From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You come back and go to a job where your boss is trying to make an extra buck and your co-workers are trying to trample each other to get ahead- even though you just came back from a place where people were willing to die for you.
Fear is a great weapon, and tyrants use fear against their people to encourage them to vote for increases in military spending, even when infrastructure, education and healthcare are suffering.
Wherever there's judgement there's noise, and more than you think. In the criminal justice system, we saw variability between judges in the severity of their sentencing for equivalent crimes. In business, you may have a company where someone in hiring says, 'bring everyone in, I think they're great' and you end up with a company full of people who shouldn't be there.
I define authenticity as the consistent practice of choosing to know who we are and embracing who we are. For a lot of us, we come to know who we are, but then we rail against our identities.
Growing up, I was a speech and debate kid – and I realised that anytime I made the judges laugh, I would automatically get 10-15 points higher on my final score! Comedy, and making people laugh, has the power to engender empathy and to make people like you.
By encouraging them to pay attention as they overeat, we can reduce the reward value of that habit to zero in just 10-15 sessions of eating. These are people who could have been overeating for decades, but their behaviour can change quickly.
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.
Inside each of us are monsters and angels- there are no divisions between good and bad people- and I've seen how those times of insecurity can make us do terrible things to each other.
The more people that must be involved, the less likely the theory is to be true. A couple of people could pull it off, hundreds or thousands of people would have to be involved, and it's not likely because we would hear about it.
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.
Doing something that has never been done before is terrifying… all the people who love you will tell you not to do it… not because they're jealous, but because they're genuinely scared for you… they're worried for your wellbeing. If you venture outside that wall, you are really somebody who has traded security and certainty for freedom and risk.
Abraham Maslow (a famous psychologist) once commented, 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail'. Investors currently have a hammer, and that hammer is economics.