Wisdom in fragments

Entrepreneurship means a constant willingness to keep learning. It's about maintaining that start-up spirit—where you're forever young, and forever in crisis. It's about always having your mind on the business: Lying in bed and constantly asking yourself, What should I do?

Founder and CEO of Baidu, China's leading search engine company

Opportunities generally arise from landscape change. But entrepreneurial ideas can come from anywhere. They can come from recognizing where the pain points, the bottlenecks, and the inefficiencies are. They can come from late-night conversations with friends, or from random eureka moments.

Founder and CEO of Baidu, China's leading search engine company

It was not wealth or fame that these people wanted… These individuals had, in their own minds, observed a particular customer need that wasn't being met. They were wired in such a way, that this need seemed obvious to them. Whether it led to a million or a billion? That was secondary.

These individuals were extremely well-read, very curious and very disciplined… In a world where so many of us multi-task, when we met with these individuals, they were very focussed on the interview, free of interruptions. That's very unusual nowadays.

80% of self-made billionaires we studied made their mark in mature, competitive markets. They weren't all 'exactly' new products that came out – they were maybe a variation of a business model or existing product that pleased the customer in a different way. Think of Howard Schulz with Starbucks, or Sara Blakeley with Spanx for example.

Don't aspire to be an entrepreneur. Aspire to create something that solves a problem. My message to young people with an idea is build a prototype and test it. Test it again and again, making the changes, learning from failure.

Inventor & Founder of Dyson Ltd, Bagless Vacuum Pioneer

Transport, natural disasters, the distribution of resources, globalisation – engineers and inventors have the traits and skillset to solve the problems the world faces today. And therefore have the potential to impact the world and economy.

Inventor & Founder of Dyson Ltd, Bagless Vacuum Pioneer

At Dyson our philosophy has always been to invest in the long term. To power our 25 year pipeline of technology we have just announced a further £1.5 billion investment into new research and development on top of our current spending of £3 million a week. You cannot create disruptive technology without investing heavily in the long term.

Inventor & Founder of Dyson Ltd, Bagless Vacuum Pioneer

Inventors shouldn't be afraid to take risks. They should embrace failure and learn from their mistakes. I created 5,127 prototypes of the first Dyson bag-less vacuum cleaner and only the last one was right! Not being afraid to fail is something I think all successful entrepreneurs have in common.

Inventor & Founder of Dyson Ltd, Bagless Vacuum Pioneer

Being an entrepreneur, an inventor, is about having ideas and having the doggedness to see them through… As an inventor your ideas should be based on creating a solution to a problem – a solution which focuses on function over form. Solving problems has been my life's work.

Inventor & Founder of Dyson Ltd, Bagless Vacuum Pioneer

It's inevitable for complex animals. Some simple animals avoid aging by exporting absolutely all the entropy they create, but that's because they don't contain any material that stays in place unrecycled. Basically, if an animal has any organs that rely for their function on being built out of long-lived cells (like our brains, for example), it's going to age.

Biogerontologist researching aging reversal and life extension therapies

The real mystery is not why organisms as complicated as us age and die, but why there is a kind of immortality through the germ line! There clearly is some way that all the damaging aspects of life that feed into ageing are overcome in the germ line.

Nobel Prize Winner for Work on Chromosome Protection and Telomeres

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.

Biogerontologist researching aging reversal and life extension therapies

Many organisms have a pattern of temporal change and senescence that is reproducible and predictable for the species and gender — clearly with a huge genetic component. For example, the longevity of rats is 3.8 years while their 'cousins' the mole-rats live up to 30 years. These timings are probably optimized to fit with the ecology patterns of the species — predation, litter size, environmental variation, food abundance, etc.

Synthetic biologist & Harvard geneticist; pioneer of DNA sequencing technology

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.

Nobel Prize Winner for Work on Chromosome Protection and Telomeres

It is there to establish a framework in which the society works; and lay down, first of all, the parameters which form this framework- and secondly provide objective and fair ways of determining whether these have been contravened- and if so? what should be done.

Former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales; judicial reform advocate