Mark Tercek is the CEO of The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental organization. He is a former Managing Director and Partner at Goldman Sachs and is the author of the bestselling book Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature.

Some interesting insights from this episode:

• We all have an inner environmentalist inside of us.

• His executive coach taught him some valuable lessons early on including how to listen better and how to not sweat out the details.

• In the nonprofit world, he had to learn how to understand employees’ psychic income and use that as motivation to drive behavior.

• Saving nature isn’t just the morally right thing to do, it’s also the smartest investment we can make.

• Learn how he pivoted his 4,000 employee organization from pure land conservation toward embracing climate change as a top priority.

• “Excellence is matching ambition with a good dose of reality.”

• We all have a tendency to overestimate risks in our lives. The returns are greater than perceived and the risks less that perceived.  More of us should just go for it.