Sterling Hawkins

The Biography

Sterling Hawkins is a bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, and globally recognized keynote speaker on breakthrough innovation, resilience, and the courage to grow through discomfort. He is the founder of the #1M No Matter What movement, a global community dedicated to helping people push past their perceived limits, and the author of the bestselling book *Hunting Discomfort*. Over the course of his career, Sterling has founded, invested in, and grown more than fifty companies across six continents. He has lived inside the innovation problem from both sides — as the entrepreneur racing to build the next thing and as the investor backing the people bold enough to try. That rare vantage point has made him one of the most sought-after voices on how organizations and individuals can create breakthroughs when the comfortable path has run out. Sterling's philosophy is built on a deceptively simple idea: growth lives on the other side of discomfort. In his widely viewed TED talk, *Discomfort is Necessary for Innovation*, he argues that the instinct to avoid what feels hard is exactly what keeps people and organizations stuck. Rather than treat discomfort as a signal to retreat, he teaches audiences to hunt it — to move toward the friction, the uncertainty, and the edge of their competence, because that is where reinvention actually happens. On stage, Sterling is kinetic, candid, and deeply human. He speaks from the scars of his own journey — the companies that scaled, the ones that didn't, and the personal reckoning that came when the version of success he'd chased stopped working. His keynotes are equal parts provocation and practical toolkit: frameworks for building cultures that embrace change, rituals for staying in the discomfort long enough to transform, and the mindset shifts that separate organizations that adapt from the ones that get left behind. His work has been featured across major media, and he has spoken for Fortune 500 companies, global associations, and leadership teams on six continents. Whether the room is full of executives navigating disruption or teams searching for their next edge, Sterling's message lands the same way — as a permission slip to stop waiting for comfortable and start hunting the breakthrough that's already on the other side.