The trap of win-lose thinking (and how to escape it) | John Mackey
TED Business
TED
4.0 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
What do you get when you combine a major flood and near-bankruptcy? For Whole Foods cofounder John Mackey, the answer reshaped his business into a household name. He takes us back to the night his first store was destroyed, showing how shifting from a win-lose mindset to a "win-win-win" worldview helped him achieve success — and why it can work for you, too. After, Modupe teases what she would add to improve John's "win-win-win" perspective.
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| 0:00.0 | One of the gifts of being a professor is that I get to take a sabbatical. Every seven years at my |
| 0:06.7 | institution, you can take time off for intellectual refreshment. I've done it twice now, and with each one, |
| 0:13.7 | I'm as nervous as I am excited. For me, this opportunity to pause, sit with myself, and think |
| 0:20.4 | more deeply about my relationship to work |
| 0:22.7 | is very special. It brings up some big stuff. And for my next sabbatical, I'm going to ask myself, |
| 0:30.2 | what do I love? How has that changed? How have I changed? And am I the person I want to be? I'm Madupa Aginola. This is |
| 0:43.4 | Ted Business, a podcast from TED. Our speaker today is John Mackie, the co-founder of Whole Foods. |
| 0:50.1 | And he decided to get vulnerable up on the TED stage, sharing how a brush with disaster led him to embrace a win-win outlook on life. |
| 0:58.8 | Turns out, that changed his business forever. |
| 1:02.9 | And after the talk, I'll ask you to think about what and who you love. |
| 1:07.9 | But first, a quick break. |
| 1:18.4 | And now, John Mackey takes the TED stage. |
| 1:24.5 | Most people live in a win-lose paradigm, |
| 1:33.9 | where self-interest is the thing they think of the most there's a better way a win-win-win paradigm and this is more than just a game metaphor it's a philosophy of human interaction that seeks mutual benefit for everyone. |
| 1:47.1 | I had a major epiphany in the early days of Whole Foods that helped me wake up to this idea |
| 1:55.3 | of a win-win-win way of life. It was Memorial Day, 1981. The very first Whole Foods we ever had |
| 2:07.1 | went through the worst flood that Austin, Texas had experienced in over 70 years. |
| 2:14.8 | Overnight, our store was completely destroyed. We were near bankruptcy. It looked like our |
| 2:22.0 | story had ended only nine months after we started it. And then something really cool happened. |
| 2:30.9 | When I went to the store the next morning to help clean up, there were a lot of people there helping us. |
| 2:37.9 | Our team members were there, of course, but so were our customers, and so were our neighbors. |
| 2:46.4 | And I was deeply moved by this. |
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