“What holds people back from speaking up is fear.”

“Communication is at the heart of every single aspect of your career.”

“Don’t tell yourself a story that takes away your power.”

“What people want, in short, is to be transformed.” 

“Customization is the antidote to commoditization.” 

“Sell the end.” 

“This is the story of a wipeout.” 

“True leadership, I realized, wasn’t about perfection or invincibility. It was about authenticity.”

“Surviving trauma and confronting its aftermath are two different experiences.” 

“Improv is a warm hug for girls.”

 “Improv teaches girls that there’s no right or wrong, fostering a sense of confidence and belonging.”

  “By using improv, we’re helping girls discover their voices and build the confidence they need to lead.”

“In the mid-2010’s, everything started to get a little crazy.” 

“Improv allows you to practice in low-risk ways for nonlinear futures and unpredictable environments.

“The best leaders will be great storytellers.” 

“If in doubt, transparency is the safer bet.” 

“Today, the illusion of reciprocity thrives on social media.” 

“Like most hangovers, the pain of TMI is often short-lived.”

“We like different people for different reasons, which just adds to the chaos of it all.” 

“Learning your place in the dating pool can be a brutal process.” 

“No one enjoys being stuck in the friendzone.” 

“Synchrony between humans is nothing short of a superpower.” 

“Our interactions with people are what make us most happy and most miserable in life.” 

“We are born to sync. We yearn to sync. And we suffer when we do not.” 

“The type of attention we bring to the world changes the world we find.” 

“If you can’t say no, your yes is worthless.” 

“People mistakenly think life is a treasure hunt. And it is not a treasure hunt. It’s more like a treasure creation.” 

“Don’t microwave food in plastic.” 

“Plastics are on track to surpass coal emissions in the United States.” 

“Get rid of all black plastic in your kitchen.”

“We learn who we are by telling stories.” 

“Stepping up to the plate when you aren’t ready is the price of starting.” 

“Our blind spots are dangerous precisely because we can’t see them.” 

“Uncertainty has so much to teach us.” 

“Our brain is uncomfortable in the in-betweens.” 

“All it takes is the courage to be curious.”

“Confidence is a verb.” 

“Most of us speak very harshly to ourselves.” 

“The battle for your mind is a precious one.” 

“Practice is an essential element of mastery learning.” 

“Time is a poor proxy for learning.” 

“Our young people know their education is failing them.” 

“Be passionate in agreement. Be dispassionate in disagreement.” 

“As writers, we are emotional chemists.” 

“Every time you sit down and write a screenplay, you’re world-building.” 

 “Creativity is not limited to one type of creation.” 

“You don’t decide your purpose in life; you discover it.” 

“Confidence can be lost if it isn’t fed through practice.” 

 “Courage is a learned behavior, not an innate one.” 

“Heroes seldom act alone.” 

“Sometimes, frankly, we take confidence too far.” 

“My parents didn’t really enforce rules when it came to media consumption.”

“The movies led to reading, which led to more movies.”

“My love wasn’t limited to horror. I adored comedies, too.”

“Community is essential for introverts.” 

“Introverts often grow up feeling out of place.” 

“Personal branding is not about being someone that you’re not.” 

“To me, the Holiday Train is more than a seasonal spectacle; it’s a train of light.”

“I’ve felt the collective joy of strangers momentarily united by a shared sense of awe.” 

“In the end, the train doesn’t just bring light to the city, it makes winter feel a little less harsh.”

“Video games are the consumer touchpoint of the twenty-first century.” 

“Don’t copy and paste old playbooks.” 

“When people play, their masks come off.” 

“This book is about reprogramming the nervous system of leadership.” 

“Technology offers both promise and paradox.” 

“Virtue signaling has become a form of social currency.” 

“Revenge is a kind of addiction.”

“Forgiveness stops pain.”

“This can get better and it will.”

“Leadership is ultimately about relationships.” 

“Each new level of leadership requires a new level of us.” 

“Leadership is, in many ways, a creative act.”

“People think actors are good liars. We aren’t.”

“We believe what we need to get by.” 

“There is no other feeling like holding for applause.” 

“Every new idea represents a risk.” 

“Creativity happens in leaps, not steps.” 

“All great ideas sound great – in retrospect.” 

“Lasting change comes from within.” 

“I want to be clear that coaching is not a substitute for therapy.” 

“Our reluctance to engage in self-reflection is often also rooted in fear.” 

“Don’t waste your time following gurus.”

“We need to value risk.”

“True irony is deeper than simple opposition. It is opposition mixed with justice of a sort.”

“Rationality is an assumption in economics, not a demonstrated fact.” 

“People are not thinking enough about what everyone else is thinking.” 

“Roughly speaking, losses hurt us about twice as much as gains.”

“By all means, keep it real – just don’t make everyone else suffer for it.”

“Everybody loves change until they have to do it themselves.” 

“Most of us inhabit multiple selves.” 

“Many of us resent where we sit in the food chain.” 

“Status begets status.” 

“Luck is enshrined in social hierarchies.” 

“All behavior makes sense with enough information.”

“Be careful judging how other people spend their money.” 

“The best measure of wealth is what you have minus what you want.” 

“We’re living in an age of unprecedented individualism.” 

“Groups that look outward adapt faster to an ever-changing world.”

“Tolerated deviants can’t dissent on every issue.”

“Both researchers and the popular media don’t talk much about talking.” 

“Talking doesn’t just let us communicate. It tunes our brains.” 

“New knowledge fades away unless we do something with it.” 

“Things go well until they don’t.” 

“We are not as self-aware as we believe.” 

“Your identity is the least fixed part of you.” 

“Alarms ring; they don’t teach. And often when an alarm rings for too long, we tune it out.” 

“Spoken words are the precursor of all precursors to reading.” 

“Praise the process.” 

“All passes – Art alone endures.”

“You’ll feel as you’ve just stepped out of a time machine.” 

“Let the building haunt you; it’s a place where you can feel the energy of the past.” 

“Connection is vital for life.” 

“Our brains are wired for fear.” 

“Time is our most nonrenewable resource.” 

“Happiness is a temporary state, not a life goal.” 

“Women’s desires are hijacked by their obligations.” 

“Your fire starts where all your shoulds end.” 

“Before we can influence others we must first listen and understand.” 

“Listening is the cheapest concession we can ever make.” 

“Managing a crisis properly depends on managing information.” 

“Attention is the most basic form of love.” 

“Vulnerability is not for the faint of heart.” 

“Deep listening is a radically selfless act.” 

“Culture change is not a comfortable topic.” 

“Creativity and collaboration are the foundations of innovation.” 

“Failure is one of our greatest teachers.” 

“Fear is a liar.” 

“You don’t encourage good behavior by convincing someone they’re bad.” 

“Taking about shame takes courage.” 

“Gut feel is related to emotional intelligence.” 

“Our gut feel whispers to us, and we don’t often listen.” 

 “We usually recognize our Spidey sense most easily.” 

“I think we’ve all watched too much Shark Tank.”

“My definition of entrepreneurship is value creation through innovation.”

“I think to be a great entrepreneur, you have to have one thing: self-awareness.” 

“I think everyone is a potential causie.” 

“Passion for the mission is necessary but not sufficient.” 

“Notable board service often happens outside the four walls of the boardroom.” 

“Your greatest asset is that there is only one of you.” 

“It’s more natural to make modest pivots versus complete career overhauls.” 

“A cornerstone of networking is generosity and caring for others.” 

“The hard truth is that conflict isn’t the problem. We are.” 

“Conflict resilience is not comfortable.” 

“Implicit bias – kills our curiosity and blunts our ability to listen well.” 

“Whistleblowing was miserable.” 

“We now occupy a world that is too big for our minds to handle.” 

“If we let it, failure brings clarity.” 

“Everybody wants to manage people until they have to manage people.” 

“Management is like a high-wire act of care.” 

“Lousy managers equal lousy work vibes.” 

“Let me be very clear: the threat from AI of existential risk and annihilation to humanity is very real.” 

“The word ‘robot’ is derived from a Czech word for forced labor.” 

“AI is only as good as the data sets it is trained on.”

“Our phones can give us facts but not story; information, but not relation.” 

“Sometimes the teacher is wrong, and you should refuse to do their assignment.” 

“Theatre folk exist in a state of perpetual emergency. And yet, it’s almost never really an emergency.”  

“Mentors talk to you; sponsors talk about you.”

“The key to effective sponsorship is trust.” 

“Performance is not the driver of who gets promoted; perceived potential is.” 

“We can’t have healthy organizations with unhealthy people.” 

“Noticing is an ongoing practice that takes skill.” 

“Schedule your good intentions.” 

“Before you can align with others, you have to know what you want.” 

“Be fully present during your conversation.” 

“You’ll be more successful by listening more than you talk.” 

“We are fighting for attention. We want to be seen.” 

“Behavioral residues are the by-product of our lives.” 

“Each of us comes in many different versions.” 

“We’re living in a time when we identify so strongly with our victimhood that our potential has taken a back seat to our pain.” 

“There’s big money in trauma right now.”

“The thing is, when we’re rigid, we become fragile.” 

“Many newly minted adults are more educated than ever, yet more lost than ever.” 

“Knowledge is pointless unless you know what you want.” 

“The most useful skill for any career is empathy.” 

“Talking about money often ranks high on the list of least favorite conversations.” 

“Productive fighting is better for a relationship than poor communication.” 

“We can’t make good decisions about our lives without looking at the whole picture.” 

“Trust at work – like in improv – is the oil that keeps the gears turning smoothly.” 

“Storytelling can be a powerful tool to create belonging.” 

“Micromanagement is a meaning killer.” 

“Wild courage will change your life.” 

“Serendipity isn’t found; it’s made.” 

“Success mindset precedes success.” 

“Cops are dropped into a scene and they have to improv every single thing they do in the field.”

“This is what the police have to do every day. We just don’t call it improv.”

“Communication is everything.”

“Improv taught me I can rely on others to supply their side of the interaction.”

“Behaving against our natures doesn’t bother us as much as we fear it might.” 

“In improv, as in life, sometimes it helps to just make a choice, weird though it might be.” 

“So much of the historical record was written with silence.” 

“I discovered my faith in the capacity of words to help me know myself and the people who made me.”

“This book is a dialogue with my family. It is also a dialogue with those who write about the past in which my family made its way.” 

“First rule of comedy: know your audience.” 

“We – all of us – are wrong about lots of things.” 

“Confident humility is a corrective lens.” 

“Emotions aren’t good or bad; they are just information.” 

“There are things you can control and things you can’t. Emotions are both.” 

“The effect music has on our emotions feels like magic.” 

“Disproving someone else’s experiment can be a death wish in science.” 

“Most academic bio-scientists depend on the National Institute of Health to keep the lights on.” 

“Eleven of sixteen FDA medical examiners who worked on twenty-eight drug approvals left the agency to become employees or consultants for the companies they recently regulated.”

“Relationship outcomes depend not only on the specific qualities of each partner but also on the unique patterns that emerge when the partners’ qualities intersect.” 

“There isn’t just one true and proper way to love, to relate, to bond, to touch.”

“Motivated reasoning is a cognitive process where people use reason to support their existing beliefs or desires and lay at the heart of ‘When Harry Met Sally.’”

“The world seems confusing, and people no longer seem to agree on the basic facts of what is happening around them.” 

“In many ways our learning is facilitated through stories.” 

“We risk a lot if we’re unable to weave all the different threads of our self together.”

“Very few people are against fairness, but we don’t all agree on what it entails.” 

“The biggest determinant of remote work is education.” 

“Bias from above is complemented by bias from below.” 

“You simply cannot predict the human experience.”

“Your employees are another set of customers.”

“Culture cannot just be shaped from the top. It starts at the bottom.”

“Conversation is an ongoing act of co-creation.” 

“We’re all making it up as we go along.” 

“People who ask more questions are better liked.”

“It feels like we are at war.” 

“It is true: we are safer today than we were at the dawn of humanity. But we don’t feel safer.” 

“If other people’s pain is like a whisper on the wind, our own pain is a scream in our ear.” 

“A True no is a process, not a snap judgment.” 

“Defiance first requires that we know our values.” 

“Curiosity can be an effective way to approach others, opening pathways to change.” 

“Speaking is not a sidecar to being human.” 

“Great communication is you, when you are at your most other-focused.” 

“Speaking is actually closer to an athletic event than a decision-tree flowchart of ideas.” 

“Screens act like secondhand smoke.” 

“Waldorf Schools may be the best kept secret in education.” 

“You cannot rush learning any more than you can accelerate thinking.” 

“Students today report higher levels of stress and anxiety than ever before.” 

“Employability is based on more than technical skills alone.” 

“Let us be clear: leadership is not the same as occupying a position of authority.” 

“Ensemble lay at the heart of the work at Second City.”

“The Second City’s creative process is sacred to the work done on its stages and in its classrooms.”

“As Alison Riley used to say, at The Second City – two wrongs make a tradition.”

“Switching jobs isn’t random or independent from the experiences you’ve had in the past.” 

“A fear of the unknown future creates friction that can thwart movement toward a new role.” 

“Without any context wrapped around it, money is just a feature. It’s not the underlying reason to change jobs.” 

“Just talking to the same people is not a recipe for generating ideas.” 

“Happier employees are more productive employees.” 

“It’s hard to incentivize innovation.” 

“The future lies in a combination of technical skills and human skills.” 

“Traditional four-year degrees are no longer seen as the only path to a successful career.” 

“Technology is, to an extent, only an enabler.” 

“Impressing powerful men is a core skill for investment bankers.”

“The world romanticizes the causal relationship between adversity and breakout success.” 

“Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” 

“I sometimes ask executives, ‘Will anyone tell you your joke isn’t funny?’” 

“At its core, culture intelligence is about how we connect with another as humans.” 

“Words are never just words. Their meaning is always rooted in context.” 

“And so, like sun and moon and oxygen and ionosphere, Johnny Carson was always there, reliable and steadfast.” 

“He was also mothered by omission.” 

“Work was easy for him, family was not.”

“Politics doesn’t have to feel as dire as it sometimes does.” 

“The system of voting is too complicated.” 

“It’s hard to trust something you don’t know a lot about.” 

“In accepting loss we make possible the future.” 

“We carry our ghosts with us everywhere.” 

“There is no love without pain or loss; this is what grief taught me.” 

“It’s amazing how creative we can be to avoid acting.” 

“Showing someone attention is one of the most meaningful things you can do.” 

“Top performers fall in love with their client’s problems, not their own solutions.” 

“Tribal living is what made us truly human.” 

“Our species became wiser thanks to our tribes.” 

“Killing the old culture happens top-down, then building the new culture happens bottom-up.” 

“In an odd way, there is a kind of nobility in fundraising.” 

“The first thing you need to know about fundraising is that it’s not brain surgery. It’s harder than brain surgery.” 

“Good service is everything. No one gives you money to sit in lousy seats.”

“We look to others to find ourselves.” 

“When our fate depends on other people changing, we get stuck.” 

“Sometimes humor is the best way to share your thinking, and sometimes it isn’t.” 

“You may have truth on your side, but persuasion does not hinge on what is true.” 

“Business is all about give and take, but there is a shelf life for an ask.” 

“Sharing your ups and downs makes you instantly more convincing.” 

“I didn’t decide until the day after my SATs, because all of my friends were working on their personal essays and I thought, ‘My personal essay is cello,'”

“Music is a medium of awe that helps make sense of life’s wonders.”

“I feel like sound is texture. Sound is feeling like I mean, feeling on my skin, like how soft cashmere feels is how it. That’s my experience, that’s my lived experience. “ 

“We protect our past so we are connected to what came before us and so we understand what lies in front of us – today and tomorrow.”

“Ultimately, the goal of architecture is to shelter and create spaces that improve human life and foster a sense of belonging,”

“For the ironworkers, It’s not how many years you have left – it’s how many winters.” 

“Improv seeks to widen our mental bubble.” 

“Improvisation is the discourse of paradigm shifts.” 

“Innovation always begins with disruption, a pushback against the dominant culture.” 

“The key to managing your status – and reaping all the benefits that come with it – is showing up as a likeable badass, getting others to see you as both assertive and warm.” 

“The faster we talk, the more status we get.” 

“There is a strong relationship between humor and status. People who have high status engage in more humor.” 

“We’re built by change but we’re not built for change.” 

“The pursuit of better is about progress, not perfection.” 

“Fair warning: it takes courage to be curious.” 

“People want what they want, where and when they want it. Those who can give it to them are more likely to win.” 

“The robots are coming.” 

“The customer as king is a tired metaphor. It’s also increasingly accurate.”