From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
People suffer from the curse of knowledge, they don't know what they don't know! All of us have different starting points, different assumptions and a different knowledge base.
I use the word ecstasy, which people think means being very, very happy- but in Ancient Greek it means ecstatic, which means standing outside. It's a moment where you go beyond your ordinary sense of self and feel connected to something great and new.
I have way too often felt like 'the other.' Even in my motherland, I did not quite fit in. I never did. This is partly because I was born in France, Strasbourg. After my parents separated, my father stayed in France and remarried.
Fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.
You cannot genuinely connect with another human being through technology. You can only connect with other human beings through the mind, and through love, but technology can serve the process.
A lot of negotiation is teaching people tricks or verbal games, as opposed to providing a framework for thinking about negotiation. People want to come up with a solution that's fair. But what they think of as fair is often proportional division, and that just arises because they don't really understand what they're negotiating over.
Mirroring is a crazy skill, it's so insanely effective. Just repeating the last 3 words of what someone said or picking out 1-3 words from the middle of the statement, can get you the outcome you need. Using mirroring, you feel like you can work Jedi mind tricks!
In our culture, particularly in the last 300-500 years in Western culture, people have become much more ambivalent to ecstatic experiences. The idea of losing control is seen as dangerous and shameful... We're a culture that's very much about individual autonomy, and ecstasy is the opposite of that – it's about surrendering control.
The moment you send Billy Connolly, Lenny Henry and Victoria Wood out somewhere to make an appeal – they are representatives of 'normal people' perhaps in some ways more than pop stars.... Comedians are a kind of humdrum kind of celebrity, and as such I think they're very good at evoking empathy.
Most people think, 'that's not me, I could never run a marathon!' That's precisely why you should do it – a marathon is a way of proving to yourself that you're better than you think- that you can go further- and endure more.
At its best, music is empathic… we can relate to it… it moves us and makes us feel connected. The best music for me captures a zeitgeist, captures something of the time and something of what we feel.
What happened was that people saw their place going down while London was booming. They started to blame each other. We retreat into polarised blame games, and that is very common.