When life gets easy, to feel alive, we need to do something hard.

To scale? you have the stars aligned- timing is everything. When we created the first personal digital assistant, the Newton... we were probably 15 years too early. Even some of the best computer scientists in the world didn't realise that at the time, we needed Moore's Law to continue doubling processing power every couple of years for at least a decade before it was practical to build products like iPhones.

Today, we are asking the opposite question – will luxury brands continue to be sold offline? 20 years after we started, when people were suspicious about whether luxury brands could be sold on the internet, the opposite question is now the big consideration!

Our world today is not only superficial, but also very cynical, almost to the point of nihilism. There's a cynicism that masquerades as intelligence, but which- in reality- is a form of despair, a kind of excuse for not having to do anything.

It's this natural propensity to analyse and optimize everything around me, turning mundane tasks like loading a dishwasher into a strategic game of Tetris, that highlights how my brain operates. It's an instinctive approach to life, viewing the world through the lens of systems and structures.

In space, and certainly on the International Space Station, everybody is a leader- there are so many complex, moving parts.. there are so many pressures on the system an teams around the world... It's an environment where listening is very important, and an environment where followership is equally as important as leadership.

Have you ever read Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power? One of the laws is 'discover every man's thumbscrew,' which means that every person has something that matters deeply to them. I think you can approach this not from a negative perspective, but a positive one: to understand the 'good guys,' the 'bad guys,' and everyone in between. Why do they do what they do? As a journalist, the best way to uncover that is to listen—authentically.

If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?

When I ask people to note down their desired earnings for the next week or year, about 95% choose figures they deem 'realistic'. They won't even dare to jot down their dream figures, held back by their internal reservations.

What's beautiful is when you're filling your bank account and your soul account. There are two accounts! Look, I like money, I like fame… I happen to be rich and famous… I don't apologise for those things, nor do I boohoo them or approach my appreciation for them with false modesty.

From about 2000, Africa has come into an economic renaissance: Between 2000 and 2008, we saw a marked improvement in macro-economic stability, with inflation falling and interest rates hitting single digits even in areas like Nigeria. We have seen robust GDP growth, 17% in Angola and 5.5% in Ghana and Nigeria in 2008 for example, combined with increases in FDI, which was up 25% year on year between 2000 and 2005.

Biology doesn't need to be obeyed, but it always needs to be considered. If we discuss gender differences, we cannot act as if biology doesn't exist. We live at a time where a group of people – for ideological reasons – have made it clear that they think we can shove biology aside, that everything is culturally constructed, and we can act like biology doesn't exist. That's not going to work, that's not how the world works.