From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I started writing fiction because I was lonely. I was an only child, a solitary child, raised by a single working mother, which was very unusual at the time in Turkey. Literature gave me a sense of continuity, coherence; it kept my pieces together. It helped me to connect even when I felt like I didn't quite belong.
My best ideas, and most successful opportunities have come- usually- from the most unexpected areas.
I've learned that the best ideas often come from the most unexpected conversations. That's why I've spent decades having curiosity conversations with people from completely different fields.
The moment I sang and I saw the audience loved it, I felt this powerful electricity all over me, it was like falling in love and knowing my purpose right there and then. I didn't know what journey my dreams would take, but I knew singing filled me up like nothing else could. It felt like a superpower.
Comedy delivers the cerebral and the hyperbole, it can be funny and serious. You can see that ability for the pendulum to swing both ways when you watch the best comedians perform.
We have these floods of ideas when we allow ourselves to slow down – you get this pent-up energy that flows out of you.
You couldn't design a situation more hostile to human learning than a typical school. We learn not to be creative, because everything is about turning us into good factory workers. That's why these systems were created: to make us into factory workers who produce more stuff, more money, more stuff, more money.
I started writing fiction because I was lonely. I was an only child, a solitary child, raised by a single working mother, which was very unusual at the time in Turkey. Literature gave me a sense of continuity, coherence; it kept my pieces together. It helped me to connect even when I felt like I didn't quite belong.
The more dots you give your brain, the more of them it will connect!
Songs are these magnetic creations of words and music, in very short form. A song needs to hit you in less than a minute and sometimes it can be an incredibly solitary, emotional experience where it's just you and the imagined relationship with that singer.
The single best way to have a great idea is to produce lots of ideas. The number of new ideas your organization can produce is a metric for its ability to generate novel solutions to any given problem. Your ideaflow is the most crucial business metric that you've never considered.
The workplace of the future is hard to predict specifically, but one thing we can predict is that we will increasingly rely on human intelligence and creativity as opposed to human capacity to perform repetitive tasks.