From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If a company doesn't have a purpose, I think they are wasting their life. Making money should be the result of helping people to build businesses.
The primacy of overtly scientific approaches to understanding life has come at a tremendous cost; in some ways we see the world in shades of grey rather than in full colour.
we make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same…
I've noticed that wealthy people don't build resilience often because they think they're protected by their money. To a certain extent, this is true. As the money goes however, there's no strength… there's no kernel behind the money that allows them to see through the problems of life. Your happiness comes from inside.
We seem to be in a strange period of history where our official world view, our official picture of the universe denies the reality of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life value. I think people do feel this at an intuitive level, and it can lead to a deep sense of alienation.
Humans often come together by believing in ideas that may only exist in our imaginations. We have an ability to imagine together, to merge our ideas as a collective, which can slowly move us toward a future once believed to be impossible. This is part of what changes us from being simple animals to a group that will soon travel to Mars and perhaps even further. To me that is magic.
The smartest being on planet Earth is life itself. Life creates with abundance, not with scarcity. Life does not want to kill the tigers for the deer to survive. Life basically says more deer, more tigers, more everything.
Architecture should fulfil multiple criteria. One of its purposes is to itself. A lot of people believe to some degree, in the autonomy of architecture as a discipline which means that part of the purpose of architecture is to construct new forms of knowledge that relate to the enhancement and advancement of the discipline.
Entrepreneurship means the unrelenting belief that there has to be a better way.
Conditional on the emergence of the human brain, civilisation was inevitable for many reasons. We had a commendable population in Africa 300,000 years ago and given the fact that these individuals were equipped with the power of the modern brain, the emergence of civilisation was inevitable.
Aging is a side-effect of being a machine with moving parts. All such machines, whether living or not, inherently create entropy in their structure. Living organisms have immensely sophisticated systems for exporting that entropy, but those systems are generally not 100% comprehensive, so aging still happens.
I personally want to throw up every time I hear some completely senseless and baseless statement like 'we need more of Europe, not less'. It means nothing, and those slogans simply drive people crazy – It goes to show the intellectual vacuousness of the people who say them.