Culture is not aspirational, it's observational. It's not something you and your co-founders sit down, dream-up, put into PowerPoint, and create some posters from, for the break-out room. Culture, simply, is how you behave and how you treat your co-founders, employees, and customers.
— Marc Randolph Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming PioneerThe absolute focus must be on reducing inequality. This means creating strategies which provide economic opportunity - investing in industries that provide employment rather than profit, investing in education, and providing a fairer deal for those who form the labour force.
We've had wars, poverty, and homelessness long before anyone went into space. It's not accurate to say, 'we're doing space exploration, and that's why we have poverty' – if we stopped space exploration, those problems wouldn't be solved, they haven't been solved in thousands of years.
At one site, a mature man carrying a white flag was shot dead by an Israeli soldier. To those less experienced or with a 'soft' generally compassionate outlook, this might immediately seem a clear case of unlawful killing – a 'war crime'. However, the general offered a different perspective. He considered the terrain and highlighted the dilemma faced by the soldier in high-risk situations: might the soldier be genuinely uncertain over whether the white flag genuinely signified surrender?
Alzheimer's starts its destructive process 30 years prior to its typical diagnosis. If we were to compare this to our approach with heart disease, it's like only making a diagnosis when a coronary bypass is needed.
Around the world, government economists have a paradoxical role. On one hand they have a clear remit to accurately quantify their nation's economy and publish those figures in good faith... but conversely they can be prone (through pressure) to 'engineer' the figures in order to meet political objectives.
By far the most common is underestimating expenses. When industries do barely double-digits if their lucky, business plans ought not to be showing EBIT or EBITDA of 50-70% – that doesn't mean people are smart, it means they haven't understood the industry.
To scale? you have the stars aligned- timing is everything. When we created the first personal digital assistant, the Newton... we were probably 15 years too early. Even some of the best computer scientists in the world didn't realise that at the time, we needed Moore's Law to continue doubling processing power every couple of years for at least a decade before it was practical to build products like iPhones.
Diamonds are a miracle of nature, they are millions of years old, they survived a hazardous journey to the earth's surface and the discovery of them is an exciting moment. To see the rough diamond and then watch it come to life on the polisher's wheel with incredible fire and scintillation is incredibly inspiring.
Music is also incorruptible in many ways. I can hear when music isn't authentic, or when it isn't coming from the heart and soul. Music is a pure, universal, language that can transcend.
You are as good as your highest level of preparation in any negotiation. In any negotiation, you develop trust by putting in time where you don't have any skin in the game; that means you need to watch negotiations happen- and get a feel for how it's done.
You need one strong relationship in your life to remain sane. You need a relationship that doesn't depend on digital transmission! You need somebody who you understand deeply, who you can talk to directly, who can give you a reality check when everything coming through your computer and phone is bewildering.
Abraham Maslow pointed out in the 1950s that flow is essentially what redeems the suffering of life. It's the psychological reward for mastery and without it, hard work can lead to burnout.