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 BlattmanOne major overhead entrepreneurial business often grapple with is the exorbitant rent in cities. Moving to a smaller town offers a significant reduction in these costs and promotes regional economic balance.
You can think of habits as a 'set and forget,' we set the habit, we set the behaviour, and we forget about the details. That frees up our brain to learn new things throughout the day.
We seem to be in a strange period of history where our official world view, our official picture of the universe denies the reality of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life value. I think people do feel this at an intuitive level, and it can lead to a deep sense of alienation.
There's an entirely different category of knowledge, the utility of which isn't immediately apparent. This category is equally, if not more, crucial, especially for those aspiring to make creative or innovative strides.
We are hard wired through our biology to understand: what there is, what to do about what there is, that there is a difference between knowing what there is and knowing what to do about what there is and what the difference is.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. For me intelligence is a property of life. Even the most humble unicellular living organism must be intelligent to solve the problems of everyday life. Human intelligence is, for want of a better phrase, a degree of magnitude greater than the intelligence of a Paramecium or, better, of a Chlamydomonas; but the difference is just quantitative and not qualitative.
My learnings came not only from our successes, but a lot of the key learnings came from failures. When you do experience failure rather than to run away from it, you have to sit down and do a good post-mortem and learn from your failures.
Either I'm in charge of where my awareness goes, therefore dictating what I'm experiencing and feeling, or I allow my environment to dictate where it goes. Most people become a slave to everyone and everything around them.
In large organizations, a small group of leaders can hold the organization's capacity to change hostage to their own personal willingness to adapt and change – they are the gatekeepers – and even if they have the best will in the world, there simply will not be enough of them to deal with the complexity that we have in the environment around us.
We estimate that between 2010 and 2015, there will be 150million new Chinese entering the middle-class. That's a middle-class which increasingly buys diamonds as a gift of love and as a memento of stature.
There was no single spark that got me into science. My parents were both scientists, so I was exposed to that world from an early age. I remember noticing that science was international – in our house in India, we would have visitors from many different countries and I found that fascinating.
There is no such thing as one-sided victory in diplomacy, perhaps in war there is, but not in diplomacy. You are always, or at least should always be, mindful of the other side.