Ep 249: Kara Swisher - In 20

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.

Are you conscious of your choices?

Kara Swisher is the most effective and successful tech journalist of our lifetimes. She’s the host of the podcast ‘On with Kara Swisher’ and the cohost of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway. Over the last thirty years, she has interviewed everyone who matters in tech, multiple times. And she’s just written her third book, titled Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.

In a world of white men with giant bank accounts and even bigger egos, how did this 5 feet 2 inch, self-described, liberal lesbian mother of four, end up as the most influential and insightful reporter of the technology age?

As you’ll hear, Kara puts it down to curiosity, confidence, and understanding the choices available to her.

Leadership is the art of unlocking the potential of others. But our success at doing that, first depends on our ability to unlock the potential in ourselves.

If you’re listening to this podcast, you have choices. Given its reach around the world, some of you have more than others. But all of us, all of us, have more choices than we think.

Too many times we doubt ourselves, see only the obstacles, respond only to the fear, the one that makes us believe that we don’t have the ability, the experience, the confidence, or the right to choose a different path.

We let others decide our future. We wait for approval, or acceptance, or acknowledgement that we have passed some undefined, moving line test.

But when we choose to take a different path - one that recognizes that life is a journey; that what we do with it depends on the decisions we make, not those that we let others make for us. When we make that choice to take a different path, then we show up differently.

We start to discover that our future is waiting for us to create it. That the choices we make will determine the impact that we make and the one we leave behind.

To be a leader is a choice. To make a difference is a choice. To define our own journey is a choice.

So choose your future. And then create it. In Kara’s words, “be defined by that the choices you have.”

It is the human equivalent of lighting the blue touch paper. And the results will light up the sky.