We go to war not because we ignore the costs, but because we know there are costs, but we are willing to pay those costs because we get something from the war which we wouldn't get otherwise.
— Christopher BlattmanThe hardest part of the job is telling those players that they are not playing, I remember from my playing days how that felt. This is when compassion is an important tool as well.
In general, 90% of people are overmedicating themselves with either drinking, smoking weed, whatever it is. People do not want to be uncomfortable, they cannot stand discomfort.
We need to be more nuanced about how we define integrity. For me, it's not about sticking to opinions, but about sticking to values. I'm very flexible about the best way to live those values.
What was broken in journalism was not a lack of demand for good stories nor a lack of journalists or the format of stories and distribution – the thing that was broken was the business model.
We are, in the early days of the 21st century, talking about the death of the living world as an environmental externality. That alone should be an alarm-bell that our framework doesn't serve our time.
The last thing we want is to live like machines. Our research over the past 45+ years shows that when you're actively noticing, your neurons are firing, and that's literally and figuratively enlivening. And what do we do when we're having fun? We notice, we engage. So mindfulness is not just beneficial—it's enjoyable.
What seemed like trash to this giant software company was akin to Aladdin's treasure for a 12-year-old. I recruited my older sister as my business partner, and we began to gather discarded floppy disks using my youngest sister's pram. As an added bonus, we offered same-day delivery, a feature that we cheekily called 'Amazon Now'.
You don't have to choose a business that's going to drown you, be a treadmill, or suck you underneath. You can start slow, make a bit of money and then double down. You don't have to risk it all at the beginning.
Walls are seductive though… what politician hasn't said, 'I can make it like the old-days again…' Bridges sound harder – how do you build them? What will they cost? Who will pay? In truth, build walls almost always yields a negative result.
If you have a doctor who is very ready to find people as having heart disease, and thus overdiagnoses and overtreats them – that's a mistake, risks safety and wastes resources. Similarly, if you have a doctor down the hall who underdiagnoses, that endangers lives.
It doesn't matter how successful you are, how much market share you have, if you're in your comfort zone you will leave yourself exposed. Courage also links to decisiveness, which is one of the key attributes of great leaders. Cowardice pushes the day of reckoning out, decisiveness brings it closer.
Think about a rabbit sitting in a field. If that rabbit saw a hawk circling above and decided to wait for the back-propagation step before responding, it would be dead. It has been eliminated from the gene pool. The better you model the world, and the faster you can act on that model, the more likely your genes are to survive.