There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanWhat we need now is the George C. Marshall of our era to help us train better than the Chinese and the Russians.
Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic, and scientific advances that, for better and worse, underpin modern civilization.
Humans haven't been able to survive in any of our environments 'raw' – we've made fire, made shoes, made hunting tools… we've never had to experience being adapted to an environment 'as it is,' and so there's no sensible definition of people without technology.
Chosen suffering is part and parcel of a meaningful life. If you don't have any chosen suffering in your life, you're probably not living the best life you could.
Similar to the 'use it or lose it' principle that applies to muscles, our brains engage in a nightly routine that stimulates thoughts and ideas not typically relied upon during the day. This built-in process keeps our thinking adaptive and nimble, fostering divergent thoughts and offering an evolutionary advantage.
My interest is not whether something could dematerialize in my hand, but how people can be misled. You can this very dangerous thing- lying- and make it safe to play around with.
In fact, imposter syndrome is a symptom that we are leading because leaders are doing something that's never been done before and so of course you will feel like an imposter, because you are one! Who can guarantee something is going to work? Not you, not anyone.
Manifesting involves leveraging the mind's power to shape our reality. For me, it's more than just a concept; it's a self-development tool and a way of life. It's about finding the best version of oneself, gaining empowerment, and unlocking the potential for positive change and transformation.
Most leaders are running human organisations, not financial organisations. This means they need to understand how to motivate, inspire and organise people first rather than capital first. This requires a set of skills that traditionally have not been taught in business schools.
What is worrying is not the rise of multinational corporations, but the rise of social media. Facebook has 2.5 billion participants and whilst some may argue they are an instrument of the American state, it's worth noticing that Russia was able to use Facebook as a device to penetrate and disrupt the American electoral process in 2016.
The key component of bravery is integrity. My father's nickname for me was, 'the brave one,' and what I saw growing up was the reality that people would often give their integrity to make life more comfortable in the short term; but guess what, that leads to your integrity being chipped away until you are left with nothing – just with the shell of who you are, and who you could have been.
My own twist on that is that the bigger they come, the exponentially harder they fall! Banks are so bent at using expanded balance sheets, using derivatives, pretending that risk is in the net when it's really in the gross, pretending that risk is a linear function of scale when it's an exponential function of scale.