From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I believe that success in business can be measured by if you enjoy what you are doing; create something that stands out; create something that everyone is really proud of.
In the 18th century, they're kind of taking stock of how, in just about 100 years, all this classical learning had been overturned. Looking back on everything that's happened, they construct this narrative of how human reason has progressed.
If you don't love the act of doing, you'll never find happiness. If your motivation is glory or money, you're bound to be disappointed. If you're more excited about lunch with investment bankers than dealing with the day-to-day realities, you'll end up unhappy.
In war, you're forced to survive. It's kill or be killed, it's the most basic human instinct. You have to unleash that aggressive shadow side of yourself. It gives you a profound sense of being alive, it becomes a dopamine slot machine.
What's beautiful is when you're filling your bank account and your soul account. There are two accounts! Look, I like money, I like fame… I happen to be rich and famous… I don't apologise for those things, nor do I boohoo them or approach my appreciation for them with false modesty.
Revolution was, in a way, the original problem of political thought. Constitutionalism is a Greek answer to the problem of revolution. You want to avoid revolution? Then you need to design a constitution in a certain way—so that it's balanced and less likely to be overturned by revolution.
What makes any sport exciting is learning how to excel by staying within the confine of rules, not by winning through ignoring them. The team isn't just the one with your jersey, it's everyone who wears a jersey.
Uncle John always had a desk-plate in his office that said 'trouble is opportunity' and that's very much how we see the markets.
I realised that what people do is, instead of figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it whether they want to or not, doing the ethical thing, what they do is they figure out what they want to do and then come up with the rationalisation for doing it, whether it's right or wrong. And we fool ourselves.
Be ashamed to die unless you have won some victory for humanity. Nobody should make the world worse off for their having lived in it. Everyone has the obligation to add their brick to the edifice of civilisation, and whether that brick is big or small, it means you have contributed to building- not destroying.
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.
In higher states of consciousness, we also lose our fear of death. The transcendent you is not in time. Only thought exists in time… only perception exists in time…