There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanPurpose and meaning are inextricably tied to suffering and difficulty. If you tell me a pursuit that you view as meaningful and important, I can guarantee it won't be easy. If it was easy, it wouldn't be meaningful or important. We reserve the notion of meaning for things that have difficulty.
Animals in this third group had learned from being exposed to inescapable shocks that nothing they did made a difference- they were essentially helpless when it came to controlling their fate. Most of our fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.
How would one expect society to develop 'actualisation' and 'esteem' driving characteristics (economic growth and spending) when the basic 'physiological' and 'safety' needs (food security, employment, health, property) are not met.
The reality is, not every business model is designed for scalability. Some businesses don't necessarily need to scale to be successful. The key lies in intellectual property. Once you've developed a piece of IP, the cost of distributing it to one person versus a million is remarkably similar.
The only people I've come across who don't have impostor syndrome are the real impostors. The conmen, con artists, the deceivers in our society who have no problem pretending to be who they are not.
Entrepreneurship is about taking risks and having the audacity to commit and persevere through all the obstacles and hurdles we have to overcome.
It's quite rare to enhance the product experience and simultaneously challenge an existing business model. Typically, you manage to achieve either one or the other. However, Perplexity introduces a superior product experience by saving users time and eliminating the need for them to click through links. This disruption is nothing short of revolutionary.
I was working on the principle that if you only listen to the voices around you, you'll amalgamate them into something that already exists… My view was that consensus isn't going to build something that will change the game.
Fear isn't just a neurophysiological phenomenon; it's also socio-cultural. We're enculturated to fear; it's something that we inherit, acquire, and learn – which implies that there is possibility of 'unlearning' our fear.
The only way to innovate is to follow Aristotle's prescription. To create a future that is different to the past is to imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made, not the one for which there is the most data. If companies want to innovate, they need to realise that data analytics is killing innovation yet is lauded and used increasingly.
Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the entire planetary 'net primary productivity' is today devoted to sustaining this one species- us.
I went from having no parents, to having 65! For kids, it was fantastic, there were lots of activities, a very strong community, and everyone cared for each other.