The Four Principles.
By Adrian Gore with David Cohen.
Multiply your Impact in Life and Leadership.
Adrian Gore is a South African entrepreneur - the founder and Group Chief Executive of Discovery Limited, who has built one of the country’s most successful financial services businesses around the principles of behavioural science, innovation and shared value. His overriding goal of ‘making people healthier’ drives him and his team constantly, and is a touchstone for all their major decisions. I listened to him talk about his new book on this podcast, and, wanting to learn more, bought The Four Principles shortly afterwards.
Rather than being about the inception and rise of Discovery, this book is more about the ‘why’ behind the company – the purpose and the principles behind getting the best out of people, and liberating the best in them. It’s rare that Adrian uses the word ‘I’ when he talks about his success – he constantly uses ‘we’ as he explains how he works together with his to make good decisions and to set goals, and to motivate people to excel.
The four key principles that he explains in his book can create a powerful multiplying effect and our lives, and our work. He believes that we are miscoded for scarcity, and intentionally re-coding for abundance is what can open up our potential. Our software can be changed, but resisting our miscoding requires disciplined self-mastery.
Principle 1: Disciplined Optimism
This is about the discipline of seeking positive signals.
Impact is made when opportunities are identified, and we need the right mindset for this.
Our natural instinct is to see pessimism as ‘sophisticated and rational’. Pessimism is limiting.
Optimism is an outlook or attitude towards the future, grounded in hope and confidence in positive outcomes.
It’s about seeking positive signals in an active and mindful way.
An attitude of pessimism is comparatively lazy compared to the conscious effort involved in seeking out positive signals and engaging in solutions. This requires courage, and a willingness to challenge the narrative.
‘Negativity bias’ means that losses are felt roughly twice as strongly as gains of the same size.
Challenges in the workplace require leadership and collaboration, and a positive affirming framework that sets a vision, defines goals and creates positive feedback loops.
A person’s optimism measurably improves the emotional state of others, just like active kindness can inspire others to pay it forward.
Attitude often proceeds outcomes, and can have an effect on shaping facts.
It’s about being conscious and deliberate in our attitudes – using accurate readings of reality and the resulting opportunities in the impending threats.
Declinist views are disproved by actual data – in most areas of the world today is significantly better than it was in the past (examples: life expectancy, diseases, extreme poverty, child mortality, basic education, literacy – all markers of human improvement.)
The media reinforces pessimism, and is also embedded in algorithms that decide what stories to serve up.
There can be risks to rolling up our sleeves and getting involved but sometimes doing nothing poses a much greater risk. Research shows that the story a country tells about itself can influence whether it grows or stagnates. Optimism plays a role in macro-economic momentum.
Applications of this principal:
Deciding when to start a business – often better in difficult times (assets are underpriced and opportunities are vast).
We can learn from failure – but success can be a better teacher. Profound lessons come from focusing on what went right. When something feels bad, we don’t always absorb the learnings as deeply.
We can use deliberate and realistic optimism to see potential in others, and use this more in performance appraisals. We fixate on criticism and downplay praise, which damages morale and future performance. Catch someone doing something right.
Principle 2: Focused Urgency
We have less time than we think to make an impact, and we should pursue what is important to us with focus, and urgency.
Adrian asks his people: ‘Is there greatness in you?’ followed by ‘Have you used that greatness?’
Logarithmic theory of time is how we experience time, not how we measure it on a clock, leaving the window to make an impact shorter than we think.
Years feel shorter because each year becomes a smaller fraction of the life we have already lived. Example: when you are 10 years old one year equals 10% of your life. When you are 40 years old, one year is one 40th. A year at 40 goes twice as fast as a year at 20.
When were in our mid 30s we are 80% through our lives in terms of perceived time, and this is crucial to understand if we want to make an impact in life (building a business, spending time with family, making a charitable).
This is not a depressing concept – rather it is galvanizing, acting as a great motivator.
We can employ tactics to stretch time to enable us to have more impact, and achieve goals. The perceived scarcity of time can create urgency, and action.
You have less time than you think to act. If you have something more to say or do, do it now. Do not delay! Act now with proactive urgency.
Being productive and impactful comes down to:
Health – lifestyles affects length and quality of life, therefore prioritise regular exercise, good sleep, nutrition.
Knowledge – the more we learn, the more efficient we become; so that each unit of time yields greater wisdom and more effective action.
Knowledge acquisition slows the perceived passing of time and increases your effectiveness in that time.
Knowledge compounds – what we have already learned helps us learn more.
As learners develop great expertise, they reduce their working memory load, enabling them to process more difficult tasks with less effort. This creates a positive feedback loop that speeds up mastery.
Knowledge accumulates and accelerates. The years feel shorter, but the ability to learn and apply the learning will get faster.
Experience, networks and expertise often outweigh raw youthful energy - for those who are motivated and feel the energy, it is never too late to begin, and build something extraordinary.
Applications:
Optimising work/life balance by managing energy, not just time (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual energy). Stephen Covey’s book teaches that to be effective we need to spend time planning and clarifying our values and purpose – shifting from reactivity to proactivity. Adrian describes his personal ritual and routines – he is highly structured about his time, but emphasizes that optimizing your own work/ life balance as a personal affair.
Creating focused urgency and pace within an organization:
External shocks can lead to breakthroughs. The challenge is how to do this proactively from within, without the pressure and stress of responding to external stress.
He believes in imposing timelines and deadlines within the company, in order to foster innovation.
Networks get quicker as they get larger, but companies get slower. Networks achieve dozens of tasks simultaneously, learning and improving, and dramatically increasing speed. Businesses get slower (increased bureaucracy, fighting, competition between internal power bases). They become less dynamic and two inwardly focused. They risk losing the ‘founders’ mentality’ – the strengths and values that help them to be initially successful. Layers of management and processes result in complexity. Decision-making slows and loss of speed and agility deals entrepreneurial spirits.
It’s about activating a conscious awareness of how limited time is, so that you can operate with urgency.
Principle 3: Declared Goals
When we set goals and declare them to make them visible, we create something to lose. Potential last motivates more than potential gain, and goal setting becomes crucial for impact.
Daniel Kahnman and Amos Tversky’s prospect theory: losses loom larger than gains (known as loss aversion theory). Fear of losing something is a much stronger motivator than gaining something of equivalent value.
If we declare a goal and put something at stake, we create something to lose, and so galvanise motivation and action.
Goals (the what) or desired outcomes or end states – are what an individual wants to achieve.
Plans (the how) a specific sequence of actions and strategies used to reach a goal.
Dreams are aspirational, open ended, often abstract. A goal is a dream made specific with a deadline and direction.
Goals are organizational anchors of mental life.
Goals transform into destinations, and plans help us to travel the distance.
Motivation intensifies as we near the goal i.e. discovery data shows people increase effort as they knew weekly fitness goals.
How important is the goal and what are you genuinely prepared to sacrifice to achieve it? (Our true limits lie far beyond where we usually stop.)
When a goal truly matters, people can tolerate far more discomfort and exert more effort, and make greater sacrifices then they believed possible.
It is often the journey to the goal that enriches your life most.
Applications:
Rapid scaling
Once a product system reaches a critical threshold of readiness, it can expand exponentially, faster than linear growth.
Ambitions stretch goals, and activate energy and urgency.
It’s not just about innovating, but deliberately engineering impact (i.e. Google and SpaceX)
If you seek out positive signals, live with focused urgency, sit and declare goals – you are perfectly positioned to begin acting in the Pareto tail.
Principle 4: The Pareto Tail
Only a few important decisions and actions determine the impact of our lives.
Pareto: a small number of causes generates a disproportionately large share of effects. 80% of output steam from 20% of inputs.
We are taught that many phenomena follow a bell-shaped curve, with an average in the centre and small mirror image tails on either side.
The curve is actually more of an asymmetrical, right-skewed bell curve with a long, tapering tail extending to the right. The few decisions in the tail i.e. who we marry, where we live, what career we choose, whether we start a business - carry large consequences for the rest of our lives.
These big decisions can shift our identity and beliefs, and can be difficult or impossible to undo.
These decisions shape many of the choices that come afterwards, and new decisions tend to connect back to them, and they become the most influential actions in the whole system.
How do we act in the Pareto tail?
The answer lies in the first three principles:
Disciplined optimism enables us to resist automatic declinist narratives and seek positive signals to identify opportunities that others don’t see.
Focused urgency addresses our distorted perception of time and ensures we act quickly and in time.
Declared goals create motivation, action and additional drive to avoid the loss that comes with falling short of the goal.
Applying these principles puts us in the proximity of the tail, and of leverage.
Our tendency is to prioritise smaller, immediate rewards over larger delayed ones. When we imagine the future, we should begin from a place of unbounded possibility rather than bounded probability. What we dream about is possible, and achievable. I love that!
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash