We go to war not because we ignore the costs, but because we know there are costs, but we are willing to pay those costs because we get something from the war which we wouldn't get otherwise.
— Christopher BlattmanScience is a learning experience. We are interacting with nature, collecting evidence, and sometimes nature is more imaginative than we are. We ought to be humble when collective evidence, and not assume we know the answer in advance. Many of the realities we create are designed to flatter our ego... We prefer to attach ourselves to virtual realities that flatter us, and that's driven by ego.
The absolute biggest risk out there I can identify would be if something went really wrong with China as it is so important to the BRIC and global economic future. Luckily, I think it is a small risk.
HIV/AIDS is the greatest pandemic in human history. It is chronic pandemic, in the sense that its rise and fall is measured in decades. The known part of this pandemic is now three decades old, and it has several decades still to run.
Our number one instinct is survival, followed by reproduction. People started to realise that if they took care of themselves, they would live longer, have better sex and have healthier children. The mission of my family, which ended up being Lululemon, was for people to be able to live healthier, longer, and more fun lives.
We have to stop pretending that there's no adversity, or that we can't do anything about the adversity we face. We need to fix the culture of silence and ignorance surrounding bias and adversity.
When these people are under stress, they make bad decisions. They get reactive. One of the key findings in our conclusions is that the unsuccessful founders were more reactive. They weren't measured. They weren't deliberate. They didn't make decisions based on facts — their emotions carried them away.
While the crisis made the problems of the euro-structure clear, they were present long before. Indeed, the euro helped create the crisis: for the markets seemed to have vastly overestimated the extent to which the single market/single currency had reduced risk (another example of market irrationality), leading to excessive lending to the afflicted countries.
Short-term vision does not allow one to build better businesses and create value. If we keep a long-term perspective in mind, we will go through the good cycles and the bad cycles and reach the other side.
Undeniably, joining a flourishing company vastly differs from joining a struggling one, just as there's a significant contrast between building a company with the intention to sell and constructing one with the goal of passing it on.
If you care enough about something, as opposed to writing a cheque and letting someone else do it, or bitching about the problem, I say… 'you know what? If I care enough about something? I'm going to go out and do it…' that means I'm giving one of the most valuable things I have… my time. In life, you can always make more money and get more of everything- but one thing you can never get back is the time you give.
Understanding truly why a failure occurred and making peace with it is the first step to being able to move-forward- it allows you to identify where the gaps where in you and your enterprise, and hopefully will give you insights into where you need more support, education and attention.
When you embark on that spiritual journey, it's literally a series of deaths that lead to a new, more spiritual life. That part of me had to die for the spiritual part to be born.