I i really hope that people also if they read it, realize this is not a book that is meant to overcoddle the millennials or gen z. This is truly believing that this is the alpha infrastructure to building significantly large successful businesses. You got your perspective. I just want to be happy, don't you want to be happy? It is very clear to me, 25 years into my career, that kindness and empathy and patience and humility are actually the foundations, and i think the things that all of us think about as soft skills and emotional intelligence are actually the hard skills that it is far Easier for me to find people who are good at the task or have good math skills than it is to find people who are capable of being the bigger woman or bigger man in the face of pressure or adversity, and so for 20 years or so.

This has been in my subconscious code, like for many of us, gave me a time to reflect, and i immediately went into writing the book on a couple of reasons. One i'm incredibly aware that there's a lot of young people paying attention to my moves are fans of what i do and i thought it would be a disservice if i wasn't incredibly aggressive in my communication on the things that i see as a winning formula, it Becomes double important when i realized that most people don't talk about kindness as the single alpha skill in building a successful empire, and i thought it was a unique take. It's also very nuanced. The reason the subtitle is ingredients is when i was going through my process.

I realized, oh, i never just deploy empathy. I never just deploy patients in every situation. It's actually three or four different traits, often traits that are in a conflict with each other. It's very interesting to be tenacious and ambitious while being patient, and so i i liked the concept of ingredients, because it's like cooking a meal.

I think we all believe that sweet and sour chicken is something that is delicious, but sweet and sour can see a conflict. So i felt that i was the right person at the right time and what has transpired in the last 18 months, because i wrote the book very quickly in the beginning of kovid - obviously takes time for it to come out and things of that nature. Many of us are thinking about things in the business world around the concept of the great resignation and and the concept of people even applying into businesses in the first place in a world of options, i think the importance of being a leader that understands these traits Has even compounded in the last 18 months since i even wrote it which feels serendipitous and exciting for me, and i i really hope that people also if they read it, realize this is not a book that is meant to over cuddle the millennials or gen z. This is truly believing that this is the alpha infrastructure to building significantly large successful businesses.

What i love is this refreshing take on leadership, and i can speak from a woman's perspective that many of us have mimicked this ideal, hard leadership, because that was the architect. That was what was you know: the right leadership and you're taking the narrative into a different direction, and so what would you say to those who would point to entitlements of industries and say well, this is not. You know how they were. Maybe this is not what you described in the world.

Look. I believe that you can have short-term success in many ways and i believe that the world has been very clear to us over the last centuries that fear and negativity are sometimes a fuel for short-term success. You know my argument is that it's not as powerful as brightness and love that that hate is a powerful trait uh, but i just believe it never beats love in the end, and i believe that to be true in business. Of course, there have been people who've been successful, who are not kind leaders that doesn't mean that it should be mimicked, and i would also ask if you have the luxury of interacting with people in their 80s and 90s, and especially those who've had major financial success By being mean and negative, i think you'll find that many 80 90 year olds, who've built their empire with darkness, have incredible levels of regret and actually lived quite unhappy lives, and so my question simply to business people is: is the money worth the unhappiness? You talk? A lot about empathy and kindness - and i think, probably the times that we've gone through the last couple of years with everything that's happening in the world.

We need more kindness and empathy than ever, and the question here is: how do you deploy these attributes without enabling that behavior with that? Well, i think first of all people want everybody else to be kind and empathetic. So my favorite part of this book is accountability. You know everyone has become incredibly good at judging others. The world is addicted to pointing fingers.

I have never seen the world louder about telling everybody else what they're bad at so i think the way to deploy successful kindness and empathy is to actually start with yourself. I also want to remind everybody that deploying kindness when the other person is kind to you is very easy. I challenge the world to start having a conversation with itself of. Does it have the ability to be kind and empathetic in the face of negativity? My leaders are incredibly kind to my employees when everything's going well, i don't need peace time generals.

I need leaders when things are bad and hectic to be able to be the bigger woman and bigger man in that situation, to create a framework of kindness and empathy. So you know for me: it's about the accountability of being able to be that person right now. We are in a world where everyone is so quick to get triggered by bad behavior that they fight fire with fire, which is why so little is being accomplished in society, in politics and in the workforce. And so for me.

I think that we are not spending enough time with our thumbs and we need to stop being addicted to our fingers. One of the things you speak about is self-awareness, which is foundational to any evolution of us as human beings. Tell us a bit about that, and how do we? Where do we start with self-awareness? This is hard. The concept of teaching someone to be more self-aware is something i've been thinking about for a long time.

You know, i think the thing that drives so many of us crazy in the world is interacting with those that struggle with self-awareness. I think one of the hardest things for people to deal with is hypocrisy. We struggle with it and i struggle with it. Um, the exercise in the book that i decided to do was creating frameworks for the people that know you the best to create a safe space for them to be able to tell you the truth, i think one of the reasons people struggle with self-awareness is because They have enablers around them that are allowing them to get away with bad behavior, and so i'm spending a lot of time trying to think about how one puts the people that knows them the best in a safe place to actually give them the critical feedback that Could be the jarror of a journey towards self-awareness? It's a very tough challenge.

I don't know if i have the answer. What i can tell you is no question. The business leaders that i admire the human beings that i admire are the ones who are off the charts in self-awareness. I'm incredibly grateful for the luck of the dna game that i think gave me a lot of it.

I would argue that the only reason i have any level of popularity is because of self-awareness because of the kind of communicator i am and my personality. I would be completely not palpable if i didn't have high levels of self-awareness, because i have some really funny attributes. As a communicator - and so it's a conversation we need more of, i do think that self-awareness has a very interesting relationship with accountability. I think that a lot of people actually know what their shortcomings are, but they try to navigate the world in a way where they are hoping that people don't notice, and it's something i'm thinking a lot about.

One of the things i actually loved in the book is the part where you talk about relationship with tom. Yes - and you hear often people say it's too late for me to start a new business to move my career to mary, whatever that may be so the love for you give us that perspective the rules of the world right now on when you should have your Life figured out when you should be married, have children make money, buy a home and everything else are based completely on when people live to 45 and 55 years old period? The rules of our society have not changed in a very long time of expectation on what we should be doing with our lives. The problem with that is we're living to a hundred the concept that a 25 year old should have everything figured out is laughable. Most 60 year olds - i know - don't have their life figured out.

Why are 25 year olds putting such pressure? I think that we have societally done a very poor job to our youth, which gets me to a place. That's even more emotional for me, which is. We must challenge the notion that so many parents in the world use their kids success as their own self-esteem. What that does, is it pressures children into short term behaviors, around education, occupation and relationships that are often missteps based on very small windows of time? One of the great reasons i struggle with the way that education is sold in our society.

Is we train kids from a very young age that you will be judged every 90 days on your actions? I think it leads to very, very vulnerable behavior that maps to our adulthood. So, yes, i think that way too many people are judging themselves in the short term. Yes, i believe that if you are 63 years old, you still have 30 years to achieve fulfillment and happiness, and i think it's time that we have a totally different conversation around age to the point where in actuality, the fact that we pressure children into starting to Get serious at 22 is actually ludicrous. 22 to 30 should be wild wild high risk high reward behavior, because it's practical, because even if you blow it and nothing goes well, you can start getting serious at 30 35, and so we ask people to now.

You're, a grown-up, get a real job and all this other ludicrous behavior that i think has really hurt society. I think i think a lot of it is predicated on outside affirmation. I think many people start doing things for validation from strangers or their parents or others, and i think we have to have more thoughtful conversations about it. I think it's i, i think it's quite depressing for lack of a better word that there are people that are 40 years old, still have 60 years ahead of them, and they think it's over.

I think that needs to stop so one of the things that surprised me in the book. That's because garyvee, the guy that sits up here is the king of candor. I shoot it straight as an arrow when i'm talking to the world, but when gary vaynerchuk, the executive is sitting across from an employee that he loves and he's scared to tell her or him that they're bad at their job. Because he fears that that's going.

To put them into a spiral of being scared that they're about to be fired is a lesson that has taken me over 20 years to learn when i, when i started really reflecting on why in a world where i really don't care about the money, why would I have any employee that has ever worked with me be unhappy with me, and i had to look in the mirror and realize that the greatest shortcoming of my life, let alone my professional career, has my been my inability to be candorous about my opinions and feelings Which has led to subconscious and then conscious, resentment towards that individual, which has led to conflict which has led to me randomly firing somebody out of left field for them, even though i thought they should have known all along. That was a very difficult thing for me to come to grips with, because my greatest pride as a leader is the elimination of fear when i realized that my lack of candor was actually creating macro fear because nobody actually knew where they stood with me. It was one of the darkest days of my career, but it was also one of the greatest days of my career because it started the process of me, starting to figure it out and me being vulnerable and putting it in my book for everyone to see, especially When my reputation as a content creator is that is my strength was an important step in my own evolution and what happened actually about that space. Reading reading facebook groups of former employees that worked for me saying i was a jerk, it's incredibly challenging for me.

I i genuinely don't like money enough to have people not like me. I don't know what else to tell you it's a complete brain twist for me that this could be, and i finally had to take on accountability, because it was very easy for me to blame. Poor performers, because everybody around them also thought they sucked. So it was easy for me to justify like they were tone: deaf, they weren't self-aware, but the reality is, i never gave them a chance to fix it, because i wasn't willing to give them constructive criticism, and i really so much of my strengths and so much Of this book is really just a story of a boy who idolizes his mom, but his mom also isn't great at candor, and he picked up on that as well.

Who also had a father who was exceptional at candor, but his delivery of that candor was so terrible that he demonized the candor without realizing. It was the vehicle that the candor was being delivered in. That was the problem, not the candor, and so that was a process of self-reflection and experience and for all the kids in here, no matter how great you think you are, and i thought i was super great at 22.. Let me give you a preview.

The gray hairs come with some value so on another another optimism so well. This is where the ingredients come into play. My optimism comes from gratitude when you are grateful for what you have versus envious for what you don't have optimism comes. Second nature.

Life is always going to be challenging, but perspective is something we all need a lot more of. We sit here today in this gorgeous room, while 850 million almost 10 percent of the world does not have access to clean water. 850 million people in this world do not have access to clean water. I have not been able to put the pieces together to be upset about a business deal going awry in a world where 850 million other people don't have access to clean water.

I am dumbfounded by people's inability to be grateful for what they have for me. Optimism is second nature, because i'm completely based in fundamental gratitude - and i wish more people were too and that's why i like talking about gratitude, those attributes, the crispy they are beautifully selected and the way that you put those ingredients together actually are so practical. In terms of how one can use this, this book to evolve and to kind of really it's incredibly important, especially for those in here who don't have a lot of context on me, i've been listening to the first 10 15 minutes of this. Let there be no confusion.

I am a full-pledged operator. I am only grounded in practicality. For 22 of the last years, i have been responsible to make payroll 100 on my own back. Everything i'm talking about right now is the framework for those successes.

Yet i could be very empathetic that somebody listening right now may think that this is a very optimistic delusional ideology. That is why i wrote the book. This is the furthest thing from delusion, but society for over 100 years of business have told all of you that the things i'm talking about almost have no place in business or is a very nice to have. As long as you have all the other skills, i promise you all.

Those other skills are a commodity. The reason most businesses fail is because they're incapable of firing the people that are producing dollars but are destroying morale. You know this is a great question. I believe that we are born with a lot of our traits.

I believe we are then parented and some of the traits go up and down. I believe we are environments of our neighborhood, our country, our culture. When i tell you, the thing that comes least natural to me in the world is candor one on one and for me to see where i am today as a 46 year old man, everybody in this room has the ability to grow in many of these attributes. Most don't want to put in the work most would prefer not to do the things that come hard to them.

Most would hope that it goes unnoticed. Nothing goes unnoticed. People may not tell you, but nothing goes unnoticed. I believe in the human spirit, the world is very black and white to be on this.

One people evolve, people change, people can get stronger at certain things. People can get weaker at certain things, and so i am incredibly optimistic on human's capacity to evolve. What it requires is, first acknowledging its truth, seeing it one of the reasons i produce. The content that i produce is with the hopes that just one when i do this right now, literally when i tell you that i'm just hopeful that one person in this room is listening and something triggers one, because that's profound saying a couple of sentences that shift A person's perspective which allows them to start building towards a better place for themselves and the people they love is a great gift, and i take on that responsibility, and i think everybody in this room, who is fortunate enough to be in a happy place, has a Requirement to start communicating it because we live in a world today, where negativity is incredibly loud and positivity tends to be silent, and i think if you are positive, you have an obligation to your fellow man to communicate it and make it louder.

Yeah these microphones that are lined up here, excite me to no end. I hope that tons of people i hope tons of people are - is that how we're doing it people are going to come up to mike. Please i mean i see a lot of hands line up and there's a lot of mics. Let's line up and do it.

Thank you. Okay. I used to be remember. Uh one day, i was punished by the company being compassionate um, where they came up to me and they're like you're supposed to do your job.

When i was looking after someone that was the day, i decided that i don't want to do this. I was looking at your content all these days, and that was my trigger point and i decided to pursue photography on the weekends, and now it's been four years. I've done that full time freelancer. What i'm trying to do is i want to get most, and i regard myself as a very compassionate person, so much so that sometimes i want to help my friends to get into this space and i'm unable to do that because of their minorities and their responsibilities.

How do you, because i know about general people, explain to yeah, but with your with your friends and families? How do you come to terms that you can't do so much for everyone, because i deploy patients everyone's on a different time schedule? One of the great things that works for me is a lack of expectations. You know i want everybody that i ever talk to to see what i see. I'm also incredibly aware that that is not going to be the case on my timeline. You've got to realize that, even though you're coming from a beautiful place, the energy that you're talking about right now is selfish.

You want to feel the endorphin hit of bringing value to somebody you love, which is a wild concept, to realize that it's selfish all. You can do is stay consistent with your communication. I mean there are certain things that i taught my father that took me 26 years to accomplish. If you love them, you won't stop communicating my question and is so much content and time to everything else.

Thank you. For saying that a couple ways one, i am very passionate about giving back giving back - comes in the form of financial give back, but ironically, i believe the biggest way that i give back is by being intellectually generous by putting out all my content to the world. For free um bringing people value, and so i compromise some of my operational upside on my selfish side, because i allocate more time to put out content to the world comma. I'm incredibly operationally strong and i figured out many years ago that if i just filmed every moment of my life, even though in the beginning, it was going to be very weird that it was a more efficient model for me to create content that i can share To the world, i am one of the most prolific content creators in the world and i never sit down and do content.

I just actually live my life and it's just filmed, and so i think it comes from the ambition to give back and from being actually a good operator cheers extra free books cheers hi gary. How are you uh? My name is ben and i have a simple question for you, which tricks me a lot like. Is it better to sit to get in the car and start driving or knowing where to go? That's a really fun question. I believe the answer is very individual.

I believe, if you're the kind of person that has spent too much time thinking about where to go, then it's time to get in the car and start driving. I believe that if you're a person that continues to drive - and you have no idea where you're going that it's time to pull over and give some thought to think about where you're going you.