From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
Music leads you to a greater understanding. Einstein said that relativity came to him through musical intuition- he was a great violinist, and was also Chair of the Princeton Orchestra. Bach had a phenomenal, and intuitive, understanding of mathematics too.
There really is a very weak moral justification for these weapons that mainly relies on the concept of deterrence—that their purpose is to prevent another country from attacking you with them. That case is so weak that you see major global institutions like the U.S. Catholic Church condemn nuclear weapons as immoral.
I actually encrypt my wishes and goals into the things I do. There are creative ways for each of us to embed our wishes into our daily lives, but we have to set those wishes to start with.
When you're in the present, looking forward, your brain sees change as scary. But from the far side, looking back, the fear fades.
Courage is not the opposite of fear, rather it is the triumph over fear. There is nothing courageous about a guaranteed outcome, right? Courage is being yourself in a world where everyone tries to be like everyone else.
On our Sahara Desert crossing, there was a man, who was dying of thirst, who urinated in his hand and shared some with me when he needed it to survive. The world is about sharing and giving to others.
For the people I documented, money was secondary… They knew absolutely they would make money, but changing the world and doing cool stuff was the primary goal; that was their mission.
We all have philosophies which form the basis for our motivations and what we do with our days. Everyone has their own philosophy of life; every institution has a philosophy... but for most of us, those philosophies are unexamined and more or less automatic and instinctual.
True art, real art, real creativity, comes from somewhere else. It isn't about a picture or decoration- there's a divinity to it…
What politics couldn't say and left silent, fiction could tell. Literature takes us out of our comfort zones and pushes us to see the issues from various angles. Fiction is an intellectual exercise.
There's also a danger in acting of identifying yourself as an actor. We have to try to identify ourselves as human beings first, and our jobs second. I'm Sam, I act sometimes… not I am Sam, I am an actor.