Wisdom in fragments

The basics of this are to understand what your interests actually are and what your priorities are—what your hierarchy of interests is. What are the things that really matter to you? What are the things on which you can be prepared to compromise?

Nobody ever has control of all of the levers, and nobody ever has complete information. But also, there's always the day after. When dealing with really difficult issues it's very easy to get stuck in the moment and to lose sight of where we do want to be five or ten years from now.

I am never again going to accept a box of Ferrero Rocher from anyone. We need to do away with the idea of what diplomats do and how they work. Being diplomatic in the sense of not really saying what you mean or softening the message—it's been absolutely essential to be clear and precise.

When you're trying to understand the motivations of people, quite often understanding the emotional drivers is at least as important as understanding the facts that took them there. In the case of Putin and the people around him, it's resentment and it's anger and it's determination to recover something they believe they lost.

History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, the second as a farce. I think one of the things I have learned with history is that it's important to study it, but it will rarely give you the right answer. Quite often because there is no right answer, and what you're really looking for is to understand how you got here.

When these things happen in life, our soul calls on us to learn a lesson. Often we need pain to be able to see the light. Most of us begin our spiritual journey after a job loss or a career change.

When you embark on that spiritual journey, it's literally a series of deaths that lead to a new, more spiritual life. That part of me had to die for the spiritual part to be born.

We've been bamboozled into believing that love is found on the outside. Deep down, we're really trying to achieve peace, happiness, and love. It's not about the wealth itself; it's about what we perceive the wealth will bring into our lives.

I've done what society tells you is successful, only to feel really empty and alone inside. True success is the discovery of your authentic self—discovering who you are before any wounding, trauma, or limitations were created in your life's journey.

Too little credit and the economy can't grow, too much credit and the economy becomes unstable and we have the great financial crisis. So we need to find that proper Goldilocks point in the middle.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

We now have all the tools to do it. Computers are a billion times more powerful, the data is vastly better, our understanding of psychology is vastly better – we have all the elements we need now to do these things and to do them well.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

There's a vested interest – if the ideas you're teaching and have worked on are completely abandoned in favour of something else, then your legacy goes to zero. I think that's a big force.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

The standard models were formulated through a process that started well before computers were in place, and I would say it's undergone a certain lock-in. Once you start going down that path, it's hard to break out of it to another path. As a result, economics is stuck.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

The miracle of capitalism is that if you have a central government trying to solve something, it will come up with one averagely optimal solution for everybody. And capitalism will come up with 10 different solutions to the same problem.

Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & advertising strategist and behavioral economist

The average is the enemy of the marketer, because it actually disguises what you really need to know, which is the outliers, the unusual use cases, the anecdotal eccentricity, where most of the really valuable information lies.

Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & advertising strategist and behavioral economist