From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
When I look at my own life- the things that I'm most embarrassed about are the moments where I acted, or didn't act, because of fear. The moments I'm most proud of are those where I acted with some semblance of courage.
While people may have more connections than ever, these connections often lack depth; they are rarely reciprocal and seldom provide emotional sustenance. The pain of loneliness is something else entirely—stemming from being deliberately excluded, ostracized, or bullied. This type of isolation is literally painful, as it activates the pain centers in the brain.
We seem to be in a strange period of history where our official world view, our official picture of the universe denies the reality of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life value. I think people do feel this at an intuitive level, and it can lead to a deep sense of alienation, a sense that we don't fit into the world somehow.
The power of regret is that it clarifies what we value and instructs on how to do better. When people tell you what they regret they most, they are telling you what they value the most.
Social synchrony is a big feature of human behaviour—it's a weird thing if you think about it, but we do things like marching in time and parading and singing in choirs in ways that are highly coordinated and synchronised.
I cannot argue that my own interests are special simply because I'm me and you're not and expect that you will take me seriously. The nature of logic forces us to cede our own pre-eminence, because there is nothing in the pronoun 'you' or 'he' or 'she' which confers some special status.
At some point, corruption destroys the trust in a society so much that it has an impact on unity, and the social fabric of a country or nation. It affects wellbeing. It affects the capacity of a nation to be happy.
Since we started really living these tools, we are now better at uncertainty than we were even two years ago. You can't go back to believing that it's too risky, you've got to keep going.
Confidence, after all, is simply one's belief in their own ability to accomplish a task or achieve a result. It's an elusive and abstract feeling. In my experience, many of the individuals I work with, including Olympians, often lack this so-called essential trait. My approach is always to redirect their focus from this nebulous concept of confidence to the concrete tasks at hand.
Training helps you turn fear from something that paralyses you or makes you flee into something that spurs you to take the right decisions in very difficult situations.
We use these tools to do things quicker – but that never help us get on top of everything because they systematically increase the size of the 'everything' – It's a rigged game!
As an entrepreneur, you're often doing things that haven't been done before, or doing them in ways that break the mould. All sorts of people are telling you, 'No, that's not how it's done,' and you're constantly running into obstacles. Without a lot of self-confidence, you can't even get started.