Steve

In 1942, the Japanese rounded up all Chinese men in Singapore. They were filtering out the healthy young ones to execute. Lee Kuan Yew was 18. A guard pointed at him and said: "Go to that lorry." He knew what that meant. The lorry went to the beaches. The beaches meant machine guns. He asked: "Can I collect my other things?" They said yes. He walked away, found his family's gardener, and hid in his quarters for two days. When they changed the screening inspectors, he tried again. This time, he got through. The ones sent to that lorry were taken to the beaches and shot. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 didn't survive. 60 years later, he sat down at Harvard to explain how he built Singapore from a tiny island into one of the wealthiest nations on Earth: On what the war did to him: "We lived in happy, placid colonial Singapore in the 1920s and 30s. The British Empire would have lasted another thousand years, so we thought." Then the Japanese came. In less than one and a half months, the British collapsed. "Three and a half years of hell. Butchery. Brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate. I did." "But it changed us." "What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly?" When the war ended, Lee went to Cambridge to study law. But he was watching with different eyes. "Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? Because they scooted when the Japanese came in. And why shouldn't I be running the place?" On learning languages to lead: Lee was the best speaker in English. But only 20% of Singapore spoke English. The masses spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, and Malay. "So every day at lunchtime, instead of having lunch, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learn to convert my Mandarin into Hokkien." "Had I not mastered that, the battle would be lost by default." His first speech in Hokkien, the kids laughed at him. "I said, please don't laugh. Help me. I'm trying to get you to understanding." By 6 months, he could get his ideas across. By 2 years, he was fluent. "Believe it or not, at the end of two years I could speak better than most of them." "That came respect." It showed two things: how determined he was, and how sincere. Here was a man doing all these other things and still learning their language just to talk to them. On fighting the Communists: The Communists had been organizing since 1923. The year Lee was born. "Here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them. And they are professionals at organization." They had elimination squads. Guerrillas in the jungle. Killer squads in the towns. Lee stood up and said no. "They denied that they were Communists. 'We're just left-wing socialists.' So I did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene. And I made it in three languages." English. Malay. Mandarin. 20 minutes each. "When I finished each broadcast, the director of the station couldn't see me. Went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath." "But it was a fight for survival. Life or death." On where trust comes from: "It's difficult to establish trust in times of calm. You just say, 'Well, it's an argument, therefore I'm a better guy than you.'" "But when the chips are down and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way and you show that you're prepared for it and you'll fight for them, it makes a difference." "Without that trust, we could not have built Singapore." On IQ vs EQ: Harvard asked him: would you prefer high IQ or high EQ in a leader? "IQ, you can get beautiful paper done. Complex formulas worked out. Elegant solutions." "But when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice, you're dealing with human beings." "If you're not good at EQ, you can't sense that A doesn't get on with B, and you put them in the same team. It's no good." He rated his own EQ as 7 or 8 out of 10. His IQ as "maybe 120." But he had colleagues who could sense a person instantly. "He shook hands with the man and said, 'I recoiled when I felt his palm. Evil man.' And he was. How does he know? I don't know." "So I learned whenever I had to do interviews to choose people, I would get people who are very good at seeing through a candidate." On corruption: Singapore in the 1950s was full of deals, bribes, and organized crime. "When we took over, we decided that this was the critical factor. If we did not make it so that every dollar put in at the top reaches the ground as one dollar, we're not going to succeed." "We came in and made a symbolic act. We dressed in white shirts, white trousers, and said we will be what we represent." He put the anti-corruption bureau under his personal portfolio. "I gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything. All ministers. Including myself." One of his own colleagues took half a million in bribes. When the investigation started, he asked to see Lee. "I said, if I see you then I'll be a witness in court. So best not see me. Better see your lawyer." The man committed suicide. Left a note saying: "As an oriental gentleman who believes in honor, I have to pay the supreme price." "It's a heavy price. But it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions." On consistency: Lee had three journalists analyze 40 years of his speeches. He asked them: what was the dominant theme? All three said the same thing: consistency. "What I said at the beginning, throughout all that period, the theme stayed loud and clear." "That made it simple. Because you know where you stand with me. And you know what I want to do." On delivering results: "We deliver the homes, the schools, the jobs, the hospitals." "Today, 98% of our people own their own homes. The smallest would be about $100,000 US. The biggest about $300,000." "Once you own that amount of assets, you are not in favor of risking it with a crazy government. Your assets will go down in value." "But that was planned." Why? Because Singapore is small. Everyone does national service. If you're going to fight, you better be fighting for something you own. "So we give everybody a stake." On changing culture slowly: Lee wanted Singapore to speak English. But he couldn't force it. "Had I passed a law and said you will all learn English, we would have had mayhem. Riots." Instead, he let parents watch who got the best jobs. The jobs were already there, from the multinationals and banks. They all used English. "They watched and saw who got the best jobs. And they switched." It took 16 years. "I did not want to have said 16 years. Because in those 16 years I lost 20,000 Chinese graduates who had poor jobs. I wanted to make it shorter. I couldn't. I would have run into flack." On whether leadership can be taught: Lee quoted Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Yiddish literature. Someone asked Singer: "Can you make a writer write great literature?" He paused. Then said: "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a shorter time." Lee's version: "Can you make a leader of anybody? I don't think so." "He must have some of the ingredients. He must have that high energy level. He must have the ability to project himself, his ideas. He must have the desire, almost instinctively, to say 'let's do something better.' Of wanting to do something for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family." "You can't teach those things. He's either got it or he hasn't got it." "But if he's got that, then you can save him a lot of trouble." On sustaining yourself: Harvard asked how he managed despair over decades of leadership. "If your message is one of despair, then you should not be a leader. You must give people hope." "But there are moments when you feel very down. Either because you're physically down, or emotionally down, or because the world has turned adverse against you." "When you are in that condition, the first thing you do is get a good night's sleep. Then get a swim or chase a ball. Get the cobwebs out of your mind." "If you're not fit, you're going to make mistakes. Physically fit. You must stay physically and mentally fit." In his later years, he learned to meditate. "At the end of 20 minutes to half an hour, my pulse rate can go down from 100 to about 60. You can feel yourself subside. You still your mind. You empty your mind." "Then when you are rested, you resume quietly. You still got the same problems. Maybe you sleep on it. Come back. Look at it for a few days. Then decide." This 2 hour Harvard interview will teach you more about leadership than every business book you've read combined. Bookmark & give it 2 hours this weekend, no matter what.

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years. Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered: Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures. Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing. He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success: The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren. He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above. His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics. He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades. The results split into three groups. The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives. And the bottom group? By any measure, failures. The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic. It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families. Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity. There's a concept called "capitalization rate." It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing? In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college. If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else. Here's something stranger. Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team: January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th... 11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March. This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too. Why? The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st. When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated. So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games. We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest. Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best. Self-fulfilling prophecy. The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero. We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar. Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college. 11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity. Now here's the part about math. Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing. Some people say it's genetic. It's not. It's attitudinal. When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it. When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't. Here's the proof. The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes. It's so long most kids don't finish it. A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed. Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance. The correlation was 0.98. In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high. If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time. If they can do it, they're good at math. Why do Asian cultures have this attitude? Gladwell's theory: rice farming. His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays. A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year. Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work. There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry." His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry." If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup. When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly. Now consider distance running. In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day. In the United States, that number is probably 5,000. Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%. Kenya's is probably 95%. The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention. Here's the most fascinating finding. 30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability. Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email. This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability. How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood? You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead. 80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs. By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership. Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle. They say it's the reason they succeeded. A disadvantage that became an advantage. Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand: When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability. We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become. We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table. We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair. The capitalization argument is liberating. It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation. It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out. If we choose to pay attention. This 60 minute Microsoft talk will teach you more about success than every self-help book you've ever read combined. Bookmark this & give it an hour today, no matter what.