“Leaders Eat Last” By Simon Sinek — Part 1
Few of learnings taken from this book
- “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.”
- Every single employee is someone’s son or someone’s daughter. Like a parent, a leader of a company is responsible for their precious lives.
- Words like ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘my’ will no longer be in your vocabulary. They will be replaced with words like ‘we,’ ‘together’, and ‘us.’
The Circle of Safety
A lion used to prowl about a field in which Four Oxen used to dwell. Many a time he tried to attack them, but whenever he came near they turned their tails to one another so that whichever way he approached them he was met by the horns of one of them. At last, however, they fell a-quarreling among themselves, and each went off to pasture alone in a separate corner of the field. Then the Lion attacked them one by one and soon made an end of all four.
— Aesop, sixth century B.C.
Letting someone into an organization is like adopting a child.
The study conducted by researchers at University College London found that people who didn’t feel recognized for their effort at work were more likely to suffer from heart disease.
There are four primary chemicals in our body that contribute to all our
positive feelings that I will generically call “happy”: endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. Whether acting alone or in concert, in small doses or large, anytime we feel any sense of happiness or joy, odds are it is because one or more of these chemicals is coursing through our veins. They do not exist simply to make us feel good. They each serve a very real and practical purpose: our survival
IT’S COMMON KNOWLEDGE that we shouldn’t go to the supermarket when
we’re hungry. We always end up buying too much and buying things we don’t
really need
Two chemicals — endorphins and dopamine — are the reason that we are
driven to hunt, gather, and achieve. They make us feel good when we find
something we’re looking for, build something we need, or accomplish our
goals. These are the chemicals of progress.
It is dopamine that makes us a goal-oriented species with a bias for progress. When we are given a task to complete, a metric to reach, as long as we can see it or clearly imagine it in our mind’s eye, we will get a little burst of dopamine to get us on our way.
WE ARE VERY visually oriented animals. We seem to trust our eyes more than any of our other senses. When we hear a bump in the night we want to see that nothing is there before we can relax and go back to bed. When someone we are getting to know makes a promise or claims they have accomplished something, we want to “see it to believe it.
This is the reason we’re often told to write down our goals. “If you don’t
write down your goals,” so the saying goes, “you won’t accomplish them.”
There is some truth to this. Like seeing that fruit-filled tree in the distance, if
we are able to physically see what we are setting out to accomplish or clearly
imagine it, then we are indeed, thanks to the powers of dopamine, more likely
to accomplish that goal.
This is why people who balance their checkbooks or maintain a budget are more likely to save or not overspend. Saving is not a state of mind; it is a goal to be achieved.
Short or long term, the clearer we can see what we are setting out to achieve, the more likely we are to achieve it. It’s exciting, thanks to dopamine.
It is the selfless chemicals that keep the Circle of Safety strong.
Inside a Circle of Safety, we feel like we belong.
“At our core, we are herd animals that are biologically designed to find comfort when we feel like we belong to a group”
There are few feelings that human beings crave more than a sense of
belonging ...the feeling of being inside a Circle of Safety.
The more good things we do, the more good we want to do. This is the
power of oxytocin
Happy Reading !!!
