JetBlue chairman Joel Peterson reveals the 3 mantras to follow that'll quickly turn you into a better and more reliable leader

• Joel Peterson is the chairman of JetBlue Airways and The Hoover Institution, and the founding partner of Peterson Partners.
• The following is an excerpt from his new book, "ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others, and Running Stuff."
• In it, he describes three ways that help him make challenging decisions which ultimately better his career.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When I was an MBA student, I met many people whose backgrounds and aspirations were different from mine. One classmate who stands out in my memory was a young man from Long Island living across the hallway from me. His name was Ray Dalio.

Ray was a good student, but his real passion wasn't for management — it was for investing. Back then, Ray was obsessed with a practice known as technical trading, in which investors focus exclusively on finding patterns in the company's daily stock price movements. In contrast with traditional investors, who look at balance sheets and income statements, technical traders obsess over these patterns, believing they will predict when the stock is set to rise or fall.

This all looked like utter madness to me, a silly game on par with palm reading or astrology. As we approached graduation and I pondered my classmates' futures, I was concerned about how Ray and his piles of mysterious stock charts were going to fare. Honestly, I wondered how he was going to make a living.

Today Ray Dalio is worth $18.1 billion and is the 25th richest person on the planet, according to Forbes. Bridgewater Associates, the firm he launched after we graduated, is the most successful hedge fund investment company in the industry's history. Where I saw madness, Ray clearly had a method.

In 2017, Ray set out to describe his method in a book he called, very simply, "Principles." The book describes Ray's attempt to systematize the process of management. He writes: "Great managers are not philosophers, entertainers, doers, or artists. They are engineers. They see their organizations as machines and work assiduously to maintain and improve them. They create process-flow diagrams to show how the machine works and evaluate its design . . . They don't do this randomly. They do it systematically, always keeping the cause-and-effect relationships in mind."

Next to knowing one's core values, the most important attribute an entrepreneurial leader can possess is a predictable, reliable, and intentional personal operating system. If that operating system isn't yet as reliable as the leader wants, refining it to that point should be a priority.

Everybody knows what a computer's operating system is. It helps process the information the computer takes in, sets rules and priorities, and brings an orderliness to how the computer approaches its work. Humans have personal operating systems too. An entrepreneurial leader must translate priorities into actions in order to generate results. This begins at the interface between brain and heart — in the "applications" used to solve problems and make decisions. In the same way that an operating system guides a computer's operations, a leader's personal operating system guides his or her everyday actions.

Ray Dalio has succeeded because he's created a firm with elaborate systems, flow-charts, and processes that guide its everyday decisions. Together, they are the firm's operating system. But before a leader can create an organization that functions this way, he or she must refine his or her personal operating system — the habits he or she uses to lead — and learn to act systematically in everyday practice.

Whether genetically or socially determined, set in motion by parents, nurtured by peers, or simply welling up as inchoate emotion, most of us think we inherited how we react to stimuli, how we process information, and, especially, how we feel. By adulthood, many people stop thinking about it. It feels ingrained and foundational. We simply react. "After all," we say to ourselves, "that's just how I am."

This is a mistake. Reactions are not purely derivative of upbringing or DNA. They are, instead, choices. You can control them. And like a programmer, you can rewrite and repair your own operating system so that it represents your best self and makes you the predictable, reliable leader that people will want to follow. Indeed, to craft your approach to that of a leader who may lead durable change, you must.

Anson Dorrance, coach of the University of North Carolina women's soccer team, has led his athletes to twenty-three NCAA championships. He writes: "Deliberate actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, made into habits; [and] compounded together, added up over time yield excellence." He asserts that new habits are within the reach of everyone, as he challenges young women to raise their sights and change their behavior.

Stephen Covey, writing in "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," puts it another way. He emphasizes the importance of people recognizing the truth in the statement "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday" — and that in recognizing this, they realize that if they make different choices today, they will be different people tomorrow.

I have personal experience with making difficult changes. As a young leader, when I undertook an effort to rewrite my operating system, I began with three mantras — sometimes repeating them several times a day in an effort consciously to override my natural instincts: It's not about me. I am not my emotions. I have all I need.

1. "It's not about me." Like many younger people, I tended to put myself at the center of a self-referencing universe. Once I discovered that most people interpret the world only as it affects them, I realized that no one was paying much attention to how I came across because they were so caught up in how they came across. This realization liberated an other-centered focus, and with it, the habit of listening without agenda. I began setting aside my arguments, ignoring what I might say next, and putting on hold any evaluation of what I was hearing. Instead, I began listening simply to see how well I could summarize the thoughts of another — to capture and organize the essence of another's point of view better than they had articulated it. Soon, by adding empathy and patience, the discipline of removing myself from the center allowed me to better formulate my own thoughts — and, ultimately, to thrive at the center.
2. "I am not my emotions." Most of us feel emotions welling up as if they have a will of their own. Defendants who describe crimes of passion betray this logical leap, as if emotions are irrepressible and ungovernable. Good managers, however, train themselves to rein in emotions. I've concluded that my best decisions have been the product of analysis plus instinct. I consider my instincts, because I recognize the possibility that my heart knows things my head doesn't, but I avoid overreliance on instinct.
3. "I have all I need." No one likes failing. But in any large or meaningful project, missteps are inevitable. When failures happen, many people harbor a tendency to blame others, or bad luck, or lack of resources — anything but themselves. When I was young, I sometimes fell into this trap. Over time, I recognized I had no reason to lay off my failures on others. I had what I needed to get the job done, and if I didn't, it was on me. It reminded me to move beyond my failures and limitations. Soon I came to embrace the notion that there's information in failure, and that defeat can serve as preamble to victory. "I have all I need" reminds me that failure is often fleeting and temporary. This led me to develop a calm assurance that I have what I need to do whatever lies before me.

Eventually, these early attempts at self-talk began to stick. I began to adopt these three new attitudes as if they were natural. I found myself feeling (and acting) less selfish or self-centered, angry, defensive, or anxious. As I internalized the mantras, I thought about them less often. New patterns took over, and new habits took root. My operating system was being slowly rewritten, and as that happened, I was becoming a more reliable and more effective leader.

My own set of mantras are idiosyncratic, based on the specific deficiencies in my personal operating system that caused me to struggle. Everyone's attempts at self-correction will be different. The point is to identify what needs fixing, and begin to fix it.

From "ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others, and Running Stuff" (HarperCollins Leadership; April 21, 2020).

Joel Peterson is the chairman of JetBlue Airways and The Hoover Institution, and the Founding Partner of Peterson Partners, a Salt Lake City-based investment management firm with $1B under management. Since 1992, Peterson has been on the faculty at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, teaching courses in real estate investment, entrepreneurship, and leadership. He's been called the "Mr. Rogers of Silicon Valley" in this profile and has appeared on Fox & Friends, CNN's Quest Means Business, CBS Radio, and BNN Bloomberg among other outlets.

Peterson formerly served as chief executive officer of Trammell Crow Company, then the world's largest private commercial real estate development firm. He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and received his bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University. He has been awarded the 2005 Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2016 Robert K. Jaedicke Silver Apple Award at the Stanford GSB.

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