Wisdom in fragments

As an entrepreneur, you're often doing things that haven't been done before, or doing them in ways that break the mould. All sorts of people are telling you, 'No, that's not how it's done,' and you're constantly running into obstacles. Without a lot of self-confidence, you can't even get started.

What really matters is how well you know yourself — because every aspect of your leadership is expressed through your personality. I think that single trait — self-awareness — or rather, that skillset, outweighs all the others put together.

When you're in the present, looking forward, your brain sees change as scary. But from the far side, looking back, the fear fades.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

Your brain has an agenda: to make you feel good about you. So if you're the CEO, and you decided to launch a product two weeks ago, your brain assumes, 'Well, that must have been the right decision.' It starts scanning the environment for proof — cherry-picking anything that confirms you were right.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

I particularly like the six-month shift for operational decisions. But for life choices, look at Jeff Bezos. When deciding to start Amazon, he projected himself into the far future. He asked: 'When I'm 80, what will I regret more — starting the company and failing, or never starting it at all?'

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

If I ask better questions, they come up with better answers.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

The industrial age was designed around one group of people making decisions, and a different group carrying them out. That mindset still lingers in our language — 'leaders' and 'followers,' 'blue collar' and 'management,' 'union' and 'executive.' It splits the world into thinkers and doers. That no longer works.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

Status hierarchies help us navigate choices which would otherwise be impossibly complex. It dramatically reduces the cognitive load we face in making decisions.

If you get just a little bit of a head start, you can end up racing far ahead. So you end up with very small differences in quality or merit that get amplified over careers or competitions, eventually becoming very large differences over time.

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?

Social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works—soon to be topped by AI, which I think will be even more fundamentally, and even more bizarrely, distortive. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena.

Status is kinetic. Those who have it can give it to those who don't.

If our future is to count as a utopia, we cannot allow a massive oppressed class of hyper-sentient, uncomfortable digital beings. We want it to be good for all kinds of minds.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

Much of our future work may end up being about convincing them that we are conscious, and worth keeping around.

AI Safety Researcher & Director of Cybersecurity Lab at University of Louisville

We're not really creating a specific artefact—we're setting a direction for a process. There's no upper limit to that process; we're simply saying we'll create something capable of becoming smarter and smarter.

AI Safety Researcher & Director of Cybersecurity Lab at University of Louisville

Arguably, it could be more comparable to the rise of Homo sapiens itself, or even to the origin of life on Earth.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford