Next Sunday is Easter, but yesterday was the first night of Passover – an 8-day long Jewish holiday that recounts the story of Exodus.
The overlap can be seen in DaVinci's Last Supper, depicting a Passover Seder and Jesus's last meal before his crucifixion.
Part of the Passover Seder tradition involves discussing how to share the story in ways that connect with different types of people, recognizing that everyone understands and relates to things differently.
To do this, we examine the Passover story through the lens of four archetypal children — the Wise Child, the Wicked Child, the Simple Child, and the Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask.
The four children reflect different learning styles — intellectual (Wise), skeptical (Wicked), curious (Simple), and passive (Silent) — and highlight how we must adapt communication to the diverse personalities and developmental stages of our audience.
This seems even more relevant today, as we struggle to come to a consensus on what to believe and how to communicate with people who think differently.
On a lighter note, one of the memorable phrases from Exodus is when Moses says, "Let my people go!" For generations, people assumed he was talking to the Pharoah about his people's freedom. But after a week of eating clogging food like matzoh, matzoh balls, and even fried matzoh … for many Jews, "Let my people go" takes on a different meaning.
After Passover, and as we enter a new season, it's a great time for a mental and physical 'Spring Cleaning,' and delve into your experiences to cultivate more of what you desire and less of what you don't.
Twice this week, I heard someone say, “Start with Why.”
As a tech entrepreneur, I often ignore that aphorism.
Someone who embodies it (and made it famous) is Simon Sinek. He is a motivational speaker and organizational consultant who gained widespread recognition after his 2009 TED Talk, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” which remains one of the most-viewed TED Talks ever, with almost 70 million views.
This talk introduced his core framework: The Golden Circle, the concept that catapulted him to fame. It is a simple but powerful model for understanding why some leaders and organizations inspire while others don’t. It consists of three concentric circles, like a bullseye. At the center is Why, the middle ring is How, and the outermost ring is What.
Most people and organizations focus on the outermost circle first—what they do—and then work inward. Sinek flips this approach, arguing that great leaders and companies start from the inside out: start with Why.
Why Start with Why?
Here’s an analogy: Think of a magnet. The strongest force comes from its core. Similarly, in leadership and business, the Why is your core—it’s what attracts people to you. It’s not just about selling a product; it’s about sharing a belief or vision that resonates emotionally with others.
For example:
Apple doesn’t just sell computers (What). They believe in challenging the status quo and thinking differently (Why). Their How—innovative design and user-friendly technology—flows naturally from this belief.
Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t say, “I have a plan.” He said, “I have a dream.” His Why inspired millions because it connected with their values and emotions.
The Biological Connection
Sinek ties this idea to how our brains work. The outer layer of the brain (the neocortex) processes logical information like facts and figures (What), but decisions are driven by the limbic brain, which controls emotions and instincts (Why). When you lead with Why, you speak directly to people’s feelings, inspiring trust and loyalty.
Simplified Takeaway
Think of it like this: If you want people to join your cause or buy into your vision, don’t just tell them what you’re selling or how great it is. Tell them why it matters—to you and to them. Starting with Why connects hearts before minds, creating a lasting impact.
In short, the Golden Circle isn’t just a business strategy; it’s a way to inspire action by leading with purpose.
I met Simon through friends before his first book came out.
Then, in 2009, he gave a speech to the Dallas Chapter of EO, and then visited my office to speak with our team afterwards. I still remember how well-received he was. It was right at the beginning of his meteoric rise, two short months after the release of his famous book "Start With Why."
Who do you believe will do a better job, someone who takes a job because of the salary and benefits … or someone truly inspired to accomplish the job's purpose?
Phrased that way, of course, you know the answer. Still, how can you leverage this to better select customers and employees?
For example, Simon uses the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton to illustrate this concept. Shackleton was preparing to lead the first expedition across Antarctica in 1914. Legend has it that when seeking crew members for his journey, Shackleton placed the following ad in a newspaper:
"MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS. - SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON"
When the expedition became stuck in the ice and could not be rescued for 22 months, not a single man was lost. The reason Simon gave for their unlikely survival was that Shackleton hired survivors that could deal with the situation and were aligned with the mission and purpose.
Can you imagine writing an ad like that to attract the right people to your cause?
Watch This Video.
Here is a video of Simon speaking at a TED Conference. It is an excellent intro to his stuff.
Other Resources:
Here is a link to Simon's Blog. (2023 Note: this now links to his old blog, which is poorly formatted but interesting to see. His new website/blog can be found here.)
It's now more than ten years later, and Simon is one of the most prominent leaders in leadership development and has published five books, to much acclaim.
Part of his success is the charisma and pith with which Simon speaks and writes – but a large part is his focus on what makes humans human. He's not preaching a leadership mantra focused on the bottom line and revenue; he's focused on the aspects of human nature that don't change. He's focused on purpose and the elements of leadership that apply to everyone – not just CEOs.
As we move into an era of increased volatility – both in markets and business – these leadership principles will become more important.
Understanding your "WHY" is vital if you want to make a difference (and not be replaced by an AI). It’s also vital in making discipline the easier choice.
But Skype might be even more surprising. Skype was so ubiquitous that it became a verb and eponymous with video calling. As a world traveler, Skype also used to be the go-to international calling app.
That’s what Skype did – and it’s not the first tech business to fail similarly…
Thinking Linearly in an Exponential Age
Humans can’t do a lot of things. Honestly, the fact that we’re at the top of the food chain is pretty miraculous.
We’re slow, weak, and famously bad at understanding large numbers or exponential growth.
Making matters worse, our brains are hardwired to think locally and linearly.
It’s a monumental task for us to fathom exponential growth … let alone its implications.
Think how many companies have failed due to that inability … RadioShack couldn’t understand a future where shopping was done online – and Kodak didn’t think digital cameras would replace good ol’ film. Blockbuster couldn’t foresee a future where people would want movies in their mailboxes because “part of the joy is seeing all your options!” They didn’t even make it long enough to see “Netflix and Chill” become a thing. The list goes on.
Human perception is linear. Technological growth is exponential.
There are many examples. Here is one Peter Diamandis calls “The Kodak Moment” (a play on words of “a Kodak Moment”… the phrase Kodak used in advertising to mean a “special moment that’s worth capturing with a camera”).
In 1996, Kodak was at the top of its game, with a market cap of over $28 billion and 140,000 employees.
Innovation is a reminder that you can’t be medium-obsessed. Kodak’s goal was to preserve memories. It wasn’t to sell film. Blockbuster’s goal wasn’t to get people in their stores, it was to get movies in homes.
Henry Ford famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Steve Jobs was famous for spending all his time with customers, but never asking them what they wanted.
Two of our greatest innovators realized something that many never do. Being conscientious of your consumers doesn’t necessarily mean listening to them. It means thinking about and anticipating their wants and future needs.
Meanwhile, despite Skype having several features that Zoom still hasn’t implemented, Zoom recognized an opportunity during COVID and capitalized. When Microsoft bought Skype, they focused on adding several new features and expanding the range of services instead of improving the quality of their audio or video. Meanwhile, when Zoom entered the space, they brought much better servers and the ability to have much larger rooms. More attendees meant a wider variety of use cases and quicker adoption and referral cycles. They also made it easy to join a Zoom room. Instead of getting your e-mail up front and forcing you to create an account to use it, they let you join a meeting without an account. You only needed an account to host a meeting.
They focused on making it easy to use their service and on having a clear identity instead of trying to ride every wave and become unfocused. Of course, at the same time, Microsoft stopped focusing on the tool, with an increased focus on their new competitor to Zoom, Teams.
Tech and AI are creating tectonic forces throughout industry and the world. It is time to embrace and leverage what that makes possible. History has many prior examples of Creative Destruction (and what gets left in the dust).
Opportunity or Chaos … You get to decide.
Don’t forget … you don’t have to be the first mover to win in the end.
Today was Super Bowl Sunday 2025. As a fan, I found myself rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles today. But at times, I was rooting for Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs out of respect for the talent and the incredible record they’ve compiled.
Meanwhile, it also made me think about my home team, the Dallas Cowboys, and how long it’s been since we’ve had any real post-season success.
They’ve mastered winning in the business sense, even when they struggle on the field.
Jerry Jones does a lot right in building his “Disney Ride.” However, this post will focus more on what the coaches and players do to win.
Business Lessons From the NFL
I’m regularly surprised by the levels of innovation and strategic thinking I see in football.
Football is something I used to love to play. And it is still something that informs my thoughts and actions.
Some lessons relate to teamwork, while others relate to coaching or management.
Some of these lessons stem back to youth football … but I still learn from watching games – and even more, from watching Dallas Cowboys practices at The Star.
Think about it … even in middle school, the coaches have a game plan. There are team practices and individual drills. They have a depth chart listing the first, second, and third choices to fill specific roles. In short, they focus on the fundamentals in ways that most businesses don’t.
The picture below is of my brother’s high school team way back in 1989. While lots have changed since then, much of what we will discuss in this post remains timeless.
Losing to an 8th Grade Team
The scary truth is that most businesses are less prepared for their challenges than an 8th-grade football team. That might sound disrespectful – but if you think about it … it’s pretty accurate. Here is a short video highlighting what many businesses could learn from observing how organized sports teams operate, particularly in setting goals and effectively preparing for challenges.
If you are skimming, here is a quick summary of the key points in the video.
Organization and Preparation
Structure: Football teams have a clear hierarchy, including a head coach, assistant coaches, and trainers.
Practice: Teams engage in regular practice sessions to prepare for games, emphasizing the importance of training.
Game Plan: They develop strategies and a game plan before facing opponents, including watching game films to understand their competition.
Dynamic Strategy
Adaptability: Teams adjust their strategies based on the game’s flow, recognizing whether they are on offense or defense.
Audibles: Just as a football team may call an audible when faced with unexpected defensive setups, businesses should adapt their strategies in real time.
Learning From Experience
Post-Game Analysis: Coaches review game films to identify what worked and what didn’t, learning from past experiences to improve future performance.
Continuous Improvement: Ongoing training is crucial in businesses, similar to how football players receive coaching during practice to enhance their skills.
Importance of Coaching
Role of Coaches: Coaching is crucial for developing talent and focusing on achieving defined goals.
Encouragement of Growth: Active coaching leads to better outcomes and overall improvement.
A Deeper Look Into the Lessons
There is immense value in the structured coaching and preparation that sports teams exemplify. Here are some thoughts to help businesses adopt similar principles that foster teamwork, adaptability, and continuous improvement.
Football teams think about how to improve each player, how to beat this week’s opponent, and then how to string together wins to achieve a higher goal.
The team thinks of itself as a team. They expect to practice. And they get coached.
In addition, there is a playbook for both offense and defense. And they watch game films to review what went right … and what they can learn and use later.
Contrast that with many businesses. Entrepreneurs often get myopic … they get focused on today, focused on survival, and they lose sight of the bigger picture and how all the pieces fit together.
The amount of thought and preparation that goes into football – which is ultimately a game – is a valuable lesson for business.
What about when you get to the highest level? If an 8th-grade football team is equivalent to a typical business, what about the businesses that are killing it? That would be similar to an NFL team.
How you do one thing is how you do everything. So, they try to do everything right.
Each time I’ve watched a practice session, I’ve come away impressed by the amount of preparation, effort, and skill displayed.
During practice, there’s a scheduled agenda. The practice is broken into chunks, each with a designed purpose and a desired intensity. There’s a rhythm, even to the breaks.
Every minute is scripted. There’s a long-term plan to handle the season … but, there was also a focus on the short-term details and their current opponent.
They alternate between individual and group drills. Moreover, the drills run fast … but for shorter periods than you’d guess. It is bang-bang-bang – never longer than a player’s attention span. They move from drill to drill, working not just on plays but also on skill sets (where are you looking, which foot you plant, how to best use your hands, etc.).
They use advanced technology to get an edge (including player geolocation monitoring, biometric tracking, medical recovery devices, robotic tackling dummies, and virtual reality headsets).
They don’t just film games; they film the practices … and each player’s individual drills. Coaches and players get a personalized cut on their tablets when they leave. It is a process of constant feedback and constant improvement. Everything has the potential to be a lesson.
Beyond The Snap
The focus is not just on the players and the team. They focus on the competition as well. Before a game, the coaches prepare a game plan and have the team watch videos of their opponent to understand tendencies and mentally prepare for what will happen.
During the game, changes in personnel groups and schemes keep competitors on their toes and allow the team to identify coverages and predict plays. If the offense realizes a play has been expected, they call an audible based on what they see in front of them. Coaches from different hierarchies work in tandem to respond faster to new problems.
After the game, the film is reviewed in detail. Each person gets a grade on each play, and the coaches make notes for each person about what they did well and what they could do better.
Think about it … everyone knows what game they are playing … and for the most part, everybody understands the rules and how to keep score (and even where they are in the standings). Even the coaches get feedback based on performance and look to others for guidance.
Imagine how easy that would be to do in business. Imagine how much better things could be if you did those things.
Challenge accepted.
And, just for fun, here’s a video of me doing a cartwheel after a Dallas Cowboys win.
Carl Sagan was an astronomer and planetary scientist whose most enduring legacy lies in his extraordinary ability to communicate complex ideas to the general public.
The Turing Test, originally called the Imitation Game, tests a machine's ability to emulate a human. Developed in 1949, it is still a relevant test for AI. The Turing Test measures both knowledge and the ability to express it in a manner indistinguishable from a human response.
There is no agreed-upon definition for intelligence, so we can only approximate what skills we test AI on.
While many people still believe they can tell when an AI has written something, several LLMs (like ChatGPT) have passed modern versions of the Turing Test. Many, including me, would argue LLMs still can't consistently pass the test.
But what about the alternative? Could you convince an AI that you're not human?
Recently, a video went viral, showing a human pitting himself in VR against an AI version of Aristotle, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra, and Genghis Khan (who was played by a human).
To set up the test, the human scripted the beginning and end of the dialogue and gave the AI agents a full transcript of the conversation up to that point. The entire video then played out in one recording, with no cuts.
In this "reverse" Turing test, the chatbots were scripted using various LLMs, asked questions, and then challenged to guess who the human was. Tore Knabe, the virtual reality game developer who devised the test and played the Genghis Khan role, answered one of the questions with a quote from Conan the Barbarian.
"What a leader should do is to crush his enemies, see them driven before him, and hear the lamentations of their women."
Listening to his stuttered response, contrasted by the clunky and verbose AI responses, makes it very apparent to us, the audience, that he's human. The machines voted three-to-one that his response wasn't "nuanced or strategic" enough to represent an AI modeled on Genghis Khan's exploits. To ease your mind about hidden variables, the AIs weren't processing his voice directly. The audio was transcribed and sent to the AIs as text.
Ultimately, this is a flawed test, and we don't really know how much of this is an actual test (versus just entertainment). In any case, it's still an interesting thought experiment.
Do you think you could fool an AI? What if you had time to craft a response without penalty? What if your life was on the line?
For a bonus, here's a social Turing game where you can chat with someone for two minutes and try to figure out if it is a human or an AI.
Why is it often easier to be nice to a stranger (or a dog) than someone you deal with regularly? Emotional baggage is likely the answer. Things like anger, resentment, pain, fear, uncertainty, and doubt are inhibitors that can affect how we interact with others. Frustratingly, our challenges often stem directly from what we bring to each situation ourselves.
It reminded me of one of the earliest videos I shot almost 10 years ago. It highlights the importance of allowing energy to flow freely, enabling individuals to remain focused and resilient in the face of challenges. It doesn't matter what happens … what matters is what you choose to focus on, make it mean, and choose to do.
Sometimes, things don't seem to go well. Despite the annoying evidence to the contrary, it's probably not them … Which means it is probably you (or at least what you focus on).
The antidote to negative situations is simple – focus on your progress and the reasons behind your efforts.
The recipe for success (and happiness this holiday season) isn't eggnog … it is to choose to let energy flow and to have an unrelenting focus on your bigger future.
On September 28th, 1997 (almost exactly 17 years ago today), Apple released perhaps one of the most recognizable commercials of all time. I remember being mesmerized the first time I saw Apple Computer's iconic "Crazy Ones" video as part of their Think Different campaign.
The 34th Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place last Thursday at MIT. Every year since 1991, around the time the recipients of the genuine Novel Prizes are announced, the Ig Nobel Prize awards the ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think. They're meant to celebrate the imaginative and encourage more interest in the sciences.
And in 2017, Marc-Antoine Fardin earned the honor for using fluid dynamics to finally answer the eternal question: "Can a cat be both a solid and a liquid?" In case you are squeamish, no blender was involved in that experiment.
While these are funny examples, they're rooted in real science. As is the focus of this article, this year's Ig Nobel Prize for Demography.
In my circles, it is becoming more common to discuss how to live past 100 — and not just how to live beyond that number … but to do so with a high quality of life.
A popular concept around that subject is Blue Zones – areas where people seem to live longer and healthier. There's even a Netflix documentary on the subject. Notable places include Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Ikaria, Greece.
Saul Justin Newman challenged that belief with his research, which found that extreme age records tend to come from areas with no birth certificates, rampant clerical errors, pension fraud … and even short life spans.
While longevity in the zones has primarily been attributed to diet, community, and genetics, Newman found that many of these claims were based on errors – or outright fraud. Instead, these regions are actually characterized by the opposite of what you would expect … low incomes, low literacy, high crime, and short lifespans.
To a certain extent, it makes sense. In areas where you're struggling to make ends meet … why wouldn't you commit pension fraud? In fact, in 2010, the Japanese government realized that over 80% of the people aged over 100 were actually dead. Part of what made this possible was that America bombed the halls of records in that area during the war.
Here's an interview with Saul Justin Newman on the subject. He's tracked over 80% of the people aged over 110 worldwide. Almost none of them have a birth certificate. Only about 10% have a death certificate.
What does this mean for human longevity?
While the stories of these 110-year-olds may mostly be fake – as mentioned in my recent article – longevity is on the rise, and there are many modalities to increase your lifespan.
The goal isn't just to stay alive longer; it's to live life to its fullest for as long as possible.
There are people living to 100, and there are plenty of people living healthily into their 70s, 80s, and 90s.
We're taking steps in the right direction. Technology and medicine are both evolving quickly.
But, like with longevity data, improvements in any space need to be met with a grain of salt.
If it sounds too good to be true … it generally is. Not always. But, generally.
As the world has seemed crazier lately, I thought about an old friend – Sean Stephenson.
Unfortunately, Sean passed away a few years ago. He left behind a positive legacy of standing tall to overcome challenges and serving as an inspiration to others.
He's a reminder of what's possible with the right attitude and persistence.
Here is one of his videos – it reached over 60 million people on various social media.
Sean taught that content goes viral based on the U-TURN formula …. the key is that the message must be unique, timeless, unbelievable, relatable, nice, and short.
