From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
As Carl von Clausewitz said, 'no plan survives first contact with the enemy.' It's not about having a plan, it's about planning. When you are in a fluid situation, things change, and you have to adapt quickly. You cannot freeze into inaction.
Ultimately, there are no values in the secular world that can replace the complete happiness people find in the vision of the face of God.
The greatest adventure that any of us can take is answering these questions for ourselves. This isn't deep, dark, conversation, it's normal conversation. The wisest, coolest prophets out there… people like the Dalai Lama… they're full of joy.
I'm a school drop-out that is now teaching professors and doctors around the world; all because of a naïve woman's wish for her child to live.
Martial arts is my greatest passion in life, and it has given me everything: my values, my family, my business, and my true calling. It has given me a warrior's spirit to conquer adversities in life.
Our cognitive capability to reason has not evolved to find truth, it evolved to help us survive and that means that we sometimes find it easier to stay with a group rather than believe the correct thing.
I never had an ethical dilemma with what was going on as a child, it was about pure survival. The kids that survived were the ones who were clever enough to continually get a meal.
Success is as very personal benchmark – it's what the individual wants. To understand success, you have to know what makes you happy… not what makes your parents, spouse, teacher or children happy… but what makes you happy.
The true measure of success, as I see it, lies in the effort to effect positive change in the world. However, this perspective isn't universally embraced. The feeling of success, it's crucial to clarify, has little to do with financial gain or even fame. These are two entirely distinct concepts.
We've lost our relationship with ourselves; and that is all-encompassing because without a relationship with ourselves, we can't then have a relationship with nature, with each other and the planet.
The power of regret is that it clarifies what we value and instructs on how to do better. The fact that we have so many of these boldness regrets suggests that when people tell you what they regret they most, they are telling you what they value the most, and what most people value is growth and learning.
Why should a creature that evolved out of slime, which has all the limitations which we do, be able to access this fundamental information about the universe which allows us, for example, to be able to predict the magnetic moment of the electron to a trillion decimal places on the basis of purely mathematical calculation. Why does that work? It is a miracle, it is magic, but it works- and that's the part of magic that's real.