When you have the confidence that you really are an expert closer, you're a competent closer, the word no doesn't matter, because you know that there's going to be a certain number of no's and a certain number of yes's.

Crime itself can increase inequality. A doubling in crime increases the Gini coefficient by 3% to 4%. When crime increases twofold the share of the rich tercile drops by 1.3%, and the share of the population in the poorest tercile increases.

The best portraits happen when you strip away all the pretense, all the masks people wear, and you find that raw, honest moment. That's when magic happens.

Today's world has very mediocre leadership. Heads of state and government do not call each other out! You rarely- if ever- hear world leaders calling out Xi Jinping on the treatment of the Uighur people, for example.

Every plant has to endlessly sense and monitor a number of environmental parameters; and is constantly called upon to make decisions. This is not the place to list numerous cases of intelligence behaviour in plants, a huge volume of such examples can be found in scientific literature.

I learned you always have to use the language of the people you want to convince. If you speak to heads of states and corporations about the costs, that will be incurred to protect the environment, they will never invite you again. If you come and speak their language about job-creation and profit, they will welcome you with open arms.

We have lived through an era where success has been defined only in financial terms- leaving out any consideration of the impact of business on communities or the world. Just because accounting standards don't require you to measure certain things, doesn't mean those things aren't real.

You can't just roll out of bed and be the best in the world at something, you need to have great genes and put in the hard-work, get the breaks, and really have that balance of nature and nurture.

You may have gone to the best business school in the world and learned that the three most important things in real estate are location, location, location- but it's just not true! It's relationship, relationship, relationship.

Small companies will get an idea and try to scale up. Big companies have to decide when to extend, when to extend and scale, and when to do something new. They need to build capabilities in terms of insight and execution to do the new thing.

True courage isn't present without fear. How can one be brave without confronting what scares them? When you witness someone tackling extreme or perilous tasks without any sign of fear, it doesn't reflect courage. You need fear to get stronger. You need discomfort to build.

Creative process by its nature involves figuring out all the things that don't work on your way to figuring out the things that do. You can't have it both ways…