From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
So much of silence is about perpetuating the status quo, reinforcing what someone or dominant groups within an entity or organization have deemed appropriate, good, polite. Being different inherently exposes you to vulnerability; you're pushing against everything that the forces of mimicry urge you to do, which is to conform.
Unlike the divisive silos we've constructed, where one generation accuses the other — the older labeling the younger as lazy and the younger dismissing the older as out-of-touch or rigid. This dynamic needs transformation. Moving forward, it's imperative that both boomers and zoomers work in tandem.
Much of our learning, expansion, and deepening as humans occur within the realm of connectivity, particularly through the conversations we dare to have when we are most vulnerable and authentic. These discussions change us profoundly.
The primacy of overtly scientific approaches to understanding life has come at a tremendous cost; in some ways we see the world in shades of grey rather than in full colour.
One of the things I love most about my job is the diversity in the pace of work across the organization. I truly enjoy being with people from different parts of the world and working with individuals who operate on completely different approaches.
Rather than politicising our cultural challenges, we have to allow people to feel comfortable about their culture and about who they are, and to accept each other as equals.
We're the mammal that likes Tabasco sauce! We're the only creature (as far as we know) that seeks out suffering and pain willingly. We do so not just through liberal splashes of Tabasco on our food, but also through seeking meaning through activities.
Growing up in Pakistan, I saw so many people with heart disease and having heart attacks – it felt almost biblical – it was catastrophic. Unlike a lot of diseases, there wasn't much a cultural footprint for heart disease – it's not something you hear about on news or TV shows.
Women account for a mere 0.5% of recorded history.
The efficiency trap is very modern, but it's now become a holdover from the Industrial Revolution. If you only relate to time, as if it were a certain kind of 'thing', like a natural resource… something that you could maximise, then you're going to be in a perpetual state of psychological struggle because you won't be using the right conceptual tools to live in time.
Antisemitism has been present in Christian culture for roughly two millennia. Today it's not solely a Western, European, or North American issue; it's part of a global common culture. This 'reservoir' idea conceives of culture as a resource that a very wide range of individuals, groups and institutions have tapped into overtime.
About ten years, a guy told me about his father's death. He had to send twenty seven people on different buses and trains to inform relatives all over the country because phones didn't work. When his mother died, there were STD/PCO facilities in most-all villages. He had to only make twenty seven calls, and they were all informed in under half an hour.