My early experience as an unaccompanied child refugee on the Kindertransport brought me to England in 1939, evading Nazi Europe. That really had an enormous impact on me, everything was different. It was such a big change, that change doesn't throw me anymore. I've learned to enjoy change, I like to do new things, make new things happen.
— Dame Stephanie Shirley Pioneering Software Engineer & Founder of Freelance Programmers LtdFor large corporations, globalization opened up opportunities without the correlate responsibilities which usually travel with that- so things that banks must do at home they didn't have to do abroad. This took globalization out of balance, into a vicious cycle – and we're now dealing with the consequences of that.
What if we move to a world where, because robots are so cheap... cheap labour doesn't really matter anymore? What will be China's main comparative advantage after that?
Concepts like democracy and human rights will always remain fairly abstract if you cannot feed your family. It is therefore important to ensure that job creation, and protecting livelihoods occurs early on in the process.
Success and fame, especially fame, can instigate fundamental shifts within us at a cellular level. The very nature of fame is peculiar; it's akin to an insatiable flame that ceaselessly yearns for more, compelling you to endlessly seek something, despite its ultimate emptiness.
The physical and mental aspects of our lives are inseparable and taking care of the basic physical requirements is essential. Athletes and leaders rarely experience deep relaxation and this can become transformative in their lives.
When you have high levels of indebtedness and big deficits… if you simply impose fiscal austerity, you may not be able to achieve your targets because GDP will begin to contract and that will place much greater pressures on the fiscal side.
GDP only catches a slice of the value that we value. It captures what goes on in the market, the financial value of goods and services sold in an economy over a year. We need to get away from the narrow, monetary, measure of GDP which asserts that economic value is the only thing we care about.
An appreciation of entropy is necessary to grasp that we are not entitled to wellbeing, progress, comfort, or health. The forces of the universe are- at best, indifferent- at worse, antipathetic- to our interests. Left to their own devices, things get worse.
I started my entrepreneurship journey straight out of college, and at the time my goal was simple. I didn't want a real job, and I didn't want to wear a suit…. Anything more than that was a bonus.
Human intelligence is, for want of a better phrase, a degree of magnitude greater than the intelligence of a Paramecium or, better, of a Chlamydomonas; but the difference is just quantitative and not qualitative.
We should be looking at our regrets not as meaningless, debilitating phenomena but as signals, information, and data. If we do that systematically? We can use this emotion as a transformative force for progress.
One of the ideas you hear often is that in America there is a culture where not only is it ok to fail, but it's almost expected – like a badge of honor. This is true to a point but that implies a cut-throat culture that is more legend than reality and is actually bad for innovation.