From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Changing the mood has an economic impact superior to many measures because companies and families, when they have more confidence, they act differently. Uncertainty and fear are enemies of economic growth.
In space, you can only worry about the things you can control – not the constant low-level simmering danger that you might explode and die. If you worried about that, even a two-week flight would be hell, never mind a 200 day one.
I define authenticity as the consistent practice of choosing to know who we are and embracing who we are. For a lot of us, we come to know who we are, but then we rail against our identities.
You must tell yourself the truth about money if you're going to give it away well. If you can't live well with $999 million, there's something clearly wrong with you. Money gets inside us; it creates our perceptions and changes the way we operate. It changes the people among whom we are, and who we are. When we're not in touch with that reality, it can change us in heinous ways.
What's going to happen is that you just get busier and busier and move faster and faster! We treat productivity tools as if they're going to lead to our salvation, they're absolutely not going to.
I've sat by all the infinity pools I need and I don't have a single memory of sitting by one.. Luxury is also kind of gross to me now.
You should never place your value as a human being on results. You don't control the results of the game – people get lucky or go bankrupt. Also, what happens when you achieve your result? What long-term satisfaction does that bring you?
Like all primates, we are an intensely social species, and having our friends, cohorts, and acquaintances close is important to our general success. In these senses 'keeping the wheels oiled' is critical, hence why we like gossip, and hence why biographies and fiction so wildly outsell anything else in the books market.
No regrets culture is a terrible blueprint for living. The idea that you should always be positive and never look backwards is not an effective blueprint for living a decent, meaningful, happy life. It runs against everything we know about the science of emotion!
Silence is, by definition, an absence—an absence of voice, opinion, and life. It begins so subtly that it often goes unnoticed. We start by withdrawing or withholding our genuine thoughts from conversations, replacing them with what we presume others want to hear.
As a psychotherapist, you have diagnostic categories for problems. There are specific techniques and therapies to apply. So the book really comes out of that frustration. If you think about science, it progresses from description, to categorisation, then to explanation, prediction, and control — and I wanted to feel like there was some science behind what I was doing.
When you love what you do, when you're excited about your field, when you've chosen a path that connects with you personally- you will learn fast, you will accomplish in 5 years what it would take others 15 years to do.