From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Growing up, I was a speech and debate kid – and I realised that anytime I made the judges laugh, I would automatically get 10-15 points higher on my final score! Comedy, and making people laugh, has the power to engender empathy and to make people like you.
Etiquette is the glue that holds society together. Humans are social creatures, after all—we need connection to survive. But with global cultures in flux and the post-pandemic digital age, shadow epidemics of anxiety and loneliness are on the rise.
Women were never in the driver's seat with dating. It always came down to the man to take the lead, to ask the girl... There was this playbook where the guy has the power, the girl is weak and fragile waiting to be saved by Prince Charming... and this is disempowering for both sides.
A lot of that feeling of alienation that you see in The Office, Dilbert, and so-forth is driven by people feeling that they don't understand context, and ultimately decisions don't make sense.
All the market research we have done shows that consumers use diamonds to mark special moments in their lives because they are timeless, have been in the ground 3 billion years and are unique.
I start by asking: How will our customers benefit from this acquisition? I tend to shy away from companies that don't share a similar cultural ethos. Even if an acquisition seems financially sound, if there's a stark cultural mismatch, I'd usually reconsider.
That constant re-entry back into who we are if we're acting like someone, we're not is laborious and exhausting to do over and over.
When they went to work, it wasn't that they were selling out but rather the intention of human beings to chase things… material stuff… come out of the ghetto… achieve… they wanted their own reflection in pop culture… they didn't want any of this YMCA, Patrick Juvet's – I Love America or any of these disco records that were out…. they didn't want to listen to that on black radio, it was insulting…. so they made their own.
Every soldier who enters the military knows what makes the grass grow. Civilians are like, 'okay… sun? Water? Photosynthesis?…' for us? Its blood, we say the bright red blood makes the green grass grow.
I should deal with the term 'antisemitism' itself, which gained popular usage in Germany during the 1880s. This was largely due to individuals who considered being an antisemite as something commendable. In the 1880s, to be an antisemite meant to oppose equal rights for Jews.
We have to start breaking the toxic hyper-masculine alpha male attitude that has become the norm across businesses that you should always be hustling, never sleep, that rest is for wimps.
For the first time in over 20 years, I feel brown… I find myself being extra careful in terms of how I dress, where I go, how I speak, what I carry and how I behave; not to conform to any new social norms- but rather, so that people don't mistake me for a terrorist, or make assumptions about my intentions.