From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Fusion – or 'identity fusion' to be more precise – is basically a form of group alignment in which essential features of your personal identity are felt to be shared with the group. What this means is that there are basically two ways of becoming fused. One is to undergo an experience that becomes a core feature of who you are – such as a painful or frightening ordeal.
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. I'm also very conscious that my life was saved, and I decided, very early on, to make mine a life worth saving.
He told me that his returns got so much better in the Bahamas, why? Because he got the Wall Street Journal a few days late! It's so difficult to mentally distance yourself from the herd and so perhaps physically distancing yourself from the herd is a good idea.
We tend to go deeper with that in terms of specific facial expressions, body language, and vocal tone. And I think what's important to know there is that we often make a lot of mistakes when we're reading other people's emotions because we bring in our own cultural values, our own belief systems, and we oftentimes project emotions onto people as opposed to really knowing how they're feeling.
If you go into a new situation where you don't know anybody and you want to be more influential, don't look around the room and say hmmm… who can most help me here?… instead, look around and say hmmm…. Who can I most help here? You will put that person in a position where they will be standing on the balls of their feet to help you!
If you don't spend a lot of money on something and it doesn't work out… is it really a 'failure'? Most entrepreneurs start a lot of different ventures. Some work better than others, but that's totally normal and expected.
We must not only use the emotional part of exploration, but also the state of mind of exploration which encourages us to get out of our bad habits, beliefs, everything we know, our comfort zone, and even our way of thinking. The mindset of exploration encourages us to find new solutions.
In comparing alternative explanations, it is not necessarily the one with the most evidence apparently in its favour that we should choose but the one with least evidence against it. One solid piece of evidence can demolish a hypothesis.
The world we see is always constructed by our brain. We never have direct access to the world in itself; we only have access to the model our brain is constructing. It works as a sort of 'best guess.' The brain isn't trying to find the absolute truth or create a perfect replica of the outside world's structure. It's trying to find a model that works—one that is adaptive and allows you to function.
You're not going to be a warrior in battle unless you are a warrior in preparation. You have to be single-minded, you can't just show-up on the night.
My mindset changed from thinking that tomorrow I may be freed, to realising that unless I did something myself, nobody would come and rescue me.
The greatest risk often lies in people's biased perceptions of risk itself. The challenge is: how do you debias risk when everyone's perception of it is inherently biased?