From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In general, 90% of people are overmedicating themselves with either drinking, smoking weed, whatever it is. People do not want to be uncomfortable, they cannot stand discomfort.
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.
We are definitely seeing a shift in the skillsets that are needed. On our platform here at Udemy, we are seeing a lot more people taking courses around empathy and emotional intelligence and coaching. How do you ask the right questions? How do you enquire? How do you actively listen?
There's some psychological evidence which shows that people who have experienced very little suffering in their lives often have very low tolerance for difficulty and strangely enough, lower kindness.
I do this thing- I say something out-loud–announce it to the public–and then I'm forced to do it because people are excited and I don't want to let them down.
highly motivated teams, who are motivated by the 'end' (the cause) rather than the 'method' (the task)
We have the tendency to follow those who are comparable to us. It reduces uncertainty and provides us with an extremely effective shortcut into deciding how to best behave in a world that has become overloaded with information and stimulus. We need shortcuts!
When life gets easy, to feel alive, we need to do something hard.
The point of maximum pessimism is the ultimate time to buy a stock because at this point, all the sellers are gone… and only buyers remain. How do you determine this point? Even Uncle John said it's impossible…. You never know until it has passed!
Initially, my goal wasn't to become an entrepreneur; I was simply aiming to earn some money. Given my dyslexia, the academic path was not an option for me; there were no A-Levels or university in my future. My choices were stark: acquire a skill or venture into entrepreneurship. Naturally, I gravitated towards entrepreneurship.
Social synchrony is a big feature of human behaviour—it's a weird thing if you think about it, but we do things like marching in time and parading and singing in choirs in ways that are highly coordinated and synchronised.
Our brains are constantly making predictions about the world, and we learn when those predictions turn out to be wrong. So what Marshall did was deliberately redesign training so that people learned how to cope with a wide range of unpredictable challenges—turning the unpredictable into something more predictable.