From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Always remember in life there will always be someone that will be in more in need. We could only afford a dime that year, but we gave to help out others!
We possess an essence deeper than mere job titles, yet society often deviates us from it. We're conditioned to identify with our roles more than our core selves.
It shocks me that our society has not caught up with the fact that mental illnesses should be treated like any other disease, and not relegated to the justice system. We have so many different therapies and medicines, and people can make significant recoveries.
Without understanding the rules of the game, you might assume that your outcomes are determined mostly by luck. People who end up unhappy about what they get conclude that they were unlucky or that the system was rigged against them. After enough of these experiences, they believe that's just how the world works.
Being authentic is a privilege. Not everyone has the ability or luxury to do this. Sometimes as leaders, we need to speak less and listen more, to make room for other voices to be centred. We rein in our authenticity by being more adaptive so others can fill this space with their authenticity.
Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the entire planetary 'net primary productivity' is today devoted to sustaining this one species- us.
Western civilisation has veered off course; we have de-sacralised the world in which we live. We are collectively insane, and we need to mount our own intervention.
Disability – rather than being something looked upon as a 'condition', is really a phenomenon that occurs at a complex intersection between our humanity, policy, society, culture and the environment.
We have learned that the things that matter are not the physical, and material things. What matters in life is hope. Tomorrow is not a given, and we must be happy about small things and we must seize the day.
I also want to dispel the hero-myth of entrepreneurs, that they're somehow super-gifted individuals who are better than me or the people I know. I don't know any like that – my friends sleep late, smell funny, do stupid stuff and have weird joint problems.
The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.
Today's civilisation is more fragile as a result of its complexity. We've created an astonishingly networked world in which we communicate and travel in ways which were unimaginable for most of human history... but at the same time, we have made ourselves more vulnerable to certain kinds of disaster, and even invented new forms of disaster that didn't' exist before.