7 Unforgettable Lessons from 7 New York Times Bestselling Authors

I’ve had the privilege to talk to about humanity’s greatest ideas with some of the best human beings in my opinion…authors. Especially New York Times bestselling author that have learned to package an idea for the world to consume.

Also, a lot of people get intimidated by people in this position, but you need to realize these are just normal humans like you and I. The first NYT bestselling author I interviewed was the Jesus of business & marketing…Neil Patel. 

Neil Patel

Hustle: The Power to Charge Your Life with Money, Meaning, and Momentum

Neil taught me every I know about marketing & spreading influence and has made me a lot of money over the years. I took full advantage of Neil’s free articles, videos, webinars and it’s made a world of difference in business and spreading influence in general online. 

Perhaps Neil’s greatest quality is his genuine enjoyment of what he does. During our interview..I asked Neil “you’ve started so many multi-million dollar companies...but you’re not the CEO at any of them...why?” He told me he’s not good at managing people. He sticks to his strengths, manages his weaknesses to the best of his ability or HIRES someone else to do it!

Among all the advice Neil told me that in order to be successful in life on the business side…you just need to do one thing really well. But, you might not make as much money as you want to! If you happen to be talented at something you enjoy doing…focus single-mindedly and forget about the rest. 

He also told me the key to podcast growth isn’t to transcribe your podcast but to write an article…exactly like this! 

End Lesson: Know who you are, don’t be afraid of it, triple down on your strengths and manage your weaknesses. 

Dr. Rick Hanson

Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, New York Times best-selling author and Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. 

I talked to Rick about how you can beat the brain's negativity bias, which is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. This bias evolved to help ancient animals survive, but today it makes us feel needlessly frazzled, worried, irritated, lonely, inadequate, and blue.

Instead, in just a few seconds at a time in the flow of daily life, you can turn your experiences - the pleasure in a cup of coffee, the accomplishment in finishing a tricky email, the warmth from a friend's smile - into lasting inner strengths built into your brain, such as resilience, balance, and positive emotions.

Grounded in neuroscience, Hardwiring Happiness is super practical, full of easy-to-use methods and guided practices to grow a steady well-being, self-worth, and inner peace. And it has special sections on children, motivation, relationships, trauma, and spiritual practice.

Here are the main takeaways I took from our conversation.

• Human Beings have gotten so good at manipulated and commanding the external world to create technologies that extend our abilities and power that we have forgotten about our internal world.
• You need to be mindful, present and attentive in life…because it is a prerequisite for inner personal transformation…in combination with your breath like the steps below.

How to Actually Change your Default Thoughts Over Time

1. Notice Good Facts - Even if it seems stupid - like someone smiling at you
2. Help Yourself feel something - move past the analytical mind. 
3. After Recognizing a Good fact…slow down with a breath or two…let it marinate…to register

I'm also throwing in my own tip for this that's helped me embrace this a bit more.

4. During your breath, focus on how you're grateful for that "good fact" happening. 

Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data

Viktor is the New York Times bestselling author of Big Data, a prediction for how data will revolutionize the market economy and make cash, banks, and big companies obsolete

In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. Data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior. 

Big finance and big companies will be replaced by small groups and individual actors who make markets instead of making things: think Uber instead of Ford, or Airbnb instead of Hyatt.

Viktor is a professor at Oxford University and brings a perspective that not a lot of us are foreseeing in the future. As he states Big Data is a new perspective on how we see reality. We will be able to make better decisions about our society and continuation of a quest from Humanity stemming from the age of enlightenment. The point isn’t to answer questions we already have but to use Big Data to drive new questions that we didn’t even think we should ask. 

Viktor’s philosophy on life is to always go after and tackle the big & hard issues. You’re going to fail but there’s enough people solving smaller problems. Overall, I learned that the future of humanity & work is going to be all about more creative tasks and emphasize the human qualities of us rather than make us better machines or faster calculators. 

Robert Sutton

The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt?

I had the utmost privilege to speak to the legendary Bob Sutton, on the Humans 2.0 podcast. 

Robert has written a plethora of books all based on management that have gone on to be New York Times & Wall-street Journal Bestselling books and for good reason. 

Bob has the ability to shine the light on what we instinctively think about other people, in a way that best serves the world and how society should be operating.

Complaining about assholes and bullies is no way to live your life. You're not a victim.

The most important points in Bob's book, The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt are..

? Temporary Assholes - Maybe the guy you think you know is going through some bad stuff and we’ve all been there where we do things in situations that we’re not proud of.

? It’s easy to call someone an asshole, be slow to label others, but fast to label yourself. However, like everything in life, it’s paradoxical and depends on the context. 

Some of us are the exact opposite and are too harsh on ourselves.

Like all of the Humans 2.0 podcast episodes, I ask my guests to leave the audience with a self-inquisitive question to ask themselves.

Bob asked:

1 How much am I talking vs everyone else?

2 Among the things I’m saying what percentage of them are statements?

3 What percentage are questions?

At the end of the day, you should make fewer statements, and ask more questions.

Elena Botelho

The CEO Next Door: The 4 Behaviors that Transform Ordinary People into World-Class Leaders

Elena Botelho, is the co-author of the New York Times & WSJ Bestselling Book "The CEO Next Door," which takes an in-depth look at how leaders make it to the top of their professions — and stay there.

I learned a lot from the conversation with Elena, but two behaviors in particular stuck out to me that are the most important to understand.

This is not her opinion, but rather based on an in-depth analysis of over 2,600 leaders drawn from a database of more than 17,000 CEOs and C-suite executives, as well 13,000 hours of interviews, and two decades of experience advising CEOs and executive boards.

Botelho and Powell identified four behaviors associated with CEO success. Entrepreneurs have "inimitable advantages" in three of those behaviors, Botelho says--and "dangerous gaps in one." 

Be Relentlessly Reliable

"Reliability is what gets other people to trust you so that you can deliver for them in any aspect of life. Reliability is about making clear and realistic commitments. It's showing up on time, every time."

and then it goes even deeper...

"The interesting thing is that we all have an antenna of whether or not others around us are reliable and we jump to judgments really quickly. Reliability is really about setting clear expectations that are achievable and then delivering on them."

Always Adapt Boldy

"Highly adaptable people are better than others at letting go of the past so they don't necessarily see the future before others do they're just willing to act on that future and leave behind the habits that served them before.

Blockbuster had an option to buy Netflix for low tens of millions of dollars....three times. Well Blockbuster's is gone and Netflix is still around right. So it's not that they didn't know where the future was headed and didn't have an opportunity to participate in that future it's just that they're making so much money on their core business that they couldn't imagine putting themselves out of their own core business."

Jay Heinrichs 

Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion 

Jay is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion. The book has been published in 12 languages and three editions. The leading modern work on rhetoric, it is one of the top ten books assigned at Harvard.

His latest book is How to Argue with a Cat: A Human's Guide to Persuasion.

While it’s hard, persuading a cat is possible. And after that, persuading humans becomes a breeze, and that is what you will learn in this book. How to Argue with a Cat will teach you how to:

· Hold an intelligent conversation―one of the few things easier to do with a cat than a human.

· Argue logically, even if your opponent is furry and irrational.

· Hack up a fallacy (the hairball of logic).

· Make your body do the talking (cats are very good at this).

· Master decorum: the art of fitting in with cats, venture capitalists, or humans.

· Learn the wisdom of predator timing to pounce at the right moment.

· Get someone to do something or stop doing it.

· Earn any creature’s respect and loyalty.

He is a Professor of the Practice of Rhetoric and Oratory at Middlebury College.

Interestingly enough one of the main points I took away from Jay were 2 things...

Jay told me before he hopped on our podcast session...his intention was to send love beams out of this eyes...huh? But here's the thing, it works my friends. I felt it right away. I now exercise this every single time I hope on a recording session or meet somebody new for the first time.

Another thing I learned from Jay is the idea of creating a memory palace for yourself. This is originally from the ancient Greeks & Romans. They did this because there were a lot of hecklers in the audience and you may have a memorized speech but with all of the distractions and forks it wouldn't be possible.

Instead of memorizing a speech..they would think about which route they would take through their memory place which rooms they were going to visit for ideas, expressions and figures. When they were interrupted they would simply change the route and not be flustered to start at the beginning.

Isaac Lidsky

Eyes Wide Open: Overcoming Obstacles and Recognizing Opportunities in a World That Can't See Clearly

Isaac started to progressively lose his sight from ages 13-25 from a rare genetic optic disorder. He played Weasel on NBC's Saved by the Bell: The New Class and is the only blind person to serve as a law clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Despite his condition he graduated from Harvard at 19 with an honors degree in mathematics and computer science. He founded a nonprofit organization to fund the development of treatments for blinding diseases and within 5 years grew it to a dozen cities nationwide and more than $5 million. The technology company he founded sold for $230 million.

2 years ago I saw a visual shift in my reality. In April I heard Isaac on Tom Billyeu's podcast talk about how our eyes only provide ten percent of our reality and the rest is from imagination.

It just reconfirmed everything that I was thinking. TED invited Lidsky to present a mainstage TED Talk at TEDSUMMIT 2016 in Banff, Canada, and it was viewed more than a million times in 20 days. Lidsky now speaks to and works with organizations around the world.

He has been recognized for his achievements dozens of times and his leadership is routinely sought after. He is an advisor to a $1+ billion tech “unicorn.”

Perhaps most striking, Lidsky is only 37, and he is blind. Born with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a rare degenerative disease of the retina, from age 12 to 25 he slowly lost his sight. As his bio makes clear, neither his youth nor his blindness have limited him, however.

This is true in his professional life and personal life alike. Isaac married Dorothy, the love of his life, in June 2004. In September 2010 she gave birth to their triplets, Lily Louise, Phineas and Thaddeus—collectively, “The Tripskys”—and in December 2015 baby Clementine completed the family. The six Lidskys live in Windermere, Florida.

New York Times Bestselling author of "Eyes Wide Open: Overcoming Obstacles and Recognizing Opportunities in a World That Can't See Clearly"

Isaac lost his vision in his 20s and came to the realization that vision, the way in which we see reality is all constructed by our brain.

Listen to the Humans 2.0 Podcast

If you’re looking for a technological self-development podcast that focuses all about the human experience transformation in this 21st-century world, you should definitely check out my podcast, Humans 2.0 

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