Some thirty years ago, at a private evening in Munich among Europe’s leaders, collectors and investors, I looked at my hand on a heavy crystal champagne glass, then at the hand of the person beside me, holding an identical glass, and could find little to tell them apart. The difference was never in the flesh and blood. It lies in the way a person sees the world.
Once you see, you cannot unsee.
Suzanna Zuska Helia
Investor, business builder and author · Sydney
A forthcoming book
Exceptional
Why the Same World Creates Different Fortunes
A book about how philosophy, physics and the way we perceive the world give each of us a different world, and decide who we are in it.
What we live leaves epigenetic marks on our DNA and changes how our genes are expressed, and I believe some of it reaches our children.
Living the exceptional is like skiing down fresh powder in a rhythm, with tears of joy running down your face. You feel you are a bird flying, the snow is the clouds, and you are somewhere between heaven and earth. You become one with the mountain, one with the air, one with all, and yet no one at all.
You love a good investment or deal the same way, for the thrill of it, because you have built something that was not there before. When a deal is done honestly, with nothing hidden and enough left on the table for everyone to walk away satisfied, you do not feel the work. What you feel in your body is pure joy at what you have created, and the money is a good thing, and so is who you become.
By invitation
For interviews and speaking:
zuska@helia.company
I speak and write about
- What makes a person exceptional: how they see, think and decide, and what does a maze have to do with that?
- What Socrates, Aristotle, Newton and quantum physics teach us about how we see the world, and why we fear AI the way Socrates feared writing.
- What has an Oxford University professorship got to do with current wealth?
- We all have a responsibility to become exceptional, and our DNA is waiting! The third generation does not have to be the last.
- Mergers, acquisitions and IPOs are the large transactions that turn value into wealth. Why do they so often underperform?
- Why beauty, silence and intuition matter in business.