It is impossible to have the World Bank type of policy that is saying one policy fits all – educate your population, adopt better institutions, adopt family planning, and this will be the rescue. On the contrary, resources are limited, and we need to target the elements that are creating hurdles in the development of each country.

There is no such thing as one-sided victory in diplomacy, perhaps in war there is, but not in diplomacy. You are always, or at least should always be, mindful of the other side.

Most people run around like biological robots, as if we are an algorithm not a being. We become the predictable outcomes of the conditioned reflexes of our nerves, constantly triggered by people in reaction to circumstances.

There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.

Since citizens' militias are anachronistic, gun owners now use the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if that somehow offers protection against tyranny. A reckless, right-wing Supreme Court has agreed with them. As a result, gun ownership has become perversely linked to freedom in the vast gun-owning American sub-culture. But, instead of protection of freedom, Americans nowadays are getting massive bloodshed and fear.

The first thing I'd say is a big mistake is not caring about what the other side wants. Oftentimes people are thinking I have to say no to the other side. My goal is to say yes to them. It's to figure out what it is they want and give it to them.

Success means having a lifestyle that I enjoy. It means slowing down, enjoying what I do, and having as few stakeholders as possible. I don't want a bunch of investors. I don't want a ton of employees.

Entrepreneurs are people who by nature are optimists, who can tolerate risk and who have huge curiosity.

The rules of the brain are such that the chimp can freeze our brain, freezing the human out and can make decisions on our behalf.

I realised that what people do is, instead of figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it whether they want to or not, doing the ethical thing, what they do is they figure out what they want to do and then come up with the rationalisation for doing it, whether it's right or wrong. And we fool ourselves.

There are significant distinctions between what we perceive to be reality and the cold, hard, molecular world we inhabit. Our brains are constantly taking shortcuts to inform us about the world and this introduces an intrinsic error which our brains are filling in.

You can't just market your way out of a bad product.