Wisdom in fragments

The greatest leaders have humility. A good leader is a humble leader. A good leader listens to people, gets other inputs, admits when they're wrong… and that boils down to humility; it's the single most important characteristic that I see in leaders.

Former Navy SEAL Commander & Leadership Author

War teaches you that there are many different types of people, good and bad, and you have to understand that good and evil co-exist, and it's up to you to calculate your way through the world, understanding where people are rooted.

Former Navy SEAL Commander & Leadership Author

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.

Former Navy SEAL Commander & Leadership Author

When you fail, you take ownership of the failure, and then you assess what mistakes were made, what could be done differently, what better instructions you could have given, what better support you could have given, then you fix those problems, move on and try again, simple.

Former Navy SEAL Commander & Leadership Author

Fundamentally you build trust with people by giving them trust.

Former Navy SEAL Commander & Leadership Author

People suffer from the curse of knowledge, they don't know what they don't know! All of us have different starting points, different assumptions and a different knowledge base.

Curator of TED Talks & Author of "The Long Tail

Humans have this incredible ability; we understand the world around us, we can dream, we can share visions of the future and persuade each other- and ourselves- to improve. This is so deep in our biology.

Curator of TED Talks & Author of "The Long Tail

Our world needs a more reflective way of communicating, something which the media are not promoting. We need an antidote to the current shooting-from-the-hip, and outrage sparking emotive content that is causing mutual incomprehension, it's a tragedy.

Curator of TED Talks & Author of "The Long Tail

Screens are weapons of mass distraction, and as audiences we have to listen and give speakers a chance.

Curator of TED Talks & Author of "The Long Tail

The single most important thing someone can do for a talk is to plan three or four rehearsals in front of people who are like the audience who will be receiving it; it may be one person or three, but you really should do that and discover what works, what doesn't, what's clumsy, what resonates.

Curator of TED Talks & Author of "The Long Tail

Storytelling is an extraordinary powerful human skill that all of us are wired for; but its best used in the service of ideas.

Curator of TED Talks & Author of "The Long Tail

Machines are pushing people to new frontiers, and teach us that complacency and the status-quo are not working.

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism

Instead of worrying about powerful artificial intelligences in the future, we should be concerned about the lack of intelligence in the Oval Office today!

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism

We cannot think about technology in confrontational terms. There is no race against the machines, there is no fight, no war. We have to end this long, historical confrontational narrative.

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism

People like Trump rally people behind them by pointing out threats; these may be real, but most likely are imaginary or inflated. Then he says, 'only I can protect you.'

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism

If you offer no vision for the future, someone else will. Our geopolitics cannot tolerate a vacuum, and if you retreat- whether physically or ideologically- someone else will come up with a plan which may not be complementary for democracy.

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism