From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
People who are claiming they have no regrets are essentially saying they have no learning, no growth, and no progress. We need to recalibrate and make sense of this profoundly misunderstood emotion.
If a company doesn't have a purpose, I think they are wasting their life. Making money should be the result of helping people to build businesses.
I do what I do because I am good at it, I enjoy it and I have been successful doing it. God gave me a talent and I have worked extremely hard to fulfil this talent.
Our world today is not only superficial, but also very cynical, almost to the point of nihilism. There's a cynicism that masquerades as intelligence, but which- in reality- is a form of despair, a kind of excuse for not having to do anything.
For a long time there was a kind of cultural chauvinism: the idea that if you just played Mozart to people in the Amazon or to hunter-gatherer groups in the South Pacific, they'd instantly recognize its greatness, maybe even see God. But of course, they don't experience it that way at all.
Even if it's not your mistake, it could still be your responsibility. That's one element of maturity – owning up to things even when they weren't caused by your actions. What you should truly be striving for as an entrepreneur is creating new standards of success, redefining what success means beyond monetary wealth.
Meaningful and moral are different in an interesting sense; something can be meaningful, and yet be morally terrible. Adolf Eichmann was clearly engaged in what he thought was a meaningful pursuit, perhaps he was even in a state of flow, thinking that what he was doing was 'good' – even though he was the architect of the death of millions.
We are one big, beautiful, dysfunctional and incredible family, tearing itself apart over something as inconsequential as our hue.
The key component of bravery is integrity. What I saw growing up was the reality that people would often give their integrity to make life more comfortable in the short term; but guess what, that leads to your integrity being chipped away until you are left with nothing.
If you view the world from a moral perspective, you have no option but to address climate change in a timely fashion. The good news is that the moral imperative is backed-up by economics, technological advance and capital shifts.
The French Revolution really is this incredible hinge in the story of Western political thought. For a long time, it was just taken for granted that the French Revolution was the starting point of political modernity.
There was really a sense that humanity had already reached its peak, and so the question wasn't what comes next that's better, but rather how to prevent decline and loss. If you had a good state—or even just an okay one—your main concern was to keep it, to stop it from falling apart. Because there wasn't anything better you could reasonably expect.