This is the Gary V. Audio Experience.

It is very clear to me 25 years into my career that kindness and empathy and patience and humility are actually the foundations.

And I think the things that all of us think about as soft skills and emotional intelligence are actually the hard skills.

And that it is far easier for me to find people who are good at the task or have good math skills than it is to find people who are capable of being the bigger woman or bigger man in the face of pressure or adversity.

And so for 20 years or so, this has been in my subconscious. COVID, like for many of us, gave me a time to reflect and I immediately went into writing the book.

On a couple of reasons. One, I'm incredibly aware that there's a lot of young people paying attention to my groups, our fans of what I do.

And I thought it would be a disservice if I wasn't incredibly aggressive in my communication on the things that I see as a winning formula.

It becomes double important when I realize that most people don't talk about kindness as the single alpha skill in building a successful empire.

And I thought it was a unique take. It's also very nuanced. The reason the subtitle is ingredients is what I was going through my process. I realized, oh, I never just deploy empathy.

I never just deploy patience in every situation. It's actually three or four different traits, often traits that are in conflict with each other.

It's very interesting to be tenacious and ambitious while being patient. And so I liked the concept of ingredients because it's like cooking a meal.

I think we all believe that sweet and sour chicken is something that is delicious, but sweet and sour can see that conflict.

I felt that I was the right person at the right time and what is transpired in the last 18 months, because I wrote the book very quickly in the beginning of COVID.

Obviously takes time for it to come out and things of that nature.

Many of us are thinking about things in the business world around the concept of the great resignation and the concept of people even applying into businesses in the first place in a world of options.

I think the importance of being a leader that understands these traits has even compounded in the last 18 months since I even wrote it, which feels serendipitous and exciting for me.

And I really hope that people also, if they read it, realize this is not a book that is meant to over-cattle the Millennials or Gen Z. This is truly believing that this is the alpha infrastructure to building significantly large successful businesses.

What I love is this refreshing people leadership, and I can speak from a woman's perspective that many of us have mimicked this ideal hard leadership, because that was the architect, that was the right leadership.

And you're taking the narrative into a different direction. And so what would you say to those who would point to the patterns of industries and say, this is not high world, and this is not what you described in the world?

Look, I believe that you can have short-term success in many ways, and I believe that the world has been very clear to us over the last centuries that fear and negativity are sometimes a fuel for short-term success.

You know, my argument is that it's not as powerful as brightness and love, that hate is a powerful trait, but I just believe it never beats love in the end. And I believe that to be true in business.

Of course, there have been people who've been successful, who are not kind leaders. That doesn't mean that it should be mimicked. And I would also ask, if you have the luxury of interacting with people in their 80s and 90s, and especially those who've had major financial success by being mean and negative,

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