From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Your only duty is to take the rope and try to make a better one. Your only duty is to make the best rope you can for your children, for the next generation.
Falling in love with your brain ignites a passion for discovering how best to nurture it. I'm particularly fond of one guiding question: 'Is this good for my brain or bad for it?' When you respond to this query armed with knowledge and driven by love, you naturally start making wiser choices.
Our inner desire to start something new and make it big has been one of the most catalysing factors behind our collective evolution as a species. Our quest to explore and develop markets has persisted since the time humans have been trading goods.
I think intelligence is best understood as an entity that has the ability to improve a metric through repeated exposure over time. By that definition, machine learning algorithms are learning systems — they get better with more data and more exposures. A dog is a learning system. A cat is a learning system — you teach it a trick, reward it a few times, and it just does it from there on. And humans, of course, are the ultimate example of a learning system.
We have an emotion categorization for a reason. Anger is about injustice, disappointment is about unmet expectations, and when you feel pride, it's because you've achieved some kind of goal you've been working hard for.
From cell to civilisation took about 4 billion years, which is a long time—a third of the age of the universe. If it takes billions of years to produce complex living things at our level, maybe there aren't many places that could sustain an unbroken chain of life for that long.
We all experience challenges. If you always make one thing your excuse or let other people drag you down because of something like your gender, it will become your prophecy. Whatever reason, you will never know for sure. You just have to keep fighting.
Many people think the role of bioethics is to go and see what the scientists or doctors are doing and tell them to stop because they are acting, by hypothesis, unethically. However I often find when I go and see what the scientists are doing, they are doing wonderful things and I'm very inclined to say 'great guys, keep going!'
a powerful call to action to think deeply about what lights you up—and a guide for how to build a life of meaning and purpose.
Happiness is family. I loved growing up in Sinjar surrounded by my mother and siblings. Those memories are my happy place.
There's a great quote that is 'political correctness is tyranny with manners'.
In a peculiar way, failure can sometimes be simpler to grapple with. You can simply resist it, dismiss it with a defiant 'to hell with this, to hell with them', and return to square one. Conversely, success can be considerably more subtle and insidious. While initially thrilling, relieving, and intoxicating, it can harbor a profound hollowness, which makes it more challenging and bewildering to confront.