Boost your iPhone battery life with seven simple settings tweaks, from Auto-Brightness to Low Power Mode, that reduce drain without changing habits.
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Tax filing season is underway, and the IRS expects 164 million people will file returns by April 15.
The average refund last year was $3,167. This year, analysts have projected it could be $1,000 higher, thanks to changes in tax law. More than 165 …
Journalist Ira Glass, who hosts the NPR show “This American Life,” is not a computer scientist. He doesn’t work at Google, Apple, or Nvidia. But he does have a great ear for useful phrases, and in 2024, he organized an entire episode around one that m…
After years of studying leaders across industries and cultures, I’ve noticed something fascinating. The truly great ones, the ones who lead with clarity, curiosity, and imagination, all share the same rhythm. It’s not a checklist or an app that beeps with notifications. It is something quieter and something more human.
Great leadership is less about managing time and more about mastering rhythm. And every day, without fail, these leaders do five things that keep that rhythm alive.
1. They honor their body as the first classroom
Before they answer an email or step into a meeting, great leaders move. They understand that motion fuels meaning and ideas: a walk, a stretch, a moment to breathe deeply before the day begins.
They treat the body not as an accessory to thinking, but as its foundation. Neuroscience backs this up: physical movement increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, enhancing executive function and creative problem-solving. When you move your body, you move your mind- and therefore ideas flow. The most effective leaders I’ve observed don’t schedule exercise around their work; they recognize that movement is the work of staying sharp.
2. They guard white space like treasure
In a world that rewards busyness, these leaders protect stillness. They leave gaps in their calendars for moments that aren’t filled with doing. That white space becomes the oxygen for new ideas.
While others rush to fill the silence, great leaders pause long enough to listen to what silence is saying. This isn’t laziness disguised as strategy. It’s the recognition that innovation rarely emerges from a packed schedule. The best insights arrive in the margins- during a walk between meetings, in the quiet of an unscheduled afternoon, in the space between stimulus and response. Leaders who guard their white space aren’t avoiding work; they are creating the conditions for their best work to emerge.
3. They rest to remember
Great leaders understand that rest is not the opposite of work. It is the continuation of it. They know that when the conscious mind quiets down, the subconscious begins to connect the dots.
They take small moments of recovery throughout the day: a pause between calls, a walk without a phone, a minute of looking out the window. They rest not to escape, but to return clearer, sharper and more creative. This is the science of incubation at work. Research on creative problem-solving shows that stepping away from a challenge allows the brain to continue processing in the background. These leaders don’t power through exhaustion;they design recovery into their rhythm, understanding that strategic rest is what transforms effort into insight.
4. They listen between the lines
I’ve watched extraordinary leaders in conversation, and they have a rare ability to hear what is not being said. They pay attention to tone, tension, hesitation, and hope.
Listening, for them, isn’t about waiting to respond, but rather about creating space for truth to emerge. And in that space, trust takes root and creativity flourishes. This kind of deep listening is increasingly rare in our distracted age and increasingly valuable. When people feel genuinely heard, they offer their most honest assessments, their boldest ideas, their real concerns. Leaders who master this practice don’t just gather better information; they build the psychological safety that makes innovation possible.
5. They lead with wonder, not certainty
My favorite teachers have been the ones who don’t hesitate to acknowledge what they don’t know, and then invite me to join them in discovering answers.
Similarly, the most creative leaders are not the ones who claim to know it all. They are the ones who stay curious. They ask questions that begin with What if…?; I wonder…? And Why not…?. They treat ambiguity as an invitation, not a threat.
Wonder keeps them flexible, alive, and open to surprise. And that openness is where innovation begins. In a business environment that often rewards the appearance of certainty, these leaders have the courage to say I don’t know; and mean it as an invitation rather than an admission. They understand that the questions we ask shape the possibilities we can see. Wonder fuels discovery.
The rhythm that matters
So what do great leaders do every day? They move. They think. They rest. They listen. They wonder. But more than that, they do all of it with rhythm.
Great leadership isn’t about what you know. It’s about how you move through the world. When you master that rhythm, creativity stops being something you reach for, and becomes part of your capacity for working better, smarter and with innovative outcomes.
The best leaders do not manage energy, they design energy.
In 2010, clinical psychiatrist Dale Archer published the New York Times best seller Better Than Normal, a book that highlighted the often-underappreciated benefits of various psychiatric diagnoses.
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How should AI and human leadership evolve together in this moment of rapid transformation?
The more qualified you are today, the harder it is to get hired. This is not a guess. It’s a documented, scientific reality.
A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that when job candidates were perc…
They lie. Repeatedly. Shamelessly. They lie even when the truth would be easier. They lie when the lie can easily be debunked. They lie to dominate, confuse, and assert control. They treat contradiction as an attack and disagreement as betrayal. These are defining traits of narcissistic leadership.
Strangely enough, in politics and in organizations alike, we keep rewarding narcissistic leaders by giving them more power. We promote them, fund them, vote for them, excuse them, and normalize their behavior, even when there are unmistakable warning signs that should stop us from doing so.
It is obvious that narcissists seek power. The big (and more burning) question is: Why do we keep giving it to them?
We choose narcissists when we’re anxious
Narcissism is often confused with confidence, ambition, or charisma. In reality, pathological narcissism is defined by grandiosity, a constant need for admiration, low empathy, intolerance of criticism, and a tendency to instrumentalize others.
At high doses, narcissism is deeply corrosive. Highly narcissistic leaders take greater risks, manipulate more freely, break rules more readily, and do not learn from failure. They externalize blame, rewrite history, and prefer loyal sycophants over competent professionals.
As organizational psychologist Adam Grant has argued, we are rarely naive about narcissistic leaders. Most of the time, we recognize them quickly. They boast. They monopolize attention. They perform outrage. They lie openly and repeatedly. We see it—and we still choose them.
One of the main reasons is that chaos makes us crave certainty. In moments of crisis—economic instability, war, technological disruption, climate anxiety—we mistake loud confidence for competence. Nuance feels weak. Complexity feels unbearable. Fear narrows our tolerance for ambiguity. It makes us vulnerable to leaders who promise control, simplicity, and absolute answers—no matter how fictional those answers may be.
Seen through this lens, Donald Trump is not really an anomaly. He is a symptom. His constant lying, grandiosity, and contempt for institutions are extreme, but the underlying dynamic is familiar. The same behaviors—on a smaller scale—are rewarded every day in companies, startups, media organizations, and public institutions around the world.
7 Things We Must Change If We Want Fewer Narcissistic Leaders
If narcissistic leaders keep rising, it is because our systems keep selecting and protecting them. Changing outcomes requires changing the rules of the game. Here are seven shifts that matter.
1. Stop confusing visibility with value
Narcissistic leaders thrive on attention. They dominate meetings, interrupt others, and flood the space with what appears to be certainty. In too many environments, visibility is mistaken for contribution. To counter this, organizations must actively redesign how influence is expressed—by limiting airtime and prioritizing written input, for example. Value should be measured by clarity created, not noise produced. Treating visibility as value creates a moral hazard: Those least constrained by doubt gain disproportionate influence.
2. Make lying costly
Narcissists lie because it works. Lies are tolerated, minimized, or reframed as “communication style.” This tolerance is fatal. False statements must be corrected publicly and promptly. Repeated dishonesty should carry clear reputational and career consequences. Treating truth as optional corrodes institutions fast. The longer a lie goes unchallenged, the more it signals that reality is negotiable—and that power, not truth, sets the terms.
3. Evaluate leaders on collective outcomes
Narcissistic leaders often look impressive on individual metrics while quietly hollowing out their teams. Measuring leadership without accounting for turnover, burnout, disengagement, and loss of trust is profoundly wrong. Collective intelligence, psychological safety, and learning capacity must be treated as core performance indicators—not soft, secondary concerns. If results are achieved at the expense of trust, retention, and learning, they represent short-term extraction rather than sustainable performance.
4. Stop rewarding the will to power
Aggressively wanting power is not proof of leadership potential. In fact, narcissistic personalities are statistically more likely to self-nominate, campaign for authority, and pursue promotion relentlessly. Systems that equate ambition with suitability all but guarantee poor outcomes. Leadership selection should deliberately include capable individuals who do not seek power for its own sake—and should treat excessive self-promotion as a risk signal.
5. Institutionalize dissent
Narcissistic leaders fear contradiction and punish it, directly or indirectly. That is why dissent cannot rely on individual bravery alone. Organizations must structurally protect disagreement through formal devil’s advocate roles, strong whistleblower protections, and explicit rewards for surfacing bad news early. A leader who cannot tolerate dissent is fundamentally dangerous. Disagreement should be seen as a contribution to intelligence.
6. Redefine charisma
Charisma is too often equated with dominance, theatrical confidence, and verbal force. But sustainable leadership can look different: calm authority, restraint, curiosity, and the ability to change one’s mind in light of new evidence. As long as we glamorize the worst kind of “strong personalities,” narcissistic leaders will continue to thrive. Our dominant definition of charisma is also deeply gendered. Traits coded as charismatic—assertiveness, verbal dominance, emotional detachment, physical presence—map closely onto traditionally masculine norms, while behaviors more often associated with women (like listening) are systematically undervalued.
7. Address the root cause: Fear
Narcissistic leaders rise fastest in anxious systems. When people feel unsafe—economically, socially, psychologically—they outsource certainty to those who project it most loudly. Reducing precarity, increasing fairness, and building real psychological safety are not just moral imperatives. They are structural defenses against narcissistic leadership.
Narcissistic leaders do not seize power alone. They are enabled—by our fears, our metrics, our myths about leadership, and our reluctance to confront uncomfortable truths. If we want different leaders, we must become different selectors. The problem is not that narcissists exist. It’s that we keep mistaking them for leaders.
