From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I cannot help but admire the insight of our Jewish sages of old who taught that every child is born with equal affinities toward goodness and evil, in Hebrew yetzer hatov and yetzer hara. This means that we are not born as a tabula rasa.
When our original participants reached approximately 80 years of age, we invited them to reflect on their lives. We asked, 'What are your greatest sources of pride, and what are your deepest regrets?' The predominant regret was the disproportionate time spent working and the inadequate time spent with loved ones.
You can't go through life in that negative frame of mind. Just go, see what happens… challenge it. It's better to go to University and have an education doing what you want, rather than what you don't.
We're breathing, defecating pieces of meat that are no more significant or enduring than lizards or potatoes.
The people who do better are somehow better connected. In other words, there is an inherent logic in the idea that the more connections individuals make within their communities the better off they will be emotionally, socially, physically and economically.
There's a moment when you look at good art when time changes… It's as if time no longer exists, becomes longer, or is suspended. There's a moment of reverie when you're fully immersed in something apart from yourself. One experiences this sometimes in meditation. These inexplicable, wonderful and mysterious experiences we have never leave us.
Don't make the mistake of confusing net worth and self-worth.
Connection is not a nice to have. When we lose the right kinds of connections with others, we start to feel we don't exist. Buried underneath the complexity and the contempt, there's something wrong with how we're connecting as a society that's fuelling the anger we see.
Organizations fail when leaders fail to write-down their own depreciating intellectual capital, and bureaucracies exaggerate that problem by vesting so much power in so few people. Most change management programs are in-fact catch-up programs.
I think everyone should meditate. It's important to relax your brain and body, even just 10 minutes a day. You can do a lot to protect and build your immune system by controlling your stress and living a well-rounded life.
In the realm of experts, intuition, anchored in a substantial reservoir of experience and knowledge, becomes an invaluable asset. It's essentially a dialogue with your unconscious. However, for it to be constructive, your unconscious necessitates a good measure of education. An uneducated unconscious is a perilous entity.
Especially at the beginning, it takes just the right amount of delusion to dedicate yourself to something ambitious. The reality is you're more likely to fail than succeed and so you need strong belief to commit your heart and soul to an idea.