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 BlattmanLet's not forget that currencies today are based on good will not gold reserves.
In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom – for example, in senates and learned societies.
The most common mistake is to stop challenging when things are going well. I recognise failure as not having made a business better than when you were first involved.
Abraham Maslow (a famous psychologist) once commented, 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail'. Investors currently have a hammer, and that hammer is economics.
Sustainability isn't a trend in our kitchen - it's a responsibility. We have to think about the future of our planet with every dish we create.
Entrepreneurship is the relentless drive to carry-on, no matter what. Entrepreneurship is tolerance, focus and dedication. Entrepreneurship is this 'true north' belief that whatever this 'thing' is that you want to bring to culture, that you will see it through… and that you are the one here to usher it into existence.
Everyone on the team strongly believes in the mission. This is the one thing we want to work on in our lives, and multiple people share that same sentiment. We've fallen in love with a very stubborn technical challenge. Convincing others is always hard—it requires conviction on both sides. What we've demonstrated is small-team speed: speed in hiring, speed in getting strong results, and speed in refining our intellectual understanding.
I think people all the time, hide or lie about information that would be useful to share. If you think about somebody who's selling their business because they want to climb the seven summits and they think, Oh… that's sort of embarrassing, it's selfish ….and so they say, I'm doing it because I'm retiring. We hide things that are ultimately good reasons.
The hardest part of the job is telling those players that they are not playing, I remember from my playing days how that felt. This is when compassion is an important tool as well.
I hated it! I absolutely hated it without knowing why really, at that age. And these two contrasting images in a way became symbols for the rest of my life and the way I think about wildlife. One is how not to keep them, and one is how to leave them alone where they should be.
A resilient position means that you are not always on the brink of war. The cost of war is so great that being on the brink is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. We have to make leaders and societies pay more attention to the costs of conflict.
If you're aiming to compete for the same clientele as major banks like JP Morgan Chase, you're entering a highly competitive arena with slim profit margins. However, targeting a segment that such banks deem too risky or uninteresting presents a lucrative opportunity. We considered focusing on demographics or small-medium enterprises that were essentially deemed un-fundable by mainstream financial institutions. The idea was to make these groups profitable and easier for any entity, including banks, to underwrite.