4 Ways You’re Better Than a Robot

“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water—yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”

Those words weren’t uttered by some neo-luddite about the scary pace of computation in the digital age. They were said recently by Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, investor in Deepmind (an AI company) and, in some circles, proclaimed as the next Steve Jobs. When Musk and other high-thinkers, like Bill Gates and renowned Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, propose similar doomsday warnings about artificial intelligence, it creates a big, global debate.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Walter Frick writes about the rise of the machine and its impact on business and our jobs. He offers an alternate perspective, rejecting the “obsession of job-eliminating technology in favor of a focus on complementarity.”

If it is about complementarity, then what skills do we need to build to thrive alongside computers in the age of algorithms?

For starters, you can’t just go and “turn on” algorithms at a company; deploying algorithms at scale requires a strong technical foundation, including the ability to integrate, maintain and identify what can be done with mounds and mounds of data. Put simply, automated decision-making through algorithms and machine learning is not an easy task and will require many more years of work.

But let’s assume for a second that the data foundation has been laid, as it likely will for most companies in the coming decade. Then how do we, as humans, avoid the journey on a long road to machine-driven oblivion?

1. Move from assumption-based decisions to data-driven decisions.

Too many decisions in enterprises are based on assumptions that are grounded in experience. However, past experience may not be an accurate predictor of the present or the future when industries and markets are being disrupted. Assumptions are often based on an outdated view of how the world works.

The age of algorithms allows patterns to be surfaced based on what we know is happening, instead of relying on what we “feel” or we “think” may be happening. Analytical decision-making is no longer the preserve of a few data geeks, especially with algorithms willing and able to do a lot of that dirty work. As a result, we must move beyond intuition-, emotion- and anecdote-based decisions. Intuition is great for ideas, but data is actual proof.

2. Ask the right questions of data.

Data will give you the answers to whatever questions you have. But data and algorithms cannot tell you how good your questions are. We have to learn how to ask the right questions.

This requires us to know how to work with data, how to relate data to our work and how to tell stories with data. We have to understand what metrics matter for the business, what decisions need to be driven by the data and how to harness algorithms for the most strategic decisions.

To take an analogy from self-driving cars…. While the cars may be great at driving themselves, they cannot decide where you should be going.

3. Add context to algorithms.

Machines can’t think outside the data like our brains can. We can quickly see correlations in completely unrelated data sets that machines often miss because we understand the business context within which the correlations occur and the process that gives rise to the data.

We need to be skilled at pattern recognition and contextual interpretation of data. This in turn requires a combination of domain knowledge, an understanding of how our role or department fits within the broader context of the business, the ability to introduce insights not found in the data and to accept the most relevant insights, and reject the others.

4. Combine facts with feelings.

Machines are also really poor at truly understanding individual human behavior and the nuances of motivation, emotion and interaction. So we will continue to need skilled sociologists, psychologists, communicators, economists and leaders that understand how to elicit a response from fellow humans. Every boardroom conversation will start with algorithms and facts, but they will end with a handshake.

By focusing on the critical job functions where machines free up humans to do more strategic, complex and creative work, we can remain in the driver’s seat even, and especially, in an age of algorithms. Which, by the way, isn’t as demonic as Musk makes it seem or as benign as some would argue. It is how we adapt to that nuance that will define our role in the age of algorithms.

8 New Rules of Innovative Leadership

Historically, we’ve thought of leaders and innovators as belonging in two distinct categories.George Washington, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Those are leaders. And legends such as Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein go in the innovators group, right? Well, maybe.

But in today’s world, we can’t afford to separate the two, says Linda Hill, a professor of business administration and the faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School. “Building organizations that can innovate is the critical leadership task for the foreseeable future,” Hill says. Leaders today have to enable, encourage and recognize true innovation, which she defines as “the creation of something new and useful.” But how? That question is at the heart of what leadership means in this new century.

To answer it, we must reexamine many of our beliefs about what it means to be a “good” leader. Just as we imagine all innovators as genius tinkerers who gaze at the stars, we exalt leaders for being fearless, all-knowing parental figures with a penchant for rules and well-meaning discipline. But that conception is outdated, says Hill and her co-authors of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

For more than 10 years, she and her team shadowed executives from many of today’s most innovative companies—Google, Pixar Animation Studios, eBay, Volkswagen, HCL Technologies, Pfizer, IBM and more—looking for the common keys that enabled each of those organizations to consistently innovate and excel in rapidly changing economies. What she found could drastically change your leadership style, and your business, for the better. Here are the new rules of innovative leadership:

1. Give up your “grand plan.” We like to think of a leader as someone with a master scheme, a vision, who will hold our hands and pull us to the promised land of profits and work-life balance. “This conception of the leader’s role can work well when the solution to a problem is known and straightforward,” Hill and her co-authors write, “but it’s counterproductive when it’s not. If a problem calls for a truly original response, no one can know in advance what that response should be. Instead of determining the direction your group should go, hand your teams the compass.” Your job as an innovative leader, to use another metaphor, is to “set the stage, not perform on it,” Hill says. How do you do that? Keep reading.

2. Admit that you don’t have all the answers. Giving up your identity as the visionary savior also means admitting to yourself and your employees/team members that you are not all-knowing. In fact, it’s better not to be the ultimate repository of information regarding your business. If other team members don’t feel they have ownership of some part of the organization, they’ll never be inspired to contribute. And you can’t have innovation without contributions from all corners of your company.

Vineet Nayar, former CEO of HCL Technologies, an IT services provider based in India, where most companies are extremely executive-centered, knew he had to coax his employees out of their cultural bias toward deference. On the HCL employee website, Nayar created a “My Problems” section where he talked about strategic issues and invited all employees to help him find solutions. “I got incredible answers,” he told Hill. “Everybody was willing to help their poor, benighted CEO!” He asked one team to assist in finding other ways to engage the whole company, and they came up with an “Employees First” initiative to emphasize that it was management’s job to support the employees, who had the most contact with clients, rather than the other way around. Nayar credits that initiative in helping HCL become a multibillion-dollar business during his 2007–2013 tenure.

Hill and her team found a similar example at Pixar Animation Studios, where they talked to Andrew Stanton, director of the film Finding Nemo. He learned the “you don’t need to know everything” lesson from John Lasseter, director of Toy Story, another award-winning Pixar movie: “Every time he [Lasseter] got confessional and said, ‘Guys, I think I’m just spinning my wheels,’ we’d rise up and solve the problem for him.”

You might think that your job is to instill faith in your employees, but innovative leaders do that by encouraging active contributors, not blind followers.

3. Be a storyteller. “When a leader tells stories, it shows vulnerability,” Hill says. Craft your past failures and successes into narratives, she suggests, not only to hold people’s attention, but to show your employees that “it’s OK not to be perfect, to make mistakes.” Instead of reciting sales figures from a past deal to your team, for example, tell them how you and the client didn’t get along at first. Showing that you are “human but resilient” is a potent message, Hill says, and creates a culture in which people feel comfortable sharing because they know that failure is a part of the process.

4. Encourage collaboration. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Just as you are not—and shouldn’t be—a singular visionary, neither should anyone else, or even one team or department. When working on a film, Pixar holds daily meetings (called “dailies,” naturally) where all the teams involved—animators, producers marketers, writers, techies and accountants—meet to review the work in progress. Lots of companies have daily check-in meetings, Hill notes, but very few include everyone as Pixar does. “Most great, big ideas are combinations of multiple smaller ideas. And you won’t get the chance to integrate ideas and expand people’s thinking if you don’t collaborate.”

When Luca de Meo joined the marketing team at Volkswagen in 2009 (he would become chief marketing officer a year later), he invited more than 70 VW marketers from cities all over Europe to a two-day Berlin design lab he called Marketing Worx! The goal was lofty: Create a global brand identity. What many leaders may have considered a “too many cooks” situation, De Meo felt was an opportunity to collaborate deeply, see where the brand really stood, and get everyone on board creatively. “Unlike in the normal daily life of the organization, everyone was being invited (or even pushed) to be a co-designer of solutions, not just an implementer of others’ ideas,” he wrote of the event.

5. Allow for conflict. When you bring people from different backgrounds—creative and sales, say—disagreement is natural. Instead of calling it “conflict,” however, Hill labels this disagreement “creative abrasion” and says it’s necessary for innovation. “You can’t think of something new unless you are being pushed to think in new directions, and you can’t do that unless you’re engaging with people who have different viewpoints.” Most organizations snuff out any flame of tension or conflict, but it is the innovative leader’s job to stoke the fires just enough to spark ideas without getting anyone burned. How?

➜ Show appreciation when people offer ideas and opinions, even if you don’t accept or agree with them.

➜ Share stories from your career of how disagreements led to success.

➜ Ask, “How can we combine these two opposing ideas?” “What can we take from each idea to create a new idea?” Hill suggests shifting from either-or thinking to both-and thinking.

➜ Resist what Hill calls “unnecessary structure and systems”—for example, having to go through gatekeepers who may or may not pass your idea along—which prohibit everyone from participating in the process and allow teams to dismiss each other more easily.

6. Don’t “lock down” a path until you absolutely must. The ideas so far are admittedly inefficient, and efficiency is one of the first sacrifices you make if you’re striving to create something new and useful. Innovation comes only from lots of trial and error—and those errors can be costly, in time and money.

But the payoff can be phenomenal, Hill says. So while it’s commonly expected that leaders be decisive—we present a boss with several ideas, for example, and count on her to choose one “winning” concept—innovative leaders let multiple ideas play out simultaneously. An animator on the Pixar movie Toy Story 2 gave a character a slightly arched eyebrow in one scene that the director, upon review during the dailies, felt was too sly for the innocent, straightforward fellow. So the animator drew the eyebrow to be less mischievous. But weeks later the director, Lasseter, returned to the animator and told him how that half-second of raised eyebrow had made him rethink the character and, in fact, the whole story. Not only was the subtle ironic gesture restored, but other scenes in various stages of production were revised in consideration of this character  twist.

“If the story had been fixed and immutable, if the director hadn’t been able to hold opposing views of the character in his mind until they could merge, none of that could have happened, and the story would have been worse for it,” Hill and her co-authors note.

The production of Toy Story 2 was a long, arduous process for Pixar, says Hill, in part because Lasseter allowed changes to the story until the very end. But the director defended his often frustrating method: “We need to focus on quality, and that only happens by iterating. If we lock in the story, we will be disappointed…. I know it would save us pain, but Hollywood is littered with films that refused to change.” Toy Story 2 was critically acclaimed and earned more than $500 million in worldwide box office sales.

When Bill Coughran joined Google as senior vice president of engineering in 2003 (he left in 2011), he was tasked with developing a comprehensive data storage system. Two big ideas emerged as possible solutions: One group wanted to build a whole new system from scratch, and the other wanted to build storage layers on top of their current system.

“No one in the organization… could know for sure which system would be best in the future,” Coughran told the Collective Genius authors. “I did not want to be top-down about this.” So he let both teams build their prototypes—for two years—to the point where both could be rigorously tested. The result: Neither solution was perfect, but the “layering” approach would suffice for the short term, and the build-from-scratch team would continue its work on the next-generation system, which would help Google become one of the world’s most valuable brands.

7. Experiment locally. If you’re already part of a national or global brand, you know that maintaining cohesive practices and messaging across different markets leaves little energy for creating new initiatives. It’s easy for far-flung employees to defer to headquarters’ standards, and it’s easy for HQ folk to insist they follow them. But that means you lose the creativity, local knowledge and innovation that the smaller outposts can contribute, Hill says.

When eBay acquired the German auction website Alando in 1999, that site was moved from the local servers to the parent company’s global platform. But Alando had been known in Germany for creating quirky, successful promotions and for quick responsiveness to local trends. Now all site changes had to go through corporate, a process that could take months.

Philipp Justus, eBay Germany’s new leader, considered Alando’s promotions and frequent user-experience changes too valuable to let go, so he made the risky move to switch back to local servers for some of their “micro-projects,” as he called them. He defended his choice with data and passion.

The micro-projects were so successful that eBay’s corporate leaders encouraged other international sites to adopt them. Not only that, eBay’s leaders recognized the power that local sites had to try out and test new ideas. Instead of changes coming from top-down, they started at the bottom and grew upward.

Even if you don’t have offices all over the world, encourage different teams or team members to devise and test new ideas on a smaller scale.

8. Believe in everyone’s genius. “If you don’t believe everyone has a slice of genius, it’s not going to work,” Hill tells SUCCESS. “The role of a leader is to get the best out of everyone.” While she admits that “not everyone’s slice is the same size,” she says innovation happens when everyone contributes. And no team members will contribute if they feel that their ideas aren’t taken seriously.

She was particularly impressed when, at a Pixar meeting, one animator acted out a scene, comically prancing around the room to show how he thought it should go. He altered his performance as others shouted feedback, as if it were an improv show. In the end, the group rejected his version of the scene, but the whole room gave him a round of applause, and he grinned as he sat down.

“That was a perfect example of valuing the contributor even if you don’t always accept their contribution,” Hill says. “Reward people for taking the risk of sharing,” she recommends, or you risk missing out on a truly innovative idea.

When There’s Too Many Books and Not Enough Time..

My puppy Stanley is obsessed with leaves on the ground, especially when they’re brought to life by the wind. As the breeze animates the crackly remnants of a Florida “winter,” Stanley perks up at their aliveness, zones in on one like it’s a mouse and he’s a cat—and pounces. But once he’s got one and realizes it’s just a leaf, he moves on to the next, just as excited, hoping this will be the one that is truly alive.

It’s fun to watch, but annoying when we’re trying to walk—a constant start, stop, start, stop, start, stop.

And that is exactly what has happened to my reading life.

I’ve been obsessed with books since my very first Dr. Seuss ABC book. The library has always been my favorite place—the kind of place that makes you feel alive, like a kid in a toy store again, like magic is real. 

Now my library is inundated with fliers about all the ways I can “check out” e-books, and the first thing I see in bookstores are big bright displays of e-reader cases. But I walk right by with a pile of books in hand, anyway.

I love getting stacks of books from the library and working through them, book by book, so much so that I’m not ready to give it up. The smell. The pages. The sense of progress that I can feel in my hands, knowing how far I’ve gotten in a book and how far I still have to go. It makes me feel grounded, satisfied.

But then my overdue library charges start racking up as I have less and less time to make the biweekly trip, and I’m not always finishing the stacks of books I’d intended. And as I travel more and my suitcases are starting to creep past the weight limit. So I break down and buy an e-reader.

The thrill is instant and I wonder why I waited so long. The libraries and bookstores are in my hand, accessible from my couch. Leaves! Wind!

I pounce on a book hungrily and then curiosity leads me to another, and then another, and then another. I ping pong within this flurry of e-books in a joyous frenzy.

It is truly joyous.

Until it isn’t.  

In December, I count how many books I read that year and compare it to the previous year, something I started doing a few years ago. But this year is the first that I have not read more books than the previous year. I read less. I look on my e-reader and see I have 17 books in a collection I’d titled “Currently Reading.” Somehow I’ve gone from reading one book at a time to 17 at a time.

I feel weirdly unsettled about this. I know no one cares but me, no one is watching—there are no rules for how you’re supposed to read. But suddenly I know that this isn’t working for me. The joy is gone.

Something needs to change.

I go through each of the 17 unfinished books and ask myself the following questions:

1) Why didn’t I finish this?
2) Does it still interest me now?
3) Why haven’t I let it go yet?

I wonder to myself, Am I allowed to not finish some of these books? Am I allowed to admit that some things just don’t interest me anymore?  

I do something that, for me, is drastic: I give myself permission to not finish the books that no longer interest me (or help me reach one of my most important goals).

And the biggest change of all—I decide not to feel guilty about it. 

I spend more time walking my puppy and less time reading. I let go of the books that truly don’t interest me any longer. I take a break from reading for a few days. I think long and hard about the following questions: Why do I read? What do I want to get out of the books that I read right now?

After my reading break I open a new word document, title it “Reading List,” and type out the answers to those questions at the very top, a kind of criteria to help me choose my next books.

I make a short list of the books that fit my new criteria and make a rule for myself that I will not start the next book on the list until I finish the one above it: a reading experiment.

With “learning more about the creative process” at the top of my criteria, the first book on my list is a biography of Jim Henson by Brian Jay Jones. It’s a long one, a good first test of will.

I do really well. I focus on the Jim Henson biography only. It’s magical.

About three fourths of the way in I relapse; I take a quick three-page peek into another book—an autobiography of Warner Brothers cartoon animator Chuck Jones that Lin-Manuel Miranda (writer of the Grammy-winning Broadway sensation Hamilton) says is one of the best books on the creative process and inspired him as a kid. Leaf! Wind! I stray for a second.

But three pages in, I’m satisfied—yes, this Chuck Amuck is going to be a good one. I place it in the number two spot on my list and return to the Jim Henson book.

I continue Jim Henson’s biography without any other interruptions. As I read the book every morning, Jim Henson is alive, sitting at my breakfast table—striving, creating, teaching me something. I get to the end of the book—his untimely death, the memorial service with the paper butterflies—and I weep like I haven’t wept after a book in years.

It’s a full, satisfying experience.  It reminds me why I read in the first place.

I slow down. I realize I will never read all the books I want to read. I am too curious of a person. Every book opens up 20 more books I want to read. I’ll never finish. And somehow just saying that out loud makes me feel better.

I move the Jim Henson book to the “Finished” collection and begin the Chuck Jones autobiography. A few pages in, Stanley rings the bells on our door letting me know he needs to go out. I put the e-reader down and take him for a walk. It’s another windy day and as thousands of leaves come to life and Stanley begins his chase, for the first time I notice that he never gets frustrated with the leaves that flutter out of his reach, but delights in each one he grasps.  

Here’s How You Can Build Your Own Tiny Home

Thanks to the tiny home trend, you can now live in a space the size of an office supply closet. While the small house fad may not be new, one entrepreneur has raised the bar: the ability to build it yourself.

Designer Jacob Triche, 32, of Revival Supply Co.—a custom furniture company in Dallas—has created a build-your-own home kit (on the market for $4,500) that can be transported via pickup truck and put together by two people in around four hours. Oh, and in case you need to move it, you can take it apart and put it back together again—it weighs just 600 pounds. Designed for one or two people, the two-story structure has a ladder that leads upstairs and can fit a queen-size mattress.

“It’s geared to be the most affordable, lightweight [and] easy to transport,” Triche says. “An ‘instant house’ is what it’s designed to be.”

Triche says the tiny home has a myriad of possible applications, from disaster relief and missionary housing to accommodations for homeless people and hunters. He’s working on creating a showroom right now so people can tour the tiny home before purchasing it.

“I think it’s cool because it’s outside the box,” says Triche, who developed the idea when he went back to school for product design at age 26. “Instead of bigger is better, smarter is better—and more efficient.”

7 Personality Traits of a Great Leader

If you want to be a leader who attracts quality people, the key is to become a person of quality yourself. Leadership is the ability to attract someone to the gifts, skills and opportunities you offer as an owner, as a manager, as a parent. Jim Rohn calls leadership the great challenge of life.

What’s important in leadership is refining your skills. All great leaders keep working on themselves until they become effective. Here’s how:

1. Learn to be strong but not impolite.

It is an extra step you must take to become a powerful, capable leader with a wide range of reach. Some people mistake rudeness for strength. It's not even a good substitute.

2. Learn to be kind but not weak.

We must not mistake weakness for kindness. Kindness isn't weak. Kindness is a certain type of strength. We must be kind enough to tell someone the truth. We must be kind enough and considerate enough to lay it on the line. We must be kind enough to tell it like it is and not deal in delusion.

3. Learn to be bold but not a bully.

It takes boldness to win the day. To build your influence, you've got to walk in front of your group. You've got to be willing to take the first arrow, tackle the first problem, discover the first sign of trouble. Like the farmer, if you want any rewards at harvest time, you have got to be bold and face the weeds and the rain and the bugs straight on. You've got to seize the moment.

4. Learn to be humble but not timid.

You can't get to the high life by being timid. Some people mistake timidity for humility. But humility is a virtue; timidity is a disease. It's an affliction. It can be cured, but it is a problem. Humility is almost a God-like word—a sense of awe, a sense of wonder, an awareness of the human soul and spirit, an understanding that there is something unique about the human drama versus the rest of life. Humility is a grasp of the distance between us and the stars, yet having the feeling that we're part of the stars.

5. Learn to be proud but not arrogant.

It takes pride to build your ambitions. It takes pride in your community. It takes pride in a cause, in accomplishment. But the key to becoming a good leader is to be proud without being arrogant. Do you know the worst kind of arrogance? Arrogance from ignorance. It's intolerable. If someone is smart and arrogant, we can tolerate that. But if someone is ignorant and arrogant, that's just too much to take.

6. Learn to develop humor without folly.

In leadership, we learn that it's OK to be witty but not silly; fun but not foolish.

7. Learn to deal in realities.

Deal in truth. Save yourself the agony of delusion. Just accept life as it is—the whole drama of life. It's fascinating.

Life is unique. Leadership is unique. The skills that work well for one leader may not work at all for another. However, the fundamental skills of leadership can be adopted to work well for just about everyone: at work, in the community and at home.

Rohn: A Good Life Contains These 6 Essentials

The ultimate expression of life is not a paycheck. The ultimate expression of life is not a Mercedes. The ultimate expression of life is not a million dollars or a bank account or a home. The ultimate expression of life is living a good life.

Here's what we must ask constantly, "What, for me, would be a good life?" And you have to keep going over and over the list—a list including areas such as spirituality, economics, health, relationships and recreation.

So, what would constitute a good life? Jim Rohn has a short list:

1. Productivity. You won't be happy if you don't produce. The game of life is not rest. Yes, we must rest, but only long enough to gather strength to get back to productivity.

What's the reason for the seasons and the seeds, the soil and the sunshine, the rain and the miracle of life? It's to see what you can do with it—to try your hand to see what you can do.

2. Good friends. Friendship is probably the greatest support system in the world, so don't deny yourself the time to develop it. Nothing can match it. It's extraordinary in its benefit.

Friends are those wonderful people who know all about you and still like you. I lost one of my dearest friends when he was 53—heart attack. As one of my very special friends, I used to say that if I was stuck in a foreign jail somewhere accused unduly, and, if they would allow me one phone call, I would call David. Why? He would come and get me. That's a real friend—somebody who would come and get you. And we've all got casual friends, friends who, if you called them, they would say, "Hey, if you get back, call me and we'll have a party."

You’ve got to have both real friends and casual friends.

3. Your culture. Language, music, ceremonies, traditions, dress. All of that is so vitally important that you must keep it alive. The uniqueness of all of us, when blended together, brings vitality, energy, power, influence, and rightness to the world.

4. Spirituality. It helps to form the foundation of the family that builds the nation. And make sure you study, practice and teach—don't be careless about the spiritual part of your nature because it's what makes us who we are, different from dogs, cats, birds and mice.

5. Don't miss anything. My parents taught me not to miss anything, not the game, the performance, the movie, the dance. Just before my father died at 93, if you were to call him at 10:30 or 11 at night, he wouldn't be home. He was at the rodeo, he was watching the kids play softball, he was listening to the concert, he was at church—he was somewhere every night.

Go to everything you possibly can. Buy a ticket to everything you possibly can. Go see everything and experience all you possibly can.

Live a vital life. If you live well, you will earn well. If you live well, it will show in your face; it will show in the texture of your voice. There will be something unique and magical about you if you live well. It will infuse not only your personal life but also your business life. And it will give you a vitality nothing else can give.

6. Your family and the inner circle. Invest in them, and they'll invest in you. Inspire them, and they'll inspire you. Take care of the details with your inner circle.

When my father was still alive, I used to call him when I traveled. He'd have breakfast most every morning with the farmers at a little place called The Decoy Inn out in the country where we lived in Southwest Idaho.

When I was in Israel, I'd have to get up in the middle of the night, but I'd call Papa. I'd say, "Papa, I'm in Israel." He'd say, "Israel! Son, how are things in Israel?" He'd talk real loud so everybody could hear. I'd say, "Papa, last night they gave me a reception on the rooftop underneath the stars overlooking the Mediterranean." He'd say, "Son, a reception on the rooftop underneath the stars overlooking the Mediterranean?" Now everybody knew the story. And giving my father that special day only took five or 10 minutes.

If a father walks out of the house and he can still feel his daughter's kiss on his face all day, he's a powerful man. If a husband walks out of the house and he can still feel the imprint of his wife's arms around his body, he's invincible all day. It's the special stuff with your inner circle that makes you strong and powerful and influential. So don't miss that opportunity.

The prophet said, "There are many virtues and values, but here's the greatest: one person caring for another." There is no greater value than love.

So make sure in your busy day to remember the true purpose and the reasons you do what you do. May you truly live the kind of life that will bring the fruit and rewards that you desire.

Dream Motivational Video

I don't know what that dream is that you have.

I don't care how disappointing it might've been as you've been working toward that dream, 
but that dream that you're holding in your mind, 
That it's possible! 
That some of you already know.

That it's hard, 
it's not easy.

It's hard changing your life.

That in the process, of working on your dreams, 
you are going to incur in a lot of disappointment, 
a lot of failure, 
a lot of pain.

There are moments when you're gonna doubt yourself.

You said God, why, why is this happening to me? 
I'm just trying to take care of my children and my mother, I'm not trying to steal or rob from anybody 
How does this have to happen to me? 
For those of you that have experience some hardships, 
don't give up on your dream.

The rough times are gonna come, but they have not come to stay, they have come to pass.

Greatness, is not this wonderful, esoteric, illusive, 
god-like feature that only the special among us will ever taste.

It's something that truly exists, in all of us.

It's very important for you to believe, that you are the one.

Most people, they raise a family, they earn a living and then they died.

They stop growing, they stop working on themselves, they stop stretching, they stop pushing themselves.

Then a lot of people like to complain but they don't wanna do anything about their situation.

And most people don't work on their dreams, why? 
One is because of fear, the fear of failure, "what if things don't work out"? 
And the fear of success, "what If they do and I can't handle it"? 
These are not risk takers.

You spent so much time with other people, you spent some much time trying to get people to like you, 
you know other people more than you know yourself, 
you studied them, you know about them, you want hang out like them, you want to be just like them.

And you know what? 
You've invested so much time on them, you don't know who you are.

I challenge you to spend time by yourself.

It's necessary, that get the losers out of your life, if you want to live your dream.

But people who are running towards their dreams, life have a special kind of meaning.

When you become the 'right-person', what you do is you start separating yourself from other people 
you begin to have a certain uniqueness, 
as long as you follow on other people, as long as you being a 'copy-cat', 
you will never, ever be the best 'copy-cat' in the world, 
but you will be the best you could be, 
I challenge you to define your value.

That everybody won't see it, that everybody won't join you, that everybody won't have the vision...

it's necessary to know that.

That you are an uncommon breed.

It's necessary that you align yourself with people and attract people into your business, 
who are hungry! 
People who are unstoppable and unreasonable, 
people who are rebuilding to live life just as it is and who want more! 
The people that are living their dreams, of party winners, to attach themselves to.

the people that are living their dreams, are the people that know 
that if it's gonna happen it's up to them 
If you want to be more successful, 
if you want have and do stuff you never done before, 
I'm asking you, to Invest in you! 
To Invest in you! 
Someones opinion of you, does not have to become your reality.

That you don't have to go through life, being a victim.

And even though you face disappointments, you have to know within yourself...

that I can do this, even if no one see it for me , I've must see it for myself.

This is what I believe and I'm willing to die for it. Period.

No matter how bad it is or how bad it gets, 
I'm going to make it! 
I wanna represent an idea. I wanna represent possibilities.

some of you right now, you want to go to next level.

'I want a council, I want to be a engineer, I want to be a doctor." Listen to me: 
You can't get to that level. 
You can't get to that level economically where you want to be, until you start invest in your mind.

You are not reading books.

I challenge you all to go to the conference.

I dare you to invest tim! 
I dare you to be alone! 
I dare you to spent an hour to get to know yourself.

When you Become who you are, 
when you Become the person that you are created to be, designed to be who you were designed to be.

When you become an individual.

What you do is: take yourself and you start separating yourself from other people.

I'm challenging you, to get to the place where people do not like you or do not even bother you no more. Why? Cause you are not concerned to make them happy.

Because you try to blow, you try to the next level.

I need you to invest in your mind.

If you still taking about your dream.

If you still taking about your goals.

But you have not done anything 
JUST TAKE THE FIRST STEP! 
You can make your parent proud, 
you can make your school proud, 
you can touch millions of people lives and the word will never be the same again, 
because you came this way.

Don't let nobody steal your dream! 

After we face a rejection and a "NO" or we have a meeting and no one shows up, 
or somebody said, you can count on me, and they don't come through 
what if we had that kind of attitude that cause reposses, nobody believes in you, you扉e lost again, and again, and again! the lights are cut off 
but you still looking at your dream, reviewing it every day and saying to yourself: 
IT'S NOT OVER, UNTIL I WIN! 
You can live your dream!

10 Things Successful People Never Do Again

“Years ago, a bad business decision of mine led to an interesting discussion with my mentor,” Dr. Cloud says. “I had learned a valuable lesson the hard way, and he reassured me: ‘The good thing is once you learn that lesson, you never go back. You never do it again.’

“I wondered, what are the key awakenings that successful people go through that forever change how they do things, which propel them to succeed in business, relationships, and life? I began to study these awakenings, researching them over the years.”

Although life and business have many lessons to teach us, Dr. Cloud observed 10 “doorways” of learning that high performers go through, never to return again.

Successful people never again…

1. Return to what hasn’t worked.

Whether a job, or a broken relationship that was ended for a good reason, we should never go back to the same thing, expecting different results, without something being different.

2. Do anything that requires them to be someone they are not.

In everything we do, we have to ask ourselves, “Why am I doing this? Am I suited for it? Does it fit me? Is it sustainable?” If the answer is no to any of these questions, you better have a very good reason to proceed.

3. Try to change another person.

When you realize that you cannot force someone into doing something, you give him or her freedom and allow them to experience the consequences. In doing so, you find your own freedom as well.

4. Believe they can please everyone.

Once you get that it truly is impossible to please everyone, you begin to live purposefully, trying to please the right people.

5. Choose short-term comfort over long-term benefit.

Once successful people know they want something that requires a painful, time-limited step, they do not mind the painful step because it gets them to a long-term benefit. Living out this principle is one of the most fundamental differences between successful and unsuccessful people, both personally and professionally.

6. Trust someone or something that appears flawless.

It’s natural for us to be drawn to things and people that appear "incredible." We love excellence and should always be looking for it. We should pursue people who are great at what they do, employees who are high performers, dates who are exceptional people, friends who have stellar character, and companies that excel. But when someone or something looks too good to be true, he, she, or it is. The world is imperfect. Period. No one and no thing is without flaw, and if they appear that way, hit pause.

7. Take their eyes off the big picture.

We function better emotionally and perform better in our lives when we can see the big picture. For successful people, no one event is ever the whole story. Winners remember that – each and every day.

8. Neglect to do due diligence.

No matter how good something looks on the outside, it is only by taking a deeper, diligent, and honest look that we will find out what we truly need to know: the reality that we owe ourselves.

9. Fail to ask why they are where they find themselves.

One of the biggest differences between successful people and others is that in love and in life, in relationships and in business, successful people always ask themselves, what part am I playing in this situation? Said another way, they do not see themselves only as victims, even when they are.

10. Forget that their inner life determines their outer success.

The good life sometimes has little to do with outside circumstances. We are happy and fulfilled mostly by who we are on the inside. Research validates that. And our internal lives largely contribute to producing many of our external circumstances.

And, the converse is true: people who are still trying to find success in various areas of life can almost always point to one or more of these patterns as a reason they are repeating the same mistakes.Everyone makes mistakes…even the most successful people out there. But, what achievers do better than others is recognize the patterns that are causing those mistakes and never repeat them again. In short, they learn from pain—their own and the pain of others.A good thing to remember is this: pain is unavoidable, but repeating the same pain twice, when we could choose to learn and do something different, is certainly avoidable. I like to say, “we don’t need new ways to fail….the old ones are working just fine!” Our task, in business and in life, is to observe what they are, and never go back to doing them again.

Why Failure Is Good for Success

The sweetest victory is the one that’s most difficult. The one that requires you to reach down deep inside, to fight with everything you’ve got, to be willing to leave everything out there on the battlefield—without knowing, until that do-or-die moment, if your heroic effort will be enough. Society doesn’t reward defeat, and you won’t find many failures documented in history books.

The exceptions are those failures that become steppingstones to later success. Such is the case with Thomas Edison, whose most memorable invention was the light bulb, which purportedly took him 1,000 tries before he developed a successful prototype. “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” a reporter asked. “I didn’t fail 1,000 times,” Edison responded. “The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

Unlike Edison, many of us avoid the prospect of failure. In fact, we’re so focused on not failing that we don’t aim for success, settling instead for a life of mediocrity. When we do make missteps, we gloss over them, selectively editing out the miscalculations or mistakes in our life’s résumé. “Failure is not an option,” NASA flight controller Jerry C. Bostick reportedly stated during the mission to bring the damaged Apollo 13 back to Earth, and that phrase has been etched into the collective memory ever since. To many in our success-driven society, failure isn’t just considered a non-option—it’s deemed a deficiency, says Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. “Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list,” Schulz says. “It is our meta-mistake: We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition.”

Failure Is Life’s Greatest Teacher

When we take a closer look at the great thinkers throughout history, a willingness to take on failure isn’t a new or extraordinary thought at all. From the likes of Augustine, Darwin and Freud to the business mavericks and sports legends of today, failure is as powerful a tool as any in reaching great success. “Failure and defeat are life’s greatest teachers [but] sadly, most people, and particularly conservative corporate cultures, don’t want to go there,” says Ralph Heath, managing partner of Synergy Leadership Group and author of Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes and Thinking Big. “Instead they choose to play it safe, to fly below the radar, repeating the same safe choices over and over again. They operate under the belief that if they make no waves, they attract no attention; no one will yell at them for failing because they generally never attempt anything great at which they could possibly fail (or succeed).”

However, in today’s post-recession economy, some employers are no longer shying away from failure—they’re embracing it. According to a recent article in BusinessWeek, many companies are deliberately seeking out those with track records reflecting both failure and success, believing that those who have been in the trenches, survived battle and come out on the other side have irreplaceable experience and perseverance.

They’re veterans of failure. The prevailing school of thought in progressive companies—such as Intuit, General Electric, Corning and Virgin Atlantic—is that great success depends on great risk, and failure is simply a common byproduct. Executives of such organizations don’t mourn their mistakes but instead parlay them into future gains. “The quickest road to success is to possess an attitude toward failure of ‘no fear,’ ” says Heath. “To do their work well, to be successful and to keep their companies competitive, leaders and workers on the front lines need to stick their necks out a mile every day.

They have to deliver risky, edgy, breakthrough ideas, plans, presentations, advice, technology, products, leadership, bills and more. And they have to deliver all this fearlessly—without any fear whatsoever of failure, rejection or punishment.”

Reaching Your Potential

The same holds true for personal quests, whether in overcoming some specific challenge or reaching your full potential in all aspects of life. To achieve your personal best, to reach unparalleled heights, to make the impossible possible, you can’t fear failure, you must think big, and you have to push yourself. When we think of people with this mindset, we imagine the daredevils, the pioneers, the inventors, the explorers: They embrace failure as a necessary step to unprecedented success. But you don’t have to walk a tightrope, climb Mount Everest or cure polio to employ this mindset in your own life.

When the rewards of success are great, embracing possible failure is key to taking on a variety of challenges, whether you’re reinventing yourself by starting a new business or allowing yourself to trust another person to build a deeper relationship. “To achieve any worthy goal, you must take risks,” says writer and speaker John C. Maxwell. In his book Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success, he points to the example of legendary aviator Amelia Earhart, who set several records and achieved many firsts in her lifetime, including being the first female pilot to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean.

Although her final flight proved fateful, Maxwell believes she knew the risk—and that the potential reward was worth it. “[Earhart’s] advice when it came to risk was simple and direct: ‘Decide whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying.’ ” Of course, the risks you take should be calculated; you shouldn’t fly blindly into the night and simply hope for the best. Achieving the goal or at least waging a heroic effort requires preparation, practice and some awareness of your skills and talents.

Easing Into a Fearless Mindset

“One of the biggest secrets to success is operating inside your strength zone but outside of your comfort zone,” Heath says. Although you might fail incredibly, you might succeed incredibly—and that’s why incredible risk and courage are requisite. Either way, you’ll learn more than ever about your strengths, talents and resolve, and you’ll strengthen your will for the next challenge. If this sounds like dangerous territory, it can be. But there are ways to ease into this fearless mindset.

Maintain a Positive Attitude

The first is to consciously maintain a positive attitude so that, no matter what you encounter, you’ll be able to see the lessons of the experience and continue to push forward. “It’s true that not everyone is positive by nature,” says Maxwell, who cites his father as someone who would describe himself as a negative person by nature. “Here’s how my dad changed his attitude. First he made a choice: He continually chooses to have a positive attitude.

Reading and Listening to Motivational Material

Second, he’s continually reading and listening to materials that bolster that attitude. For example, he’s read The Power of Positive Thinking many times. I didn’t get it at first, so once I asked him why. His response: ‘Son, I need to keep filling the tank so I can stay positive.’ ” Heath recommends studying the failures and subsequent reactions of successful people and, within a business context, repeating such histories for others. “Reward them and applaud their efforts in front of the entire organization so everyone understands it is OK to fail.

So employees say to themselves, ‘I see that Bill, the vice president of widgets, who the president adores, failed, and he is not only back at work, but he is driving a hot new sports car. I can fail and come to work the next day. Bill is proof of it.’ ” Finally, Heath stays motivated by the thought that, “if I become complacent and don’t take risks, someone will notice what I am doing and improve upon my efforts over time, and put me out of work. You’ve got to keep finding better ways to run your life, or someone will take what you’ve accomplished, improve upon it, and be very pleased with the results. Keep moving forward or die.”