Sold out. Over 2,000 entrepreneurs. One line from Steven Bartlett that changed how I think about the last two years.

I had the honor to serve as Learning Lead at Entrepreneurs’​ Organization Global Leadership Conference in Dublin. First time in 29 years it sold out.

I spent most of the week backstage and behind the scenes. Watching. Listening. Learning.

Steven Bartlett closed the conference. He left me with a line I cannot stop thinking about.

”The right answers aren’t going to come from strokes of genius. They’re going to come from the rate in which you experiment. Because failure is feedback.”

I have been experimenting for two years. Pivoting. Testing. Building. Rebuilding. Somewhere along the way I started to wonder if the failures meant I was doing it wrong.

Steven reframed it in one sentence. Every failed experiment is data. Every abandoned idea is feedback. The rate of trying is the strategy.

He pointed to Amazon’s 2015 shareholder letter. To own the future, Amazon had to be the best place on earth to fail. The companies winning right now are not the ones with the smartest people in the room. They are the ones with the highest tolerance for being wrong on the way to being right.

A few other ideas from his talk I am still thinking about.

Paper walls.
Most constraints in business are not real. They are tradition and preference dressed up as rules. His team has a Slack channel dedicated to spotting them. How many of your own ’we can’t’ statements are actually just ’we haven’t asked why’?

The five ingredients of a meaningful working life.
Forward motion. Challenge. Autonomy. Subjectively meaningful goals. A supportive group of people you like. Steven said he was as happy shoplifting food at 18 as he is running a global media company today. Same five ingredients. The industry did not matter. The ingredients did. Our job as leaders is to protect those conditions for the people around us.

Legacy is lived in the moment.
When asked what legacy he wanted to leave, his answer stopped me. Legacy is what you do today. Did you show up? Were you kind? Did you call the people you love before you walked out the door? Everything else is an output we cannot control.

Being at GLC as Learning Lead reminded me that leadership is not a title. It is a practice you keep returning to.

And the leaders I watched all week, on stage and off, shared one quiet thing in common. They were still experimenting. Still pushing on paper walls. Still choosing the inputs over the outputs.

Two years of experimenting has not made me a genius. Per Steven, that was never the point. The rate is the reward.

Thank you EO, for the opportunity to serve and the opportunity to learn.