Moment 42 - These 3 Things Will Make You Successful In Life: Jamil Qureshi

00:01I wanted to know, free from you, like what role responsibility plays in people's outcomes? Okay, that's a big one. You promised me some easy questions today. No, so responsibility is huge. It's just massive. It's one of the predeterminants of successful outcomes, is our ability to take ownership and accountability. So circumstance and situation push and pull us in different directions on a daily basis. The world is complex, it's uncertain, it's unpredictable, all of those things.

00:33The people who perform best have huge levels of response ability, an ability to respond to those circumstances and situation, no matter what they are, to drive the best outcomes or opportunities. So I always say there's a circle of concern, water cooler conversations, the stuff that's going on around us, circumstance, situation, incidents and accidents. Then there's a circle of influence. and the circle of influence is where we make choice that's what it's about so responsibility is all about choice for me i absolutely guarantee you now that that uh that circumstance the situation is not a predictor of success at um because we know of people who are born into privilege they're great role models had good access to opportunity to wealth they had good guidance and good support and they ended up dying heroin addicts in prison we know some people born with a physical disadvantage.

01:26Now, the lack of good role models, now the lack of guidance, lack of support, lack of opportunity, they grew up to be some of the most successful people who have ever walked this earth. So it proves beyond doubt that attitude is more important than intelligence or facts. And I genuinely believe that to be true in all areas of high performance, that attitude is more important than intelligence or facts. I always say, give me I will over IQ. Any one of my teams, I'd rather have I will over IQ.

01:51Because high technical expertise, we're talking about the Western world at the moment, High technical expertise is no longer as valuable as it used to be. And the reason why high technical expertise is no longer as valuable as it used to be is because we can Google things. That's why. So knowing a lot isn't where your success is going to come from. It's not what you know which is important. It's how you think about what you know and how you bring it to life with your character and personality to determine the best outcomes or opportunities.

02:19so you know i genuinely believe that the only way in which businesses or people will become successful and truly perform to their optimum is taking full accountability and ownership we need to almost move away from circumstance and situation which is a distraction so um the more that we realize that our success is dependent upon us and not on the situation the better and because the world is so unpredictable we need to simply learn to dance on a shifting carpet not see the rug being pulled from under our feet you know life is a game of continual adjustment and it doesn't matter what happens it's how we react and respond to it to determine those best opportunities or outcomes and i think that you know it's funny because initially i'm working with a lot of businesses and um on culture on team um people strategies and the focus on responsibility has never been higher mainly because we've been asked to stay apart people are having to determine their own work schedules people have to determine their own working week and they're going to have to take responsibility for driving the best outcomes at them whilst they're not surrounded by team or working with directly with a leader so there's been a greater

03:30call for responsibility i wonder whether in answer to your question i don't know the answer to this um i wonder whether we'll see a better shift or greater shift towards more responsibility in the western world because i agree with you i think that many of us will see ourselves as a victim of circumstance and situation and not necessarily see the beauty in the chaos because of it you talk there about the the internet as well and the power of the internet and how that's been a bit of a leveler which is yeah which is a really wonderful thing i think um what how important is it do you do you think when you think about the successful people you've worked with to be a sort of self-driven learner beyond school um do you see in the specifically in the sort of upper echelons of like business the ones that the people that are most successful are proactive sort of self-driven yeah i think i think it's true i think that um i've said our only sustainable competitive advantage is to learn faster and better than your competitors so you know and you think about that for a business you think about that for a leader you know you think about as a sportsman it's probably true isn't it you know our only sort of sustainable competitive

04:39advantage is just learn faster and better than anyone else two power line line yeah yeah and i think that you know and i think that i think that how can we learn faster and better yeah if we're not proactive lifelong learners and so you know and i think that you know learning isn't necessarily about being taught um we don't necessarily need teachers um it's a strive for greater curiosity you know i think curiosity is worth more than creativity at the moment but as a strive for greater curiosity it's a matter of being matter of being open-minded it's a matter of being um agile in our thinking so we can deploy resource to opportunity as it becomes visible um it's about um it's about self-discovery so it's about a variety of things which are based not necessarily upon traditional learning but more in a way in which we can open our mind up to experimentation and feedback you know and understanding ourselves differently and i think the best leaders um you know have this ability to you know reimagine repurpose reinvent i don't think they're beholden to a particular or wedded to a particular mindset but that's for a lot of people that's terrifying the thought of experimentation and being agile and reinvention i've seen that in my own business i've

05:54seen over the years i was um i was known as being the guy that would walk in i think a lot of business leaders are walking in the morning and be like we're going in a different direction everyone come in this room we're going to launch this part of our business and we're going to take a we're going to experiment and i i would often say to our team that experimentation is like at the heart of all of our strategy it's like why especially as a social media company where our platforms social media changes every day there's new updates pushed by facebook and instagram every day um so our company slogan was keeping keeping brands at the forefront of what's possible which meant that we had to be agile but i'd often see people in my organization that were really against change fearful of it they would take you know they would resist it yeah you know uh and i i um i wonder how you if it's i always wondered why it was i think some of them had levels of imposter syndrome so they were you know they were just uh just trying to get a hang of the role they were in and not do more they you know they were already you know conscious but i wonder what your thoughts where i'm at i think i think people don't like change because they don't know what it results in

06:58i think that's one of the things but so let's take um let's take uh moving your desk yeah someone's sat at a desk for 10 years in a particular office you said you know what you need to you need to move down the corridor um i'm gonna make a move at uh people won't like that in the slightest um if you said to them that you know you need to move down the corridor you know we really appreciate the move we're going to give you a million pounds at the end of the year because of it they'll be trotting off with a potted plant in hand i guarantee it so i think that because people don't necessarily know what it results in why should we invest in doing something different which is uncomfortable because it goes against our mental tram lines our habitual thinking so now you're asking me to compromise my patterns and i don't know what for and i know what's going to result in and it could be good it could be bad so therefore i'm not sure i want to go to the trouble at out of investing in this change at um when i haven't determined you know the result of it as human beings we like patterns um that's good and it's bad and um it works in our favor sometimes sometimes it doesn't so we like patterns and so we like consistency um and we compartmentalize

08:05and i get a viewpoint on the world and in fact if you look at um the office is a good example the office is a great example of keeping people in patterns you've got your phone on your desk here you've got your computer there, come in at a certain time, work in a certain way, take your lunch at a certain time. So we're conditioned to work in a way which is reflective of the consistency which takes out variance in business. So you think that management has been around for about 100 years.

08:30And the reason why management's been around for about 100 years is to reduce variance because then you can scale. So businesses got bigger, a lot bigger 100 years ago because of the ability to keep people habitual. So because we've become conditioned to do this and everything around us keeps us in a pattern that we quite like being in, as soon as we start to move outside of that, there's a level of discomfort. So I guess leaders can allow people to make change and embrace change.

09:03I guess there's a few points. One, it's always best if it's co-authored and co-created. So let's involve people in what that change looks like. It's always best if we look at our organizations or teams as a community instead of as a team or an organization. At the moment, communities are outperforming bureaucracies and hierarchies when it comes to maximizing human talent. So let's try and form a community. Let's co-author and co-create. And then let's have a look at peer recognition, peer coaching, peer challenge.

09:34It doesn't need to be a top-down thing done to people. It can be something which can happen from the inside out. You know, it's meaningful when something is endorsed by others that, you know, you feel an affinity with.