Optimism and impact Gore principles of success

Adrian Gore has spent more than three decades building Discovery into one of South Africa’s most prominent companies. But the question that has continued to interest him is not how to build a successful business. It is why some people make an extraordinary impact while others, despite having greater advantages, do not. 

That question sits at the heart of Gore’s new book, which he discussed with CNN business correspondent and Quest Means Business anchor Richard Quest.  

“I wrote the book with my team with a deep conviction we can make a massive impact on people and help them liberate what I believe is their greatest,” Gore said. 

The book grew out of his long-standing fascination with people and performance at Discovery, a company he describes as having been “built from the ground up organically” rather than through capital and acquisitions. “We built it life by life, person by person,” he said. “The fundamental issue in our business has been the quality of people, the ability to bring out the best in them, to attract the right people, develop them, and ultimately perform exceptionally well.” 

That focus eventually led Gore to a broader question. “Why is it that some people, regardless of capabilities or talents, can scale everything, whereas others with interesting capabilities, privileges, and education, often live a more benign life?” 

His answer is rooted in the idea that human beings are operating with an evolutionary “miscoding”. “We evolved with scarcity of resources and food,” Gore said. “Physical threats. We lived short, brutal lives, beaten by animals, falling off cliffs.” 

Modern life, however, is almost the opposite. “Now, we find ourselves in a world of abundance. We don‘t have physical threats anymore. Our threats are now systemic, the threats of failure of systems, education systems, governance, democracy, healthcare systems.”  

The problem, Gore argued, is that human beings have not had enough time to adapt. “It’s been too short a time for us to recode.” From this idea came four principles that form the basis of his book: disciplined optimism; focused urgency; declared goals; and the Pareto tail. 

The first, disciplined optimism, is not about pretending everything is fine. Gore is emphatic about the distinction. “It’s not glass half full,” he said. “Success and impact are not about avoiding the negative; they are about seeking opportunities, finding opportunities, and executing on them.” He believes people are naturally more affected by negative information, meaning that opportunities can disappear beneath an instinctive focus on what might go wrong. 

Quest offered a personal example of how a single negative comment can outweigh numerous positive ones. Gore recognised the phenomenon immediately. “You’re living my view of the research,” he said. “The negative stuff counts more to us than the positive.” 

He linked this to psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on prospect theory and loss aversion, explaining that “the pain of a loss is much more, much worse for us than a gain of the same magnitude”. Kahneman received a 2002 equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on judgement and decision-making, which included research conducted with Tversky. “You can’t get over that issue,” Gore said. “What you can do is be aware of it and be disciplined in your optimism.” 

For Gore, this principle has had practical consequences in South Africa. During the electricity crisis, he and a group of business leaders decided that the private sector could help the government with execution. “The loadshedding was absolutely horrendous, and it was a real concern that the group would fail,” he said. The response was to bring the chief executives of large corporates together and get them to sign a pledge stating, “I believe in the potential of the country and I’m committed to help.” Within days, 160 of the executives of the country’s biggest companies had signed. “It sounds kind of fluffy,” Gore admitted, “but it changed the entire dynamic.” 

The second principle, focused urgency, concerns the way people use time. Gore argues that people often fail to appreciate how quickly the most productive periods of their lives pass.  

The third, declared goals, is based partly on loss aversion. Gore said people are often more motivated by what they stand to lose than by what they might gain. “Goals are a fundamental thing,” he said. “The declared goal creates this invisible hand of loss aversion that drives the hard work.” 

The final principle, the Pareto tail, is about identifying the relatively small number of decisions and opportunities that can have a disproportionately large impact. Gore illustrated it with one of Discovery’s most significant innovations, Vitality. 

Discovery had been presented with what appeared to be a straightforward cross-selling opportunity: sell health insurance to members of a rapidly growing gym chain. But the team was “obsessed with the idea of making people healthy”. 

“We suddenly flipped the thing around,” Gore recalled. “The key issue was, what if basically when you joined Discovery, the gyms were free? That was the Pareto moment.” Members could earn points and status through healthy behaviour, eventually gaining free access to gyms. “I knew at that moment,” Gore said. The idea was developed without the certainty that extensive data might normally provide. “We had a hunch about that,” Gore said. “There was no data yet. But just the power of the product would attract the right people.” 

Quest noted that Vitality had since become something of an obsession, with people going to extraordinary lengths to earn rewards. Gore admitted that the team could not have predicted just how far the idea would go. “Did we really have the foresight about how to apply it to life insurance, health insurance, the idea of shared value that we could take globally? No, we didn’t.”  

But, for Gore, the significance of the story lies not simply in Vitality itself. It demonstrates how the four principles work together. “The real story is how I got into the tail,” he said. “That passion, that finding that solution of not simply succumbing to a cross-sell opportunity came from the first few principles.”  

Asked which of the four principles mattered most, Gore initially hesitated, eventually describing optimism as a powerful force. “It is a gateway,” he said. 

“There’s an arrogant belief that pessimism is sophisticated,” he said. “Optimism, perceiving positive, is reckless and naive. And as I try and show in the book, it’s quite the opposite way round. We code it for negative, and that’s primitive. Sophistication is about avoiding it.” 

That philosophy extends to his understanding of success itself. Gore argues that failure is often romanticised as a great teacher, while success is overlooked. “In the book I talk about success being a better teacher than failure.”  

Ultimately, however, Gore does not define success as wealth, status, or even business growth. “It’s about impact,” he said. “Impact is success.” 

And though he has spent years putting these principles into practice at Discovery, he does not claim to have mastered them. “I live these by being very aware of them,” he said. “I’m no specialist at them. And I wouldn’t pretend to tell you I’m always living them.” 

What matters, he said, is recognising when he is not applying them. “I’m living it every day and I’m aware of when I’m not.” For Gore, that awareness is ultimately about refusing to become passive in the face of problems, whether in business, in South Africa, or in his own life. “I’m not uncomfortable trying to make an impact,” he said. “I’m striving for it.”