From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
No regrets culture is a terrible blueprint for living. The idea that you should always be positive and never look backwards is not an effective blueprint for living a decent, meaningful, happy life. It runs against everything we know about the science of emotion!
If you feel scared; the starting point is to understand why. You need to then understand how to make the fear work for you – if an emotion doesn't work for you, it works against you.
The way I prefer to think of perception is as a processor of active construction, a controlled hallucination. Sensory signals don't come with labels attached. Everything we perceive is a kind of inference, a burst guess about what's out there.
We have to interact with everyone so no one feels left out or ashamed; these negative emotions can kill curiosity and creativity.
We often project our 'superhero' aspirations onto our leaders and vulnerability, and other more human traits, are not always encouraged. Organisational leaders often experience loneliness, and the 'truth' within their company is often illusive to them because subordinates will often tell them what they want to hear.
There's an innate tendency in human-beings to sort ourselves by how much we want power. Some of us don't want it at all, some of us are absolutely obsessed with it. The interaction between the individual and the system is therefore critical.
The experiences you have in dreams, measured by brain activity and glucose consumption, are remarkably similar to those you would have while awake. Whether you're running the London Marathon in reality or dreaming about it, your brain's electrical and metabolic patterns are nearly identical.
That experience [of being tortured] has altered my whole life. You can never be the same person and anything you do is in reference to that moment. I have never been able to pass it.
Entrepreneurs are people who by nature are optimists, who can tolerate risk and who have huge curiosity.
If you want a caricature, life satisfaction is your self‑smugness rating—how smug you feel about your life. Western smugness has definitely slid over the past ten years.
When faced with the inevitable, get relative.
Our boredom threshold has declined to the point where we're unable to stand idle in an elevator for ten seconds without pulling out our phones. There's also an epidemic of social avoidance, particularly among younger people, as the skills required for face-to-face interaction are more demanding.