From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
When you're getting defeated in training, you're getting better. You've got to get tested in life if you're going to improve. When you're training in the martial arts, you always want to be getting beaten in the practice room. That signifies you're fighting good people.
We're no longer just measuring ourselves against the 120 members of our local community. Instead, with our devices, we're exposed to global icons like Bill Gates, Oprah, or LeBron James, setting standards for our intelligence, beauty, and self-worth. This expanded comparison can be detrimental.
The greatest risk often lies in people's biased perceptions of risk itself. The challenge is: how do you debias risk when everyone's perception of it is inherently biased?
Play is inherently interactive, granting agency whether indoors or outdoors. When competition was added into the mix, playing with friends introduced me to complex concepts like game theory, including strategies involving threats, promises, and bluffs.
They described, for example, taste as if it were just electrical signals in the brain, but there's no way such signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That's the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.
Often, we perceive antisemitism as an issue affecting someone else, never ourselves. However, it's a resource that a very wide range of individuals, groups and institutions have tapped into overtime.
In a highly emotive and risk-averse market, rationality seems to fall by the wayside, with investors trigger-happy to pull immense volumes of liquidity out of assets at the earliest risk warning.
Firms like McKinsey are self-reporting that their people are 5x more productive in-flow than out of flow… 500% more productive. That means you can work Monday in-flow and take the rest of the week off – and you'd still get as much done as your peers.
Everyone experiences some form of trauma. Many people are unaware that being bullied, constantly criticised, or neglected can also be forms of trauma. There's a growing recognition of these repeated relational injuries—being ignored or growing up in a dysfunctional family where excessive drinking or overworking occurs, neglecting one's emotional needs.
If you want to see where human nature is most revealed, you have to look at human beings in their most stressful and painful scenarios. It is in those situations that you can learn how people behave and how you can behave.
My biggest fear isn't the fight itself. I don't get nervous about the physical aspect of fighting. My nervousness stems from the fear of losing, not living up to my own expectations of victory in front of an audience.
Space triggers that innate curiosity in us about what's out there, where we came from, and the possibilities those answers could bring. Humans are explorers – our imaginations can run wild- it's in our DNA. Our fascination with space links to our ability to dream, to wonder, to be curious and to have big ideas.