Be deliberate about who you listen to, pick the voices you listen to very carefully, especially in a crisis. Curate a great group of people, your inner circle, to listen to, not just for criticism but for praise as well. You wouldn’t listen to criticism from someone you don’t admire or who doesn’t know who they are, so why would you accept praise from someone you don’t admire or who doesn’t know who they are?
If you want great discussions with people full of new ideas, cultivate a personal atmosphere of psychological safety. People will feel safe sharing incomplete ideas with you. People need to feel that you will give their ideas the chance to be heard without shooting them down
For an idea to come to maturity, there is a process. Any moron can kill a fledgling idea, but an intelligent person gives it room to grow and develop, to see if anything can come from it. You need psychological safety for that idea to develop and grow or for someone to even bring it up, they have to feel safe. Teams need this when it comes to problem solving
Remind yourself weekly (or whatever time horizon is good for you) what is important to you. It is not enough to write it down, we often write it down, then it wears off, then we forget, then when the time comes we do not make a decision based on our values. We need to remind ourselves of our values, especially when creating and establishing new ones
A seed needs the right environment to grow into an oak tree. Within the seed it contains the right knowledge to become a tree, but it needs the right environment to flourish. The idea of balance between inward and outward definitions of success. You can’t seek validation primarily from external sources for yourself, it’s not healthy, but you can’t ignore and avoid the outside world either. You can spend years meditating and defining yourself by your own internal metrics, but you can’t avoid the external world entirely, it does affect you and your life