People ask me all the time what do you want to be known for? My answer is simple. I want people to say 'Shaquille O'Neal was a nice guy…' forget how much money I made, forget how many championships I won, or what type of businessman I am.

You come back and go to a job where your boss is trying to make an extra buck and your co-workers are trying to trample each other to get ahead- even though you just came back from a place where people were willing to die for you.

I cannot help but admire the insight of our Jewish sages of old who taught that every child is born with equal affinities toward goodness and evil, in Hebrew yetzer hatov and yetzer hara. This means that we are not born as a tabula rasa.

Quantum mechanics is the most radical break in our thinking of reality that we have ever encountered... Quantum mechanics comes along and says that whole experience is misleading, and that the best you can ever do is to predict the probabilities of outcomes. Quantum mechanics says our world is nebulous, fuzzy, a haze of possibilities until it somehow snaps to attention upon an appropriate interaction, observation or measurement.

When you examine how these myriad factors intertwine, from genetics and evolution to the proteins synthesized mere minutes ago, you see a continuous arc. In my view, there's no room in this intricate web for free will.

Whether it's doodling with a pencil, or painting, the practice of art – in any shape or form – is hugely liberating and gets us into the sense, and state, of flow. Art helps us navigate our place in the world, and offers us a place of stillness – much needed in today's digital world.

The movements that sustain themselves the best over time are those that have culture at their core, that use art as a means of conveying a message, and use art-making as a means to mobilise a movement.

True grit is that rare strength and resilience to dust yourself off, look at what went wrong, refine your proposition and plough on. Always be prepared to adapt: an open mind is everything – but stay focused on your end game.

Whenever I write a new song with somebody, it feels like the first time. I sometimes feel embarrassed, humiliated, like I don't know what I'm doing until we find a spark. You have to dare to go to this place where, even though you've done it before, it feels like you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.

Endurance stays with you across everything, if you do it one place, you can do it anywhere. You're able to sustain because you've already trained your brain to do that.

We are held back by our deep, underlying fears. Fears of rejection, fears of being the imposter. We need to reframe these fears and work on regret minimisation. If you didn't take that action, spark up that conversation, or try that idea, would you regret it?

My colleague Jerry Joyce once chaired a NASA committee that defined life in a practical sense, as a self-sustaining chemical system with the potential for Darwinian evolution (the hallmark of biology). That's a perfectly adequate operational definition that is appropriate for research into the origins of life. Obviously it has nothing to do with consciousness, or even the experience of being alive.