Overtime: Risky? Sure. Reckless? Not at all.
Nate Silver explains that the best competitors, from poker tables to boardrooms, think alike.
This is Big Think Business Overtime – our top two releases worth your time. Get advice directly from the people who have been through it.
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Habits of highly successful risk-takers
with Nate Silver
What does it take to make bold decisions when the odds aren’t clear? Statistician Nate Silver explains why the best risk-takers aren’t reckless. They’re strategic, evidence-driven, and comfortable acting without perfect information.
Silver shares habits that separate success from failure in competitive environments, to help you become more comfortable with risking it all.
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How “contemplative leadership” can help us face uncertainty with confidence
By Patrick Boland
When I was sixteen, I asked my parents for a copy of Niccolò Machiavelli’s classic Renaissance-era book The Prince as my Christmas present. It might seem strange, but I’d just read an excerpt in history class, and it had sounded like perfect reading for any young person looking to make their way in the world. There’s a lot of pragmatic wisdom in The Prince, all focused on achieving significant leadership goals. However, as the critics of its time so succinctly put it, one key message of the book is that, when it comes to leadership, “the ends justify the means.” Although it is now often regarded as an outdated manual for acquiring and maintaining power, some of the utilitarian conclusions that Machiavelli draws are very similar to how outcome-oriented leaders rationalize their achievements today.
We can easily forget that the way we participate in everything we do communicates the kind of leader we are. This greatly impacts the way we show up in every interaction, impacting the quality of our presence in each meeting and our ability to authentically connect with, and influence, the wider organizational context. When our focus is on achieving big results, we can become too task-focused to consider the means we are using to get things done. We need to find ways to focus on both the means and the ends. This is where a contemplative approach to leadership is most valuable.
Reframing the concept of leadership as our ability to influence others is a helpful first step in actively taking responsibility for what we do and how we do it. When our external world is ever-changing, we need to go inside to our internal world and connect with what is most valuable, meaningful, and true of ourselves. It’s only as we do this that we build a solid foundation on which to base the why and the how of our leadership.
We can only lead others as far as we have first gone ourselves.
Mike Hodgkinson is the commissioning editor at Big Think. He has worked as a writer and editor across a range of publications for more than three decades.
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