5 key insights I learnt from meeting Conor Neill
Date: 1/1/2020
This morning, I had the honor and privilege to meet Conor Neill. I have been waiting for this moment for the last three months ever since I got to know about him. I had asked for an hour of his time but he was too generous to stretch it to two. The conversation with him was full of wisdom and I was taking notes profusely. Never before have I paid such rapt attention to a conversation. I was glued to every word that Conor uttered. And mind you, Conor is not someone who is known to waste his words.
Who is Conor Neill?
Conor is a sought-after keynote speaker on Leadership. He teaches Leadership Communications at IESE Business School and is the President of Vistage in Spain, part of the world’s leading CEO organisation. As an entrepreneur, he has founded 5 companies, selling 16 private jets and building the 3rd largest fleet of private jets in Spain. He is a visiting professor at University College Dublin, the University of Montevideo and Permanent Faculty on Entrepreneurs’ Organisation’s Global Leadership Academy.
His articles on leadership and persuasion have been published at Forbes, IESE Insight, Quora, Lifehack, Venturebeat
On top of that he runs a massively successful Youtube channel named Conor Neil with over 200K subscribers. He is often posting videos on Learning to Lead and Persuasive Conversation.
His most popular videos How to Start a Speech and Improve Your Speaking have 13M views and 1.3 M views respectively. My personal favorite talk of him is his TEDx Talk, titled, The Discipline of Finishing. Conor’s genius is revealed in full glory through this talk.
You can subscribe to his Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/rhetoricaljourney
You can subscribe to his blog here: https://conorneill.com/
I would rate his blog as one of the top three blogs on personal development. I often go back to his blogs many times over. He is a master craftsman. Two of my favorite blog posts are:
5 Key Insights from my conversation with Conor:
- Work with great clients : Conor talked about the importance of picking great clients to work for and not compromise with the quality of clients for the sake of money. Working with great clients helps you amp your own game and helps your grow. He mentioned how he keeps his bar high and has a strict criteria to only work for the best. He also mentioned about Seth Godin, who also preaches the same. Here’s Seth’s video on picking great clients:
- Keep a journal and take notes: This is something that he he did not tell me explicitly but I noticed in the time I was with him. A lot many times, he pored into his diary to where he had taken copious amounts of notes. No matter how high you have climbed the ladder of success, your hunger to learn, staying curious and absorb must not stop. Conor demonstrated all of this. He also mentioned about his fond memories of a teacher he greatly respected who inculcated the habit of journaling in his classes. This teacher would force all the students to journal for 5 minutes at the end of every class. Conor has built the habit from those days.
- Invest in self learning by learning from experts: Conor mentioned that to chase ambitious goals, one need not learn everything by themselves. One could shorten the learning path by learning under the masters. He talked about enrolling for classes and workshops from the best masters available.
- Embracing the “What’s In it for you?” attitude: Conor also mentioned that in his formative years, he lived with an attitude of “What’s in it for me?”. But then he altered his attitude towards helping others first and that transformed his life and put him in a higher growth trajectory.
- Build bigger boats to go far: Conor also mentioned the importance of building bigger boats when one is chasing ambitious goals. Bigger boat is an analogy for building stronger foundations. He said, when you try to go alone and chase all by yourself you might not be able to go far and your boat may sink when the water gets rough. It is therefore wise to be patient and invest in long term relationships, which will help you conquer the mighty seas in life.
Conor shared a lot more in our interaction but the above five were for me the highlights.
