When you fail, you take ownership of the failure, and then you assess what mistakes were made, what could be done differently, what better instructions you could have given, what better support you could have given, then you fix those problems, move on and try again, simple.

It is vital that you never, ever, ever stop pursuing excellence. And that is elusive. It's very elusive. It calls for a lot of honesty. A lot.

We have the technological means to deal with climate change. We have the technological means to deal with pandemics. This is not a technical problem. It is mostly a political problem. If we get our politics under control, the rest is fun and games.

Winning is satisfaction. When you are working hard with your team, when you are working day and night, fighting hard, doing the best you can… when you make sacrifices and see things start to grow. That feeling of satisfaction is more important sometimes than money.

If you don't have some failures continually, it is a signal that you have retreated into the conservative past. Most people still interpret failure as an unfortunate thing to get to success, but this isn't actually what it means.

All these prongs matter for happiness, and they're all interventions we can try, regardless of our circumstances or genetic background. They're simple changes that can really improve our well-being.

Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.

In postmodernism, there are no absolute truths; everything is relative, of course other than the one absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. This is a form of intellectual terrorism, nihilism.

Everyone has a little bit of warrior in them. We all grow up and have a little piece of us which wants to be a superhero, who goes and fights the bad guys. In real life, fighting is tough, you have to overcome your fears – nobody really wants to get into a fight! Escaping that fear is the reason so many people who get into combat sports.

In the 1960s, NASA commissioned a study to identify creative geniuses for hiring, and found that 2% of the adults they tested fit the bill. A few years later, someone thought to give the same test to four- and five-year-olds—and 98% of them qualified as creative geniuses. The researchers blamed the school system.

I started writing fiction because I was lonely. I was an only child, a solitary child, raised by a single working mother, which was very unusual at the time in Turkey. Literature gave me a sense of continuity, coherence; it kept my pieces together. It helped me to connect even when I felt like I didn't quite belong.

We had intended to build a media network but what we were really building was a people network. The same idea of reaching out, opening up and asking for help has been invaluable to me since- especially in the world of diplomacy.