these sorries raise the question of whether any harm is actually done when someone commits the sin of unavailability.

The Sin Of Not Being Available Right Away

Even if being responsive at all hours has no bearing on an employee’s actual productivity, many bosses lazily use it as a proxy for gauging workers’ value.

Wrong Expectations At Work

A delayed response can cause genuine problems too. If your partner texts you “I love you,” responding two days later is not a good idea. In personal communications, a lack of a speedy response risks signalling a lack of care. After all, your phone was right there.

A Genuine Problem

The most common way for people to resolve the tension between the pressure of speediness and the reality of busyness is to start messages with four words: Sorry for my delay. It is an innocuous, polite gesture. But, having multiple obligations and priorities means that we are, all of us, in a perpetual state of delay on something, and apologizing for that fact feels like having to apologize for your standard mode of being.

Apologizing For Everything

Even if “Sorry for my delay” is a social nicety, performing remorse can have real effects. Repeating it can make us feel like we’re perpetually behind, and worse, it models an unreasonable standard of responsiveness for the person we’re (allegedly) slow in writing back to.

Repeated Mistakes Out Of Nothing

Instead of 'Sorry for the Delay' or 'Thank you for your patience', there is another alternative.If a message will take you a while to respond to, you could first reply with a quick note saying when you plan to respond fully. This can reduce uncertainty and stress on the part of the sender, but the downside is that … well, you’d still have to respond relatively quickly to tell them you’ll respond more thoroughly later.

The Right Approach

More than a graceful email response, is a more humane culture of work and communication. Technology, for instance, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/economist-email-less-painful/518934/">could be designed</a> to that end. Apple’s latest mobile operating system is a start: When people turn on “Focus” mode, others can see in the Messages app that they aren’t receiving notifications. The law can help too. In France, a legal “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/world/europe/france-work-email.html">right to disconnect</a>” cuts down on after-hours work emails.

career

Career

timemanagement

Time Management

What If We Just Stopped Being So Available?

Each of us is occasionally overwhelmed by a multitude of competing desires: pursue job offer A or B? Start a new relationship or stay single? Sign up to run a marathon, or enjoy not getting up early to train? 
But life is full of marathons, and they don’t necessarily involve running. It’s good to know which desires to pursue and which ones to leave behind – to know which marathons are worth running. In this Guide, I aim to show you how.

How to know what you really want

It’s true that when people strongly desire something, such as a new shirt, they might feel like they ‘need’ it – but they don’t need it in the same way that they need water or food. Their survival isn’t at stake.
Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not.

Desires are fundamentally different from needs

Your intellectual appetites might include knowing the answer to a mathematics problem; the satisfaction of receiving a text from someone you have a crush on; or getting a coveted job offer. 
These things won’t necessarily cause physical pleasure. They might spill over into physical enjoyment, but they are not dependent on it. Rather, the pleasure is primarily intellectual.

Intellectual pleasure

French social theorist René Girard realised one peculiar feature of desire: ‘We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths,’ he said, ‘but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.’ Girard noted that desire is not, as we often imagine it, something that we ourselves fully control. It is not something that we can generate or manufacture on our own. It is largely the product of a social process.Our desires are mimetic, they don’t come from within; rather, we mimic what other people want.

Desire is a social process – it is mimetic

When I think about the lifestyle that I would most like to have, who do I feel most embodies it?
 In reality, this person almost certainly does not live the lifestyle you imagine them to have, but it’s still good to identify those you pay attention to the most when you’re thinking about the kind of life you want.

Influence: Identify the people influencing what you want

Is there anyone I would not like to see succeed? 
Are there certain people whose achievements make me uncomfortable or self-conscious? This is the first clue that they might be a ‘negative model of desire’ – ie, someone you are constantly measuring yourself against.

Influence: The question of success

It’s useful to recognise what kind of models are influencing you. Girard identified two main types: those inside your world, and those outside it.Models inside your world (‘internal’ models of desire) are the people you might really come into contact with: friends, family, co-workers, or really anyone you can actually interact with in some way – it could be the person who cuts your hair, for instance. These are people whose desires are in some sense intertwined with your own – they can affect your desires, and you can in turn affect theirs.

Categorise your models as internal and external

Online or offline, the closer someone seems to being like you, the more you can relate to them – and the more you are likely to pay attention to what they want. Who are most people more jealous of?
Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world? Or the colleague who has a similar education to you, and a similar job and works roughly the same hours, but who makes an extra $5,000 a year? For almost everyone, it’s the second person. The difference between the internal and the external mediation of desire explains why.

The comparisons

Advertisements also model desires to us, obviously, but notice how they usually work: the companies serving the ads typically show you not the thing itself, but other people wanting the thing. Advertisers play right into our mimetic nature.
Be aware that internal models lead to more volatility of desire in your life because the world of internal models is highly reflexive: you can affect one another’s desires, which isn’t possible in the world of external models.

Advertisements stoking desire

Because desire is mimetic, people are naturally drawn to want what others want. Two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash. This means that mimetic desire often leads people into unnecessary competition and rivalry with one another in an infernal game of status anxiety. 
Mimetic desire is why a class of students can enter a university with very different ideas of what they want to do when they graduate yet converge on a much smaller set of opportunities – which they mimetically reinforce in one another – by the time they graduate.

Beware of becoming obsessively focused on what your neighbours have or want

Be aware that your desires can become hijacked through this process of mimetic attraction. It’s easy to become obsessively focused on what your neighbours have or want, rather than on your immediate responsibilities and relationship commitments. 
We humans are social creatures who know others so that we can also know ourselves, and that’s a good thing – but, if we’re not careful, we can become excessively concerned with others.

Hijacking Of Desires

As well as identifying the specific models influencing your desires, it is also helpful to consider whether you have become embedded in a particular system of desire. For example, consider the chef Sébastien Bras, owner of Le Suquet restaurant in Laguiole, France, who had three Michelin stars – the highest culinary distinction for a French restaurant – for a full 18 years. Until 2018. That year, he took the unprecedented step of asking the Michelin Guide to stop rating his restaurant and never come back.

Map out the systems of desire in your life

Less extreme mimetic desires might include the desire to go to a specific university because all your friends want to go there. Yet the desire could also have something to do with the school’s academic reputation. Desires can have many different influences, some mimetic and some non-mimetic. The key is to understand the forces at work, and to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Take ownership of your desires

To be anti-mimetic is to be free from the unintentional following of desires without knowing where they came from; it’s freedom from the herd mentality; freedom from the ‘default’ mode that causes us to pursue things without examining why.It’s possible to develop anti-mimetic machinery in your guts – things that have traditionally been called virtues, or habits of being, such as prudence, fortitude, courage and honesty – that keep you grounded in something deeper even while the mimetic waters swirl around you

Live an anti-mimetic life

The restlessness of desire is not necessarily a bad thing – it’s what pushes people to seek more – but a persistent feeling of restlessness could be a sign that the desires you are chasing lack the power to satisfy.

Restlessness 

<ul><li>Desires are fundamentally different from needs. </li><li>Desire is a social process – it’s mimetic. Our desires don’t come from within; rather, we mimic what other people want.</li><li>Identify the people or ‘models’ influencing what you want. </li><li>Categorise these models. Find out who is influencing you from within your world, and who is influencing you from the outside.</li><li>Beware of becoming obsessively focused on what your neighbours have or want.</li><li>Map out the systems of desire in your life. </li><li>Take ownership of your desires. </li><li>Live an anti-mimetic life.</li></ul>

Key points – How to know what you really want

From career choices to new purchases, use René Girard’s mimetic theory to resist the herd and forge your own path in life

productivity

Productivity

John Doerr's Measure What Matters is about the importance of setting clear goals and using metrics to back them up. Doerr argues that metrics-driven OKRs (objectives and key results) have a considerable impact. In contrast, Jerry Muller's The Tyranny of Metrics shows that measuring everything destroys our schools, hospitals, police and politics. When metrics is the most important, everyone will try to "game" the numbers. E.g., schools teach to the test rather than to educate.

The use of metrics

Organisations often waste time by pursuing conflicting goals. OKRs helps to focus united efforts as it is easy to evaluate progress when goals are tied to measurable results. However, it can be a problem when goal-setting becomes an obsession. Common pitfalls to avoid:<ul><li>Do not tie metrics to compensation.</li><li>If your metrics measure the wrong thing, be open to change it.</li><li>When quality and quantity matter, add more metrics.</li></ul>

A case for metrics

One criticism of metrics is the obsession with numbers leaves no space for qualitative assessment. Numbers present a deceptive quality of objectivity. We tend to think of data as representing objective truth, but it does not always deserve the authority we give it.<ul><li>Tracking metrics can take away from the actual work.</li><li>When pressured to reach specific numbers, people will game the system.</li><li>Tying metrics to rewards and punishments destroys intrinsic motivation.</li></ul>

The tyranny of metrics

<ul><li>We can apply metrics to different domains. Muller's critiques focus mainly on not-for-profits, where Doerr directs his attention to big business (such as tech).</li><li>Metrics inspire effort but also encourage corruption. Therefore, each metric should be considered in light of trade-offs.</li><li>Using metrics and goals can increase the effectiveness of a healthy company, but the same strategy can damage people in an unhealthy organisation.</li></ul>

Consider both sides of metrics

Hyped by Silicon Valley, data-driven is the new black. Metrics allow us to quantify and solve every problem. But that’s not the whole story.

strategy

Strategy

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Metrics: Useful or Evil? | Scott H Young

Compounding is the greatest mathematical discovery of all time.

“Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.”

Kaizen, which means continuous improvement in Japanese was originally developed by Depression-Era management gurus in the US. The Japanese embraced the idea of improving and thriving in small steps, as opposed to working on a BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal).
The long, hard process looks difficult but is actually easy if we just focus on the small step that needs to be taken today, and do that consistently.

The Small Steps That Change Your Life

<ul>
<li>We are never done improving ourselves. We need to do certain things daily to achieve and maintain our success. The first steps are not easy, but taking small actions is progress, while not taking any action isn’t.</li>
<li>Kaizen is about the 1 percent improvement that we can focus on, and those daily 1 percent improvements compound over time. </li>
<li>Initially the improvements may not be noticeable, but in a span of months or years, the breakthrough improvements will start to be visible.</li>
</ul>

Self-Improvement: 1 Percent Daily

Setting a goal is easy, just like marking a date on the calendar. The real challenge is always the willingness to accept what we need to do daily to achieve those goals.
We need to design a system that has to be practiced daily, as the commitment to a process provides the compound effect. Example: Learning should not be limited to college, but should be a lifelong system imbibed in your pursuit of knowledge, enriching your life and making you a better person.

Systems Instead Of Goals

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.”

When we improve a little on a daily basis, big things occur over time. We need to stop focusing on radical, sudden improvements, as quick-fixes aren’t lasting anyway. 
Consistent and sustainable gains are only achieved by small, incremental improvements on a daily basis.

Little Things Into Big Things

In a perfect world, by this time of the year, you would be halfway through your 2017 goals, right? Unfortunately, not many people can commit to a course ...

Leaders Eat Last

When You're Overwhelmed, Simplify

How to set an effective boundary

The case for caring less

How “Digital Nomad” Visas Can Boost Local Economies

Preston