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

“When the first hit was called Toastmasters, and this is like a global network of just public speaking clubs where other normal people go to the club to develop social confidence. And the one nearest me and Richmond was in Twickenham, just over the bridge, and there was Franco worked at Lloyd's on the High Street and just a group of normal, and you give a speech, they'd give you feedback. And the mentoring was a really important part of it because you need a bit of feedback and what you could have done better. And then about two-thirds of the way through there's something called tabletopics, where somebody writes a list of topics on cards, but no one else in the room knows what they are. So you have to go to the front, you pick it up, and then turn around and spontaneously talk for a minute on whatever topic. The first one I ever did was the natural history museum. That's terrifying, right? You're not used to it. But you learn and you develop that skill. So learning how to speak.”
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 wasn't that good, right? Because I hadn't practiced it. I'd never done it before. And I came off the stage and I thought, you know what, I'm just not cut out for this. If I'm invited again to give a talk to a company, I'll just politely decline. Then I thought, and it took me about 48 hours to think, what a ridiculous way to hijack my own development. If you actually had the right attitude, if you had the right mindset, you can probably learn these skills and take advantage of these brilliant opportunities because you always learn, don't you, when you go and speak in an organization. So I Googled public speaking practice.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An unintended side effect was being invited to give a speech at a big corporation, an investment bank, an American investment bank. And obviously, as an ex-ping pong player, I'm thinking, what is going on here? Imposter syndrome. And also, I went to a comp. We didn't do any, almost no public speaking. We learned stuff, we learned things in the classroom. But the idea of getting up and speaking in front of an audience was kind of very alien”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely 100% correct, and that's why the obsession with fame is a massive danger, I think, to a culture. The thing about speaking, so a completely unintended side effect of writing my first book. So I'm finishing table tennis and I'm like, you know, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? How am I going to define success? And I decide to write this book in 2000. When did it come out? 2010 called Bounce.”
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 was kind of considered the great sort of panacea of life. But 10 years ago, a lot of people were saying in surveys of young people, what do you want to do in life? What do you want to be in life? And the answer was famous. Famer, you know, not to have a body of work That gives you fame to walk. You want to walk down the red carpet, having created an amazing film. But no, they just wanted the red carpet. And I thought that was... That was a dangerous thing, and I'm sure there's been a correction since then. But I think the obsession”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started looking at how aspirations have changed since I was in my choice. So when I was at university, everyone wanted to work for the UN.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting, that's interesting because about a decade ago, I started looking at now, I believe it or not, 50, well, I was going to say, do you remember Oil of...”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Smarter. But humans lived in tighter, more socially connected. One of the kin. And therefore they can also show it with their children. They can get a cross pollination of ideas. They can bring ideas together. And then it gets passed down the generations. And it was that sociality that conferred a competitive advantage on our ancestors above and Neanderthals. It is, I think, our distinctive quality. We are social beings to an extent greater, I think, than any others except the insects like ants who. For slightly different evolutionary reasons cooperate at scale.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think this is of great and deep significance. And just to put a historical lens on this, after the Enlightenment, the idea was of human beings as individuals. Individualism was the great goal of political life. And I think we conceived of people as deciding to interact with other people, deciding to have families. And you might remember Margaret Thatcher once said, there's no such thing as society. There are just individual men and women and families. I mean, she had more to say after that. It wouldn't be fair to say that was her entire philosophy by any means. I think she was a great prime minister in many ways. But if you actually go back deeper in human history, our ancestors lived at the same time as the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals had probably bigger brains than us. They may have been individual.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get money for it, you know. You can look after your kids, or you can do something with it, but it's that feedback, that sense of making some kind of a difference. I mean, in a funny kind of a way, that's why for a long time, as I came towards the end of my telegram, I wanted to go to politics. I thought that is the place where you can make the most difference, right? You've got the levers to do something interesting. And then I realized it was not quite as fun avenue perhaps as writing.”
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 all about how much money you have in your bank account. And I think we all know although it's a bit of a clich ⁇ to say that it doesn't provide happiness, certainly not of a sustained nature. I think that that thing about social interaction, the thing that makes me happiest for sure is putting one's heart and soul into a project, like, for example, writing a book, and then getting a letter from somebody who explains in their own way how it has positively impacted their life. And there is no feeling like that for me as a writer. And that really is a powerful engine to motivate you to come up with a new idea for a new book. The fact that you know it has meaning for other people. Not that they've paid money to buy it and that money has been transferred via a publisher into my bank account. That is much less significant. I mean, it's great if you 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
“Yeah. And yeah, look, that makes a lot of sense to me. I have to say one thing that given what you've just said, you'll probably agree with, I think the narrow way that success has sometimes been defined in Western capitalist societies has been deeply mistaken.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, as a former sports person, I was a table tennis professional for a number of years. Success was defined in terms of winning matches. Achieving very clear, tangible objectives like winning the national championships or the Commonwealth. But I think when it comes to life beyond sport, it's so objective in something like the 100 meter sprint. You want to beat your PB and you can see it on a digital readout at the end of a race how close you've come or whether you've achieved that objective. In the life beyond sport, I have to say one of the things that is quite difficult, I think, for sports people to transition is it's more elusive, more subjective, more ephemeral. And I think it is a really difficult thing to define what you personally mean by success. I'm not 100% sure that I've defined it for myself yet. Have you?”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a fixed mindset, people think that success is all about talent, having the gift. A growth mindset is saying, okay, talent obviously matters, it's a factor, but it's not enough. It's what we do with our talents. I wasn't the best table tennis player in the world. I never got into the top 20 of the world rankings. But with that attitude, I maximized my own potential. I think leadership counts when it comes to innovation. I mean, the way Amazon conduct meetings. And then when they start talking, the most senior person always speaks last. You'll get an unvarnished access to the insights of your brilliant team rather than speaking first and everyone basically converging on what you as a leader has just said. There are a lot of people with truly brilliant ideas, huge potential who never act on their dreams. But having the idea doesn't mean a thing. You've actually got to act on that idea.”
2021-06-14 · The Diary of a CEO · World Leading Mindset Expert: How To Reach Your Full Potential - Matthew Syed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT