From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You start by asking yourself certain questions: who am I? what is it that wants to know who I am? What do I want for myself and the world? What is my purpose? What gives me meaning and purpose in life?
Social anxiety stems from the fear of being judged, criticised, or scrutinised. However, adopting a mindset of curiosity—deciding to learn and ask questions—can make those fears dissipate. When you shift your focus from worrying about judgment to engaging in learning and exploration, the anxiety naturally begins to fade away.
You can have the best AI in the world and the best robots in the world, but if they aren't integrated well with the humans, then you will lose.
Caregiving taught me about the dual nature of love—it's both an internal and external commitment. As a caregiver, I realised the importance of self-care, not just for my own well-being, but so that I could be there for him. This created a symbiotic and reciprocal relationship; in giving, I received abundantly, and we both were uplifted.
At a point, we developed language sophisticated enough to transmit abstract ideas with precision from one mind to another. That enables high quality parallel processing of problems such that we literally have emergent cognition. When people gather, they talk about difficult puzzles they face, and the product of their thinking exceeds the sum of their individual capacity to reason through it.
Our psychology is open-ended: we can plug in variables, and are not just tied to constants. We can expand our circle of sympathy – we can employ the logic of impartiality, and the emotional prompts of human contact and vicarious experience, and expand our fellow-feeling from our family to our clan, our nation, tribe, and from there to all of humanity and even other sentient beings.
Consciousness lies beyond the framework of quantum mechanics. It must be regarded as a primitive of the universe itself, not merely of brains. If consciousness is a universal primitive, then the entire totality of what exists is conscious and desires self‑knowledge. That offers the best way to understand evolution and why we can know: we are parts of a greater whole, we are fields—not bodies. The body is simply the creation of the field, enabling the field to have experiences in a reality collectively constructed by a multitude of fields.
People like Trump rally people behind them by pointing out threats; these may be real, but most likely are imaginary or inflated. Then he says, 'only I can protect you.'
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.
Success is really a portal into the next stage that we're possibly capable of doing, and we have to decide how we're going to face that tsunami of emotions that then comes flying at us when we thought all we were going to have was happiness.
Champions possess a distinct mindset, a relentless drive for excellence that sets them apart. They're not content with just doing okay; they strive for excellence constantly. Being second is not an option for them, they aim for the top.
I think there's a big misconception—sometimes called 'toxic positivity' or 'good vibes only'—that a happy life is one where we only experience positive emotions. But that's just patently false. Evolutionarily speaking, our negative emotions serve a really important purpose: they cue us to take action.