I've had the great honor of getting to meet / some of these, / who we would call heroes, / who've put themselves and put their lives at risk to save others. // And I asked them, / why would you do it? // Why did you do it? // And they all say the same thing. // Because they / would have done it / for me. // It's this deep sense of trust and cooperation. // So trust and cooperation are really important here. // The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation / is that they are feelings, / they're not instructions. // I can't simply say to you, trust me, / and you will. // I can't simply instruct two people to cooperate, / and they will. // It's not how it works. // It's a feeling. // So where does that feeling come from? // If you go back 50,000 years / to the Paleolithic era, / to the early days of Homo sapiens, / what we find is that the world / was filled with danger. // All of these forces / working very, / very hard to kill us. // Nothing personal. // Whether it was. / the weather, / lack of resources, / maybe a saber-toothed tiger, / all of these things working to / reduce our lifespan. // And so we evolved into social animals, / where we lived together and worked together / in what I call a circle of safety. // Inside the tribe, / where we felt like we belonged. // And when we felt safe amongst our own, / the natural reaction / was trust and cooperation. // There are inherent benefits to this. // It means I can fall asleep at night / and trust / that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger. // If we don't trust each other, / if I don't trust you, / that means you won't watch for danger. // Bad system of survival. // The modern day is exactly the same thing. // The world is filled with danger, things that are trying to frustrate our lives or reduce our success, reduce our opportunity for success. // It could be the ups and downs of an economy, / the uncertainty of the stock market. // It could be a new technology that renders your business model obsolete overnight. // Or it could be your competition / that is sometimes trying to kill you, / it's sometimes trying to put you out of business, / but at the very minimum, / is working hard to frustrate your growth and steal / your business from you. // We have no control over these forces. // These are constants, / and they're not going away. // The only variable / are the conditions inside the organization, / and that's where leadership matters, / because it's the leader / that sets the tone. // When a leader makes the choice / to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, / to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice / the tangible / results so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, / remarkable things happen. //