From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The crux of the matter is the internal liberation that comes from acknowledging that there will always be more to do than we can handle, and that certainty about the future is unattainable. It's a form of defeat, yet immensely productive, because as long as you believe mastering everything is just extremely challenging, you'll continue to struggle.
Our ethics are not static, they evolve over time and that gives me tremendous hope. If we had remained static, the progress we have made would have been impossible. The evolution of ethics is essential to our survival.
From 20,000 miles away however, you couldn't see any civilisation- just the land mass and those three colours… the brown of the land, the white of the clouds and the ice, and the crystal blue of the ocean. Earth was just suspended in the blackness of space and it was an incredibly beautiful sight.
I'm interested in the 'modern' definition of magic which plays with epistemology, and the determinations we make about what's true, and what is real. The most important decisions you can make center around your perceptions of the world, and what makes you doubt them.
Humans often come together by believing in ideas that may only exist in our imaginations. We have an ability to imagine together, to merge our ideas as a collective, which can slowly move us toward a future once believed to be impossible. This is part of what changes us from being simple animals to a group that will soon travel to Mars and perhaps even further. To me that is magic.
Tuning into these feeling tones reveals their powerful influence – they often control our lives in ways we're completely unaware of.
When I got better, even simple things like being able to wake-up, go for a walk, speak, and observe life, felt viscerally stunning and good. I found a state of being – a state that gave me perspective and feeling about life and my place in it.
Work is preventing us living. So many people use work to avoid deeper topics around their lives, relationships, kids and health – deeper topics that can lead to the positive choices they need to make that will make them happier.
There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.
I think in the past, it was more of a zero sum game, and now I think we can play in a positive sum game, which really plays into the whole greenhouse concept, because we can all actually grow together and not feel like we are needing to take in order to achieve.
Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. And the reason this is so important is that trust isn't, at its essence, an asset or an attribute or a currency. It's a belief. It's what we believe about someone or something. That definition is slightly counterintuitive because, often, when people think about trust, they talk about knowing what to expect from someone or knowing what the outcomes will be. So, they're actually thinking about trust through the language of risk, thinking about it in terms of certainty. And that's not what trust is.
If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.