From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
His physics was the part of his attempt to find magic which actually worked! I see science similarly to that. This is still a magical and mysterious thing that we are able to understand the world in very powerful and predictive ways- that is the foundation of all of our technologies today.
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?'
an object must be useful before being beautiful.
The sacrifice is perhaps a decade- and it's a total sacrifice- you may not see your kids, you may miss an entire cycle of your lives, but you're doing it to provide for them in the future in a way you never could if you were an employee.
My fear has never been the machines waking up and deciding to do away with us, but rather that we- in our own bone headed way- deploy systems inappropriately, or without thinking through the unintended consequences that may occur.
The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.
For the people I documented, money was secondary… They knew absolutely they would make money, but changing the world and doing cool stuff was the primary goal; that was their mission.
We are living longer and measuring GDP growth is not the way to decide whether a society or an economy are flourishing.
Indeed, these concepts transcend our natural intuition, but I firmly believe they aren't beyond our grasp. As Einstein marveled, the universe seems to be comprehensible.
What failure really means is that you are trying to live life, and the fact that you fail means that you are trying. As soon as you try to avoid failure, you are facing the wrong direction.
The more we recognize that we are the ocean and the waves represent different aspects of our being, the less any individual wave of difficulty will consume, overwhelm, or define us.
An object must be useful before being beautiful.