Our body is a community of cells, in which each cell occupies a place appropriate for its tasks on behalf of the whole. Cancer cells, however, are rogues that trespass aggressively into other tissues. Metastasis is what makes cancer so lethal.

You have to make decisions throughout your life and be prepared to accept responsibility for those decisions. There is also confidence that comes from learning a set of skills – and that confidence allows you to challenge the status quo.

We need companies to play by a different set of accountabilities, not just those that are related to performance. It's about creating legal accountability around the creation of value for stakeholders, not just shareholders. That's what changes the conversation in the boardroom.

The field of positive psychology, and people in general, would benefit from thinking harder about what a good life is. A lot of people think we're pleasure motivated hedonists, but it turns out we have many other goals. We want happiness, but that comes in many different forms. We want pleasure, we want to be good people, we want to make a difference in the world, we want meaningful pursuits.

Scaling up is incredibly challenging; it's definitely been the hardest part of my own entrepreneurship journey. You might be familiar with The Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It's exactly the same in the real world: if you're good at your job, it leads to advancement in your career, and then you don't get to do those things anymore that made you deserve that advancement.

Seventeen of the top twenty universities in the world are in the USA, one third of all students who leave their countries to study in another come to the USA. There are only a handful of countries who spend relatively more on R&D than the USA.

When I decided to climb Everest, the reason was simply to draw attention to what was happening with the glaciers but also, when I talked about sustainability, it was hard to keep people's attention. You start talking and 5 minutes later, it's an abstract topic. The audience start checking their emails or yawning, and this really frustrated me.

The cumulative impact of these legal instruments indicates, perhaps unsurprisingly, that initiating war is rarely, if ever, lawful. However, responding to acts of war can be justified.

A brand is really an emotional connection you have with a product or service. It's so emotional in fact that you become fairly irrational in the way you try to justify why you're using it. If you split our brain into a rational and irrational side…. a brand is what is operating at the irrational side.

All you have to do is walk through an airport, for example, and notice that it is very difficult to navigate through it. You will encounter humans (almost statue like) who are glued – looking at their mobile phones, unaware of what is happening around them, because they are addicted to their technology. That is by design that people are addicted to technology.

What I believe is the bigger benefit; is that it makes it much more difficult for governments to trick the domestic financial system to favour particular borrowers, to milk savers through variable interest rates and so forth.

I tend to go with scholarship that argues that there no people called entrepreneurs but people perform entrepreneurial functions at different times. Edison performed great entrepreneurial acts. But he was also fierce opponent of innovation when it threatened his business interests.