Humanity, having never faced any serious competition or whole-species-threats, feels relatively safe from existential events and cannot conceive any threats it may be creating.

Today, information is omnidirectional – you have to respond to it immediately- and you have to empower people, in the field, to make decisions, or you will fail. Leaders today are far less involved with telling people what to do, and much more involved with setting goals and providing guardrails.

When you're behind a camera, you have this incredible power to freeze a moment in time. But with that power comes responsibility. You're not just taking a picture, you're creating a narrative, you're telling a story.

Older generations give their trust to experts and influencers based on who and what: credibility, qualifications, and institutional affiliations. Younger generations, by contrast, trust based on how someone makes them feel. And you can manipulate that incredibly effectively in 15 seconds of video: the music, the mood, the atmosphere.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans- because we can… We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings… That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someone- because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

If those assets are not being productively converted into goods and services that make the world a better place, it's a missed opportunity. Over the past half-century, we've standardised on a 'way' to do things – and that's clearly flawed but continues. We need managers and leaders to up their game if we're going to hope to tackle the environmental, inequality and other crises we face.

Happiness is a measure that reflects the success with which people achieve their personal objectives of living levels, happy and healthy families and satisfying work.

The way we should think about intelligence is in terms of a volume in a high-dimensional space.

As a collective, we tend to look at progress as being linear, especially where it concerns women's rights. This is a huge mistake and breeds complacency because we risk losing the hard-won gains.

I think that single trait — self-awareness — or rather, that skillset, outweighs all the others put together. You're filtering every experience you have with others through your own perceptions, your own biases, your own reactions and instincts. So you have to know yourself first before you can truly know anyone else.

People who are building don't want to simply test their ideas in a microcosm, they want to be successful in the real-world, and San Francisco is an international city with real world connections.

How many times have we all heard someone say, 'I had a really good business idea, but then I found somebody else had already done it—so I gave up'? I'd say the opposite: fantastic! If someone's done it, is still in business, and it's working, that's proof you're onto a solid idea.