If you fail many times in life, it can be frustrating, but, if you look differently at that, you can see that if you fail many times, you get up many times. If you didn't get up after the first fall, you could never have fought. Failure just means you got knocked down.

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.

Training helps you turn fear from something that paralyses you or makes you flee into something that spurs you to take the right decisions in very difficult situations.

For thousands of years of human history—let alone pre-history—there was never this sense, so common to us now, of a future likely to be radically different from the present. There was really a sense that humanity had already reached its peak, and so the question wasn't what comes next that's better, but rather how to prevent decline and loss.

While participatory culture can create a Wikipedia, it is not likely to produce something like the Star Wars franchise. I don't think that's a problem, because I don't think we have to choose between participatory and top-down culture – both will thrive.

In the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere except for where our food and energy come from, and where our waste goes. We are the most powerful species in the world, but we remain blind to the fundamentals that allow us to survive. How are we blind to our life support system?

Seneca elucidates how a tree needs exposure to wind stressors to grow strong and establish deep roots. Without such stressors, it becomes brittle and can break off easily. I argue that a crucial aspect of excelling at the game of life is to expose oneself to stressors that, hopefully, won't be fatal. As the saying goes, 'what does not kill you makes you stronger.'

I'm also very conscious that my life was saved, and I decided, very early on, to make mine a life worth saving. I don't fritter my days away. I try to do something worthwhile each day, and with that I've become a very happy person.

They took a relative view of risk… They had an understanding of the risks of something going wrong, but balanced that against missing an opportunity. When that opportunity exceeded the risk of going wrong? That's when they jumped…

If you benchmark on everything, you simply become more similar to your competitors and move into a red ocean space which is highly, highly, brutally competitive. There's only room for one, maybe two at most, cost-cutting businesses.

Western civilisation has veered off course; we have de-sacralised the world in which we live. We are collectively insane, and we need to mount our own intervention.

We only make progress by getting up from getting kicked to the ground. How does a baby learn to walk? It falls, gets back up… falls, gets back up, and one day its running. You will fall, stumble and fail- that's inevitable. You need to analyse it when it happens, learn from those mistakes, and move on. Don't dwell on failure.