From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The issue you're worried about, the one you're likely spending most of your time discussing, isn't the only problem in the world. We tend to lose sight of this because we often perceive our immediate tasks as the most crucial. Given the multitude of issues we need to address, the goal shouldn't be to resolve a single problem in an exhaustive and expensive way.
Everyone has a little bit of warrior in them. We all grow up and have a little piece of us which wants to be a superhero, who goes and fights the bad guys. In real life, fighting is tough, you have to overcome your fears – nobody really wants to get into a fight! Escaping that fear is the reason so many people who get into combat sports.
Depression is depression. Despair is despair. Disappointment is disappointment, and I think it's important for us to have that emotional granularity. Because if I just walk around like the world is right now, 'I'm anxious, I'm anxious,' but I have a hard time believing that everyone is that anxious. I think it's because we don't have granularity in our understanding of emotions, and so we're not communicating our true experiences accurately.
The biggest challenge is a lack of confidence. Confidence is preventing businesses from investing significant amounts of their balance sheet strength, they simply do not feel they will get returns on that investment, and so they're holding cash.
How would one expect society to develop 'actualisation' and 'esteem' driving characteristics (economic growth and spending) when the basic 'physiological' and 'safety' needs (food security, employment, health, property) are not met.
Cruel optimism is where someone comes along with a very simple app which says you can mediate for a few minutes a day and it will give you your attention back. It's optimistic because you're offering a solution in an upbeat tone – but it's cruel because solution is small, and incommensurate to the scale of the causes.
The inexpressible depth of music... easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all of the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.
My whole life I'd thought of Earth as this place where we're in control of our lives. I'd wake up, go to the grocery store, take my kid to a baseball game. It was this safe, stable cocoon. Now it wasn't that anymore. In space I could see the Earth in relation to the stars and the sun and the moon. The Earth is a planet. It's a spaceship. We're zipping around the universe, hurtling through the chaos of space with asteroids and black holes and everything else, and we think we're safe but, boy, we are right out there in the middle of it.
Champions possess a distinct mindset, a relentless drive for excellence that sets them apart. They're not content with just doing okay; they strive for excellence constantly. Being second is not an option for them, they aim for the top.
The irony is that the more passive aggressive you are, the more your relationships will get damaged, much more so than if you were just honest. Passive aggression is infuriating when you're dealing with it. It can feel like shadowboxing!
The way you eliminate fear is to approach your situation from every angle, almost as though it were a logic puzzle. I like to think of it as approaching like a tortoise, not like a hare.
I didn't know that having face to face contact with people and being curious would be my medication…. And would save me. I didn't know curiosity was going to become a superpower in my life.