Live Hard: From Smart Risks to Innovation, to Success

Accelerating improvement through self-reflection emphasizes open feedback, coaching, lifelong learning, and goal orientation, using quiet time and who, what, why, where, and when questions to gain insights and guide action.

Find your purpose by aligning who you are with what you aim to achieve, using your values, skills, and personality to ignite lasting passion for your work.

Choose positivity in every situation, train a routine to manage negativity, and refocus on learning and effort to strengthen perspective, optimism, and resilience.

Shake up deeply ingrained routines to wake your brain into conscious thinking, boosting creativity, focus, and thoughtful decision making, while prioritizing diet, exercise, and continuous learning.

Embrace failure as a learning catalyst by trying, learning, and adapting; make your mark on your terms, fixing errors, making amends, and advancing through wiser risk-taking.

Overcome your fear of failure by shifting beliefs and embracing smart risks. Start with small, deliberate experiments to expand your comfort zone and pursue a more engaged life.

Identify sacred cows in work and life, challenge outdated routines, and design a plan to replace them with better practices, inspired by the Fosbury flop story.

Leverage your social capital to advocate for change by building coalitions, aligning with strategy, leading with emotion, and navigating system rules inside and outside the organization.

Defending your values under pressure, this lecture guides you to hesitate before complying, ask for clarification, seek policy context, request modifications, or refuse while weighing risks.

Learn to handle hell gigs and haters in in-person settings by staying calm, avoiding escalation, redirecting positively, and reflecting afterward to improve future responses.

Make diversity an essential asset driving high performance through strong communication across the organization. Start by owning your experiences and apply a single diversity makeover to build momentum.

Use a competency plus hiring approach, select candidates with half or more model overlap, and use active interviews to reveal creativity, innovation, and evidence-based track records.

Rethink how organizations attract diverse, younger talent, including millennials and Gen Z, by clarifying purpose, aligning goals with outcomes, and shifting toward team accountability, flexibility, and meaningful work.

Recognize leadership as a profession and advocate credentialing by hiring for evidence of developing others, testing capacity to lead, and holding leaders accountable through team feedback and top-level tone.

Commit to no excuses, own your growth, pick one target to face a fear or sacred cow, and grow with a buddy system.