Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage

acknowledging and receiving the perceptions of others, while simultaneously empowering yourself not to embrace and adopt those views. You can accept the perceptions of others so that you can consciously address them and confront them—but without embracing and internalizing them.

Your success is rarely dictated by one single outcome

It’s not often that we hear alternative perspectives that drastically differ from our own. We tend to hang out with people who are like us, who share our beliefs, values, and habits. We associate within the bounds of where we belong. So simply being the atypical voice allows you to enrich.

The high-concept pitch is really something that allows you to distill your point into three or four well-placed, poignant words. It delivers all the information your target audience will initially need, in a quick “shock.”

you’re likely to get some dialogue going from a two-sentence pitch. You’re likely to get some questions. That is the point. That is how you move from delight and start to enrich. What you should be doing during the two-sentence pitch is positioning yourself in such a way that it piques some interest in your counterpart and you elicit the types of q

In cultivating a mind-set for reflective improvisation,

I’ve studied how “soft” factors*—such as personality, the extent to which you are seen as trustworthy, passionate, or committed, and the way you interact with people—rather than objective data, drive the decisions and outcomes of individuals and firms.

Constraints, it turns out, also provide us with a unique opportunity to discover and employ our strengths in a way that enriches. Constraints alter the path that we take, even in the instances in which they make us feel like we have no options.

We see one path that worked for someone else, and then try to replicate that, forgetting that there are infinite ways to get from point A to point B. And there are lots of point B’s.