From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Whenever I write a new song with somebody, it feels like the first time. I sometimes feel embarrassed, humiliated, like I don't know what I'm doing until we find a spark. You have to dare to go to this place where, even though you've done it before, it feels like you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.
The objective isn't to become the world number one; it's about consistently reaching your best or performing adequately in moments that matter to you.
It's awareness that leads to regulation—that's why it's information. Because it's giving us information about how we're feeling and what we need to do about those feelings.
Currently, public services are extraordinarily hostile to those in poverty; a doctrine we've seen clearly in how the Home Office has handled the Windrush generation. This ideology believes people will respond positively to being treated with hostility; but that only works for emotionally regulated people who didn't grow-up in adversity. Our public services are emotionally illiterate.
I'd been a patsy all my life, an easy mark for the appeals of fundraisers or sales operators who would come to my door. I'd end up with unwanted magazine subscriptions… There must be something other than the features of the offer that got me to say yes, because I don't want those features, it must be the way the offer was presented to me.
It's definitely affected the psychology of the marketplace. It could not have come at a worse time. We have to deal with this expeditiously and make the system more robust to these kind of issues.
If you tell me a pursuit that you view as meaningful and important, I can guarantee it won't be easy. If it was easy, it wouldn't be meaningful or important. We reserve the notion of meaning for things that have difficulty.
A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. The human brain is a great example. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain. You have to hook them together just right, of course, but the result is completely fundamentally different than what you started with.
I think that single trait — self-awareness — or rather, that skillset, outweighs all the others put together. You're filtering every experience you have with others through your own perceptions, your own biases, your own reactions and instincts. So you have to know yourself first before you can truly know anyone else.
The purpose of intelligence is to improve the quality of decision making by reducing ignorance. The more you know the more likely it is that a sound decision will be taken. That applies to all of us in our day-to-day decisions.
One of the greatest myths in the lives of the people I coach is, 'I will be happy when…' as if there is some place to go to. There's only one book that ends with the phrase happily ever after, that's a fairy-tale.
it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human