YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Syed

lines on the record: 114
first: 2021-06-14
most recent: 2021-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's a tremendous honor. Thank you so much for me too, and good luck with it. I'm going to follow you with huge interest from now on. You're about to hit the mainstream, aren't you? Dragonstone hasn't been broadcast yet. January.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell you my brother found an old tape of me being interviewed as a 15 year old when I got selected for a national team. I think we need more of that learning how to communication is so important. Getting our ideas across so that somebody can understand not just what we say but what we mean. And I think that's a radically learnable skill. You know, a lot of the top speakers have practiced it.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I kind of I'm interested in that because I think I definitely didn't have that when I was at school. I wasn't able really to put sentences together.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do do. I'm going to send you a copy. So, my latest book, well, a couple of years ago now was called The Power of Rebel Idea is a power of diverse thinking. I'm going to send you a copy. I want to have a copy of your book. I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it this week.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's exactly right. But it goes with Ferguson. He always hired assistant managers who challenged his perspective. You know, Carlos Quiro's Mike Felan, Muhlenstein, McLaren, he also would often do competitions for his players to guess who would be in the opposition team. He would go to other clubs and watch the way they trained. Ferguson came from Govern, from a very working class background. He never lost his capacity to learn. Never. Has always had a certain level of humility. But once they were out there and performing, he was incredibly self-confident. And I don't think that's a contradiction.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think most of the best leaders have it. Satchin Adella at Microsoft is a great example of that. Humble, their market cap has grown over a trillion dollars since he took over very humble person. I've met him a number of times, great, great person, but there is confidence when he's galvanizing his team towards a decision that they've debated and discussed”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's right. So it's extra time. He needed a score to get through. And Teddy Sherringham tried to take the ball. And you see on the video, Beckham snapped. And he said, when I took that freak, I was 100% I was going to make it. That's a useful thing to have, right? You meet Beckham away on the training pitch, the humility I need to improve the way I take free kicks. I need to look at the things that went wrong in the previous game. I need to just see that. So leaders need to be both humble and confident. Depending on where they are on the performance side, when they're out there executing confidence, when they're evaluating, reviewing”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a disaster because what you want to do after a surgical procedure is review it in a completely honest way so you can find out things that you did wrong and could improve. But if you have utter self-confidence, I don't need to improve. That's exactly as you say, a fixed mindset response. You don't improve through time. Beckham, I ghosted his autobiography a few years ago and he told me about when he took the free kick against Greece. How old are you, by the way? So you won't remember this. I remember”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Execution. But then if the surgeon says, I'm a genius, I'm brilliant, you know, I'm confident, I don't need to learn, they'll never evaluate what happened and therefore won't improve. I tell you it made me think I once ghosted David Beckham.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I mean by that is When you're evaluating what we should do next. Need to be hum You need to encourage different ideas and you need not to be threatened when people dissent. That encourages people to speak up. But when you've made a decision and you've found the destination and you're going for it, I think you need to then have confidence and you need to galvanize. That's where charisma comes to the fore when you articulate the mission. Because at that point, having different ideas, you know, you're already on the way. That can often be quite disruptive. I mean, obviously, you do need to change the trajectory if something. But I think that, and funny enough, in sport, so humility and evaluation, confidence and execution. It's the same in sport. So if you imagine you're a surgeon or in surgery, if you're humble at the time you wield the scalpe or all this might go wrong, I don't know everything. Your hand's going to be, if you're Tiger Woods in the 18, you want to be absolutely confident when you take the pup”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need leadership. So I believe my own view based on evidence is that you need social hierarchies in order for organizations, institutions and societies to succeed. But you want those hierarchies to work. So leadership, I don't think you can outsource it. You need to make judgments. You need to take ownership of those judgments. But if I had to say one thing, okay, and this is based on knowing a lot of many, many leaders in lots of different contexts over a long period of time. I think the best leaders. Have a hybrid approach to leadership.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A leader still needs to make the decision. I think it can often lead to confusion over who's in charge if it's a completely democratic organization.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, of course. Extremely difficult. I don't know if you'd agree with this, but I do think even in a psychologically safe, where people can speak up.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it fails, and then they're like stigmatized. They will never try. You need, you know, that's where fail fast comes. Yeah, you've nailed it. That's exactly the insight that I think is important.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things, I mean, one of the big mistakes, I mean, Six Sigma is a great process like lean manufacturing or things of that kind. It's basically squeezing out variation So if you imagine making a car, manufacturing car, all it takes is one component in the engine to be of the wrong size or specification and the whole thing. But when you're innovating, you need variation. You need to try new things. If you're trying to create a new computer program, a new website or a new drug and you don't know which combination of ingredients are going to create it, you need to try lots of combinations. If you penalize people for failure, You're only judging them on the outcome”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. That is exactly the same thing. And it's interesting that if you look at RD, have you heard of Sixth Sigma?”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mind and motivation with the journey they need to take to fulfill their potential. So it's good experiments, praising for effort, praising for process. Is a much more positive thing than praising for talent and fixed attributes.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mindsets very strongly related to it. So instead of for parents out there, I don't know, you probably have a very young audience. I'm Show Major, but the parents out there, it's very easy to praise young people for their talent. You're super talented. They've just drawn a picture. You're super talented. You're the next Picasso. You think they're going to develop all this self-esteem? The problem, as I've said, is that the moment they draw something that isn't Picasso, as soon as they get negative criticism, oh my goodness, I'm no Picasso after all. Much better thing to do is to praise them for the effort or the process. Well, I love the way that picture, the colors fit together. They think, oh, right, if I want to develop as a painter, I have to make the colours fit together in a more sophisticated way. You're aligning.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Self esteem that is friend, and people would protect their self esteem by not trying new things, right? And that's a disaster. Self-esteem can be very fragile. I like to talk much more about resilience. I want my children to be resilient, to try new things, to mess up, but not to be devastated by it. And that, I think, is a much better quality. Now, it may be that when people are talking about confidence, what they really mean is resilience. I want to be able to walk into a room, give it my best shot. Things don't go slightly wrong. I'm going to carry on regardless. Every person who's a success has had some really tough, difficult moments. And I just think that's an inevitable part of learning.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was all about building. It was called the self esteem movement. But it fail The reason it failed is because people would keep succeeding and they'd get all this self-esteem and then they would be given a difficult test, right? Or they would leave school and they'd actually hit the real world where they would fail. And what happened? All the walls of their world would come crumbling down. Oh my goodness.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think for what it's worth that self-belief, self-esteem Things of that kind are overrated. And the reason goes back to something we said earlier. I mean, there was a movement in the 70s and 80s in Western education to build self-esteem in young people. And the way to do it was to let them succeed all the time. So you might remember this, but you give them easy tests, get them to pass, and give them lots of, and then praise them for how super talented they were. They get all this self-esteem and they can change the world. People were so worried about undermining self-esteem that there were no losers in sports days at some schools. I don't know if you heard of this. Everyone's the win”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having listened to different sides of the argument, whether the crime had taken place. Now, that again is something that takes societies a long time to create an independent rule of law, a judiciary that's, and people were like, that's outrageous because I was defending somebody who had been accused of a racist remark. I said, yeah, racism's wrong, but let's wait for the process before this person is sacked. The implication was I was defending racism itself. But that is not the same thing. But I worry a bit that we're losing that distinction.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the reasons that happened is because of exactly what you say. People were freed from the constraints of the party line. You could say something that, for example, the religious authorities didn't approve of, that the sun is the center of the solar system, not the earth. You can test hypotheses. You can say the world is older than 6,000 years. You start to adapt your understanding of the world. That's science, that's technology. And I think the more constrained, you know, now free speech doesn't seem fashionable these days, but those ideas, in addition, by the way, to things like due process, the thing that has made me trend the only time I think I've ever trended on Twitter is when I defended due pro. So the idea that in order to be punished for something, you have to have had some kind of an independent process, some independent tribunal to establish”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's right. And, you know, I mean, it might sound old fashioned to say this, but John Stuart Mill, Locke, the founding fathers in the United States. What used to be called the Western miracle. You know, the fact that economic growth was very close to 0% for the first two million years of the species to which we belong, right? I mean, it was very, very tiny throughout our history. You know, somebody who was born Of 2,000 years ago, and somebody was born 1,500 years ago, would have seen very little change in. And then economic growth started taking off in the 18th century, and now obviously it's doubled and trebled and quadrupled. And we expect growth to be two to three percent a year. And if we have two consecutive quarters of negative growth, we call it a recession.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, one other thing, the wisdom, the Cricket Magazine, wisdom.com, have managed to find a post from an England player that was controversial, I think racist or misogynistic. But before they were 16 years of age. So they haven't published the name yet. But can you imagine if that person was suspended for something they said when they were effectively a child? Because we talked about failure. Anyone who aspires to the England cricket team never says anything publicly, never writes a school essay that might come back to haunt them, you know, you never, the way we learn is by saying things and then being challenged. You don't lose all of that if you basically just either toe the party line or say nothing at all. And that served, that would be a catastrophe for a dynamic liberal society.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not going to help Those massively important demographic statistics. cancel somebody and it's it's almost like it's a It's a surrender. We should be doing things that can have a tangible effect.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sensitive to racial discrimination. I saw my father not get from a brilliantly talented person, not get promoted because of his colour. And that, you know, it leaves a real scar on someone growing up. The other thing is I think it's a complete absence of an analysis of how to improve the lives of people from ethnic minorities, cancelling somebody who sent a tweet nine years ago in their formative years. It is almost like a fig leaf for true action. Civil rights movement was a great thing in America, in my opinion. Martin Luther King, civil rights act, the voting rights act. But I think we have to acknowledge that it hasn't achieved many of its most basic objectives if you look at the number of black people in prison, the education gap, the income and wealth gaps. I think there's a real empirical question about what we do.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I'm really glad to hear you say all that. I agree with everything you said. And I'll add one other thing so I concur with all of those three points. I think they're very powerful. The other thing I'm from a Half Pakistani, half Welsh background, you know, so I've had the P word a lot in the 70s and 80s.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. That's a great question. I've never been asked that before. So one of the things I'm thinking, so I write newspaper columns, or write a sports column for the Times. And the political column for the Sunday times, right? And I think one thing that I try to do is read other people who disagree with me, because that's a really useful thing because either you really understand why you think they're wrong or you realize there's a weakness in your own argument. But now I think about it, I think the last fortnight, I haven't been doing that enough. So I must remember that as a discipline to constantly read those sources that I know are going to be... Different. I've got a question for you, by the way. So, this is another one that I'm thinking about a lot. What's your view of the word woke?”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Authority down the chain of command. People, they could, as it were, initiate action against al-Qaeda targets if they thought it was sensible to do so. And it had a big, big effect on the success of the army, the number of operations, but also the percentage of successful operations. So I think that there's a lot of different people who are working along the lines that we're talking about right now. But for me, education is a key. And I would like to see more work done in schools to really equip young people with this active ingredient.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If he could, he would ask every wannabe police officer to take one year off to start a business and for it to fail or to succeed, just so they started learning using their own initiative. Because that is what great policing is about. Stanley McCrystal. Stanley McCrystal was the head of the task force in Iraq after the invasion that were trying to quell the insurgency of al-Qaeda. And at the time, it was a real top-down model. People at the bottom were passive. If they wanted to get anything done, they had to go up the chain of command, get sign off, and it would go back down. So lacking agility and not really using their brains. And he pushed.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yeah, you describe it brilliantly. A couple of things that might be worth throwing in. There's a guy called Mike Barton. He was the chief constable of Durham police. And he kept getting rated the highest by the independent inspector of the constabulary. And I remember I was really intrigued by this. So I talked to him and met him. And he said that...”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And I think, yeah, I think there are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas, huge potential who never act on their dreams. You had the dream, but think about your dream. That would remain dormant in your head had you not acted these are distinct phenomena the idea and the action. You can have ideas and dreams without acting on them.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've thought a lot about this too. I think you get people to do it. So what Fraser does in his courses, he keeps linking ideas to action. You're not allowed to have an idea without acting upon it. He calls it the active ingredient. So you get into a habit of, so one of the entrepreneurs, so he's done these experiments in Europe and in Africa. But in one of, I mean, he tells great stories about it, but it's such a long time since I read the papers. So I think habit, doing it again and again and again, you begin to get into the routine of linking ideas to action. Honestly, I think we shouldn't underestimate how damaging it can be if we just continue to go with the flow and we're not prepared to. Break it from time to time.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think that's what's happening. I would reject that hypothesis. I don't think people make a rational calculation. I think it's more habit. Once you're used to doing things, if you've been at a school where, and some people are lucky enough to go to school where you are encouraged to make things happen, to, you know, some schools, they are actually asked to start a business, to pick up the phone, to engage with other people as they seek to do something. You begin to, it becomes a habit. The idea of writing a letter and dropping, it's like no big deal. That isn't a barrier for me. It becomes second nature. I can tell you from this parking space, I was just in a, it was just pure inertia. I hadn't learned that entrepreneurial mindset. I mean, that took me a long time to learn as well.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Calls it the action cycle. Those entrepreneurs compared to a control group had 25, I can't remember the exact amount, but five times more successful businesses or 20% higher profits.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is absolutely critical. You go to school for all those years. You get to 16. But what about going out there and you're about to take a decision about what your future career will be? In my day when you came out of university, some people would be in the same career for life. And you take that decision without going and asking people, what was it like in this job? Could I perhaps work for a day in this job? A lot of people I went to university with took jobs without any of that proactive analysis of what it would be like. Now, you as an entrepreneur have this in spades. I want more entrepreneurship in schools. I want proactivity. Instead of learning business studies concepts, this is another experiment by Michael Fraser. Instead of people doing an MBA, he gave them a short course on converting ideas into action.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he thought, well, hang on a second, I could charter a private plane, which we were in the airport. So he took the initiative. Probably a few people had that idea. What about chartering a private plane? But he actually picked up the phone and said, right, how much will it cost to charter a plane? You know, $10,000. He then went round to all the people with a blackboard saying flight, this is the amount per ticket. Some people bought it, they managed to take the flight. And then when he got home, he rented a Boeing and went from there. And I think that proactivity.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The West German business is fantastic. We're going to have this pool of really keen workers. And it just didn't work out because the East German generalizing a little, but the East German workers had worked in a communist system where all the decisions are taken by the party bosses. And so if a machine broke down, instead of taking action to fix it, they would just wait for the boss person to come along and fix it for them if they needed the telephone number. They would wait and they wouldn't act on it. And I think that being able to, Richard Branson, you probably know, I mean, I got to know little. He talked about how, I mean, I think this is probably, well, this is the way he tells it. Virgin Atlantic, he was flying to the British Virgin Islands to meet his girlfriend. He has a stopover in Miami. They're bumped off the flight. They delay it to the next day and everyone sat there going, this is a disease.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because there is a fundamental inertia in a lot of us, it's easy to have an idea. It takes a bit of, you know, I remember when I was injured in table tennis and I wasn't practicing, I wasn't doing anything. I sat at home, you know, just posting a letter felt like an unbelievably tough thing to do. You have to go all the way to the post office. Oh man, it was like struggling. The psychologist I got interested in recently is a guy called Michael Fraser. He's a German, really interesting guy. And he looked at the unification of Germany, right, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought to myself, yeah, I should knock on the door, or I should write them a note, and so I'm willing to pay rent or to buy it from me. But I never got round to doing it, and a few years later I was at a house party, and this person said I used to live on Montague, and I'll really, that's interesting. I lived there too. So, yeah, I had the house at the top. I said, what, with the parking space? And he said, yeah, well, I never understood is that no one ever came and asked whether they could rent it out. And I thought that idea was in my head and I never acted on it.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because all the houses have less parking spaces than there are. Sorry, there are less parking spaces than there are houses. And so people park on the street and then they get taken up. But you end up having to park 10 minutes away. I noticed at the top of the road there's a house with a parking space that is always empty”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was just retrospectively obvious that the solution to a problem that many people had who were traveling a lot is to put wheels on luggage, right? Wheel suitcases, which we all have now. But having the idea doesn't mean a thing. You've actually got to act on that idea, right? You've got to say, right, I'm going to try and design something. I'm going to try and sell it to a department store. I'm going to try and market it. I'm going to try and buy a shop. I'm going to have to pay rent. I'm going to have to go to the bank and get some debt. That is a mess. There is a massive difference between a dormant, passive idea and one that you act upon. Another example, I lived on Richmond on a road in Richmond when I first moved there in my mid-20s and it had no off-street parking. What I didn't realize is that in Richmond parking is a nightmare.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in addition to those things, so fixed mindset, fear of failure, risk adversity, all the things we've addressed. The other thing, I think, is I've become more interested in. It's related to what we've said, but I think it's different, is what you might call initiative or agency or proactivity. I remember having an idea, this is in the 1970s, early 1980s. I was going to Tableton's competitions and carrying this very heavy bag, blue hodel, ascot hodle, and thinking, my goodness, this is really doing my back in.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the reason I mentioned it is there is this global systematic variation in psychology. So you may have heard of something called the fundamental attribution error, where we tend to blame people for things that things have gone wrong because of the situation. That's much stronger in the West than it is in the rest of the world. Cognitive dissonance varies fundamentally. Even visual illusions vary around the world. And the reason I mention that is I think it's helpful for businesses to understand it, but I think it actually reaches into our deep history.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a good reason for it if you think about it. I mean, every now, well, is there a good, I mean, there's a number of different theories about why it happens, but one of them is that occasionally one can get things wrong that seem obvious. And if there's a lot of people who are independently saying the same thing, that's very good evidence of what they're saying is true. And so humans, I think that bias evolved probably to enable us to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd. Crowds, if they mean, crowds can converge on things incorrectly, but not independently of each. So if you imagine a stock market bubble, that's one person buying, another one seeing that person buying, and then another person seeing those two bubbying, and they get a bandwagon effect. Whereas if 10 people independently say that these two lines are different and you have no reason to believe that they're lies,”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same. And so they say, yeah, they're all the same. So they're effectively disbelieving the evidence of their own eyes in order to fit in with the crowd. Now, that conformity bias, which surprises a lot of people, is stronger in other parts of the world than it is in Western.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if you're thinking of the same experiment. The line. Yeah, yeah. So Solomon Ash, one of the most famous experiments in modern psychology, he drew a number of vertical lines which were of the same length. And then a fifth line that was significantly different in length to the other four. And then he got people to answer the question, do you think these, I think I've got this broadly right, do you think all of these lines are of the same length? And if you have people answering that on their own, like 99% say the fifth line is of a different length to the other four. But what Ash did is he got 10 Confederates to come in and say, oh, they're the same and then, oh, they're the same. And then the third person, oh, yeah, they're the same length. And the fourth person, they're the same length. Then when it gets to the actual subject of the experiment, they're like, oh my goodness, if all these people think that, it must be the same.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, you know, I think the truth of human psychology are probably, you know, I mean, you mentioned Ashley. Hey, by the way, on psychology and on the global reach of Twitter, you talked about Ash's conformity experiment. That varies systematically around the world. So in Western countries, more individualistic countries, people deviate more from the herd.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would never have thought of that as a way of having a handle on a part. I love that. Absolutely loved it. And it's a funny kind of way. It's kind of like as a parent. It's a bit like reverse psychology.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT