43 win with peace and flourish --You can win the Nobel Peace Prize!!!
Hey, everybody. Today, I wanna talk about winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Remember when we were young and they said, you can be president"? I wanna say you can win the Nobel Peace Prize, and somebody's gotta work on it, right? Because it's not going so well, and it's harder to work on the Nobel Peace Prize than it is to work on a plan to go to war. I think that's one of the unfortunate things of today, is that maybe we don't even realize that the news is seven negative comments to every one positive, and the positive and the peaceful response is harder to pull off. How am I going to win the Nobel Peace Prize? That's Episode 43. And I believe that attaching meaning to peace and flourishing and a leadership return on investment is how we do that. 📍 Welcome home, my leadership friends. I've been thinking about how to win the Nobel Peace Prize since I started heavily working on leadership, and I've had a friend shake the hand of the King of Sweden. I've had people that I've seen in person talk about winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and it seems so big a stretch, but like anything else, it starts with an idea. And maybe we work together, maybe you forward this video on to somebody else that might win the Nobel Peace Pr- someday by thinking about this question that may be bigger than leadership itself, bigger than business, and perhaps even bigger than politics and the power of politics. Why do human beings seem more attracted to justice than peace? And think about that. Sometimes you can't right the wrong, and justice is retribution, and we need justice, we need accountability, we need courage to confront wrongdoing. But justice alone doesn't tell us what comes next, and it doesn't mean I'm against our troops, either. I'm pro troops. I'm pro strength for peace. Justice can remove a tyrant, though. Justice can expose corruption, you say. Justice can right a wrong. However, peace builds. Peace creates. Peace heals. Peace takes extra work. Peace teaches children. Children know right away that peace is the right idea, right? Kindergarten. Everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten is what the book used to say. Peace starts- In business? Not very often, but let's work on that. Peace discovers medicines. Peace composes Music. I don't believe music exists. Oh, I don't believe peace exists. I believe we're gonna be a warring society. No, I don't wanna think that way. Music does exist. We can go with the rhythm. We can find that peaceful rhythm. Peace allows human beings to flourish. For years, researchers and institutions like Princeton University, which happens to have the same colors as Oregon State University, Cornell University, these are agricultural colleges sometimes, and they explored human flourishing, not just livestock. Meaning, wellbeing, and social trust. We talk about trust a lot on this show because leadership and trust go hand in hand, and one consistent finding is that people thrive when they experience purpose, belonging, trust, and positive relationships. Why do you play on the company softball team? You want that feeling of belonging, that you're not just working with people that are out for a buck. You want those outings with people where you create positive relationships. In other words, flourishing is not an accident. Takes some planning. Somebody had to plan for that softball team or have a notion of it, and then it's built. What if we attach much meaning to building peace, as much meaning to building peace as we currently attach to fighting battles? What if the hero wasn't merely the person who defeated an enemy? I honestly think this is Nobel Prize-worthy because people are confused as human beings looking at the quantitative and justifying things that affect people qualitatively, like losing a loved one. When you go in and you murder people to take over land, to do power politicking, that doesn't just go away. That person wants justice. They know that their child was innocent. And Elon Musk talked about the old guys who know each other send in young people that don't know each other to do battle. What if the hero was the person that created the conditions where enemies were no longer needed? That's environment. In flying, we talk about the pilot, the airplane, and the environment, and your emotional state. Before you go off flying, you wanna look at PAVE, P-A-V-E. Again, pilot, airplane, environment is the V, and E, your emotional state and stressors. You have to take these into account so that you do a great job as a pilot. Why don't we do that in our peaceful relations with other countries? If your emotional state is that you need to do retribution, maybe you aren't ready to talk to them yet, and that takes patience, and that takes work, and that takes diplomacy. The late South African leader and Nobel Prize winner Nelson Mandela said a lot of great things, " It always seems impossible until it's done," he say. Mandela understood something profound. Reconciliation is harder than resistance. Resistance is the first step. Building something that is hard to take down, that's the hard part. And likewise, Nobel Prize recipient Martin Luther King said He spoke of beloved community, a future in which justice and love worked together. And then that way you create a society where all people can thrive. Flourishing and thriving are things that we talk about as buzzwords in advertising and everything, but both these men understood that peace is not passive. Peace is productive. Peace is active. It takes a lot of work. They went to jail and were one was murdered for a lot of their getting in people's face to tell them about peace being leadership. Then I think of the words of Jesus " Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." Notice he didn't say, "Blessed are the peacekeepers." He said, " 📍 Peacemakers ," a peacemaker restores relationships. They don't just go down and burn a Starbucks for their cause as a step in resistance. A peacemaker helps people see another human being and see them as human beings to build a relationship with. In leadership, the return on investment is often measured in dollars, but h- perhaps there's a deeper ROI here, right? Peace, the ROI of trust, the ROI of hope, the ROI of human flourishing, the ROI of helping people become more than they thought they could be. And with our kids, just telling them we believe in them may be the most important thing that we do. All of my kids got college degrees, and I... It was because I believed that they could do it, from when they were really young. But the concept is to believe in them. I'm not saying that college is right for everybody, and I'm not saying it was even right for all of my kids. But the great leadership challenge of our age may be not defeating opponents. It may be helping people to see that they can flourish in a peaceful way together Imagine a world where organization measured success, not only by profits, by the number of lives improved. I've said it already a few times. I'm pro-business, and business is hard when you take away resources. I'm not saying create peace as a resource hog, and guess what? It does take more work. But if you donated a few hours after work hours to improve things as a collective, especially those of you leading large organizations, imagine the difference you could make. Think about how the United Way gets a little bit of money from lots of different organizations, and that makes a huge difference. And you gotta like the idea of a United Way, right? And I think Rotary is for peace and the PEO Sisterhood is for peace, and they have programs for peace, but what are we actually doing to create meaning in people's lives where the meaning of peace is strong enough that you actually do something? Imagine political leaders measured by the amount of trust created, that they create trust and meaning in people, and imagine communities measured by how many people felt seen, valued and hopeful. These are the building blocks, and create a future worth building. And if I were trying to win the Nobel Pri- Peace Prize, which I am today, that's where I would start. Not by fighting harder, not by shouting louder, but hopefully giving you something to think about and share by helping the world rediscover that peace is not the absence of conflict. We're always gonna have conflict. We're gonna always have different opinions. There are eight billion opinions on this planet. Peace is the presence of flourishing, and flourishing may be the highest return on investment that leadership can ever produce. Bless your week, and please forward this to people and subscribe if you like this content. I'd like to know I'm not alone on this. Let's build some peace together. 📍
