From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The only way to engineer virality and make a product work is to understand the consumer, and that changes from city to city, from country to country.
Success and fame, especially fame, can instigate fundamental shifts within us at a cellular level. The very nature of fame is peculiar; it's akin to an insatiable flame that ceaselessly yearns for more, compelling you to endlessly seek something, despite its ultimate emptiness.
I had to remain in war mode. I had to continue confronting my captors, not accept what was happening to me. The relationship I had with my captors was based on suspicion.
As I progressed in my career, there were always moments where I asked myself whether I was good enough for that next challenge. I was often the youngest person in the room, and typically the only brown face in the room. I took the fact that I felt I wasn't good enough as a challenge.
Identities are useful – if you had to make everything up in your life, from the start, with no input whatsoever – that wouldn't be freedom – you'd be less free; you'd have to think constantly about what you should or should not do. There would be no structure for your life choices.
This stubbornness was further highlighted during a significant hiatus from swimming at 15, amidst the turmoil of war. My father had left the country, leaving me to navigate adolescence in rebellion, seeking normalcy in defiance. That year was transformative—cutting my hair, getting a piercing, and quitting swimming symbolised a personal revolution, leading me to realize my participation in the sport was for my own sake, not merely to fulfil my father's expectations.
The objective isn't to become the world number one; it's about consistently reaching your best or performing adequately in moments that matter to you.
At the risk of being glib, in the United States, most of the narcissistic sociopaths are also devoutly religious...
The happier I become with myself, the less I buy… the better my bank account becomes, because I'm not buying nonsense that I never needed.
At a point, we developed language sophisticated enough to transmit abstract ideas with precision from one mind to another. That enables high quality parallel processing of problems such that we literally have emergent cognition. When people gather, they talk about difficult puzzles they face, and the product of their thinking exceeds the sum of their individual capacity to reason through it.
You should never place your value as a human being on results. You don't control the results of the game – people get lucky or go bankrupt. Also, what happens when you achieve your result? What long-term satisfaction does that bring you?
Technology claims to be showing us a mirror of what was already present in society but in reality, technology is a funhouse mirror with a feedback loop that's engineered to show us the most egregious parts of society that are better at keeping our attention.