From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We behave like an entire culture suffering from a severe right-hemisphere brain injury or stroke. It's almost as if our culture has pulled us into the left hemisphere, where anxiety lives, and refuses to let us return.
Without what Becker called 'cultural world views' we would be overwhelmed by existential terror. Beliefs about reality that we share foster psychological equanimity by giving us a sense of meaning and value.
It's conceivable that survival odds were higher for ancestors who embraced false information endorsed by their tribe, compared to those who acknowledged empirically accurate information but were thereby alienated from their group.
There's something intrinsically sensual about jewellery, you wear it on your skin, it's a part of you and it embodies and imbues the personality and lustre of the wearer. There's something about gold and stones in particular which- for me- have a magical element.
The most successful organisations I've met over the years have a very-strong senses of culture (even from start-up stage). This isn't the soft process of drafting a mission statement for your website, but genuinely understanding the type of personality you want your company to have.
The efficiency trap is very modern, but it's now become a holdover from the Industrial Revolution. If you only relate to time, as if it were a certain kind of 'thing', like a natural resource… something that you could maximise, then you're going to be in a perpetual state of psychological struggle because you won't be using the right conceptual tools to live in time.
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.
Alibaba's vision statement includes a mention of how long it wants to last, and that is specifically 102 years. 100 years sounds like a cliché, it doesn't sound special or memorable… 102 years sticks in your mind, and the reason for this specific figure is that Jack Ma wanted Alibaba to be the only internet company that spanned three centuries.
In No One Killed Jessica (2011), a true crime tale of a woman searching for her sister's killer, Balan (known to her many fans as simply Vidya) proved that a film without a male lead could be a commercial success.
One of the ideas you hear often is that in America there is a culture where not only is it ok to fail, but it's almost expected – like a badge of honor. This is true to a point but that implies a cut-throat culture that is more legend than reality.
Unlike the divisive silos we've constructed, where one generation accuses the other — the older labeling the younger as lazy and the younger dismissing the older as out-of-touch or rigid. This dynamic needs transformation. Moving forward, it's imperative that both boomers and zoomers work in tandem.
We have to honour all parts of ourselves; and the wellness, social-media, and culture of the modern world has encouraged us to be this faux-perfect… a virtuous, pure version of ourselves. Everyone has dark thoughts and demons… we can't suppress that and ignore it. If we do, we'll never heal.