This Year's Best Advice From Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Other Influencers

What will it take to make sure life really does improve faster for the poor? We need advances in technology and we need to deliver them to the people who need them most. We also need to close the gender gap. Countries where girls don’t go to school or women can’t open a business will be left behind.

The only way to get through those long hours is to love what you do. You have to be passionate about what you are creating and believe in the impact it will have on the world.

There is nothing better than personal experiences to make you realize the importance of diversity, and the need to work hard and continuously to advance it. After all, we all — men included — benefit from promoting greater gender equality at home and at work.

Fears of the future are just as useless as the painful thoughts of the past. They have nothing to do with how we can be happy right now. So they deserve to be labeled and put in the mental spam box.

When you’re feeling completely stressed out, try identifying and then taking one positive action. It might be making a list of tasks that you can prioritize, asking for more resources, or even just finding the humor in the situation. If you can find one positive action to take, everything else will seem more doable.

Before defining your personal brand comes defining your professional mission. This can be the really hard part. What matters to you? What are you trying to accomplish? Why do you do it?

To be an entrepreneur, you have to cast as wide a net as possible. Taking lots of risks is just part of the job, and you have to be ready for the reality that most of your ideas won’t pan out. You push on with confidence that, somewhere down the line, one of your ideas will hit big.

After a number of data breaches at some of the nation’s top retailers, many are worried about protecting their identities from thieves. Experts say that when shopping in a store, the safest choice is cash at the checkout counter, but that too has risk, because who really wants to shop with wads of cash?

Millennials may be notoriously demanding when it comes to fulfillment on the job, but this isn’t a bad thing. Companies that are able to discover ways to satisfy their curiosity and provide channels for growth—even if this doesn’t always mean direct advancement—will find that employee loyalty does exist.

My humble advice to all those who are trying to learn leadership, is to achieve clarity in your own mind, first, on what you want to achieve. Clarity is the highest form of human intelligence.