You have to make decisions throughout your life and be prepared to accept responsibility for those decisions. There is also confidence that comes from learning a set of skills – and that confidence allows you to challenge the status quo.

The platform of business is one of the most amazing ways to change society, but I am telling you this as someone who grew up not liking the platform.

It taught me the difference between the two types of people in the world. Those that own the store, and those that scrape shit off the floor. You have to decide which one you want to be.

Before you succeed, you must first learn to fail. If you keep repeating the same thing, you're always going to fail, you need to adjust. We have to look at failures and use them as an educational tool.

Society must demand that you comport yourself within a framework of rules. Once those rules break, society breaks down.

You are the custodian of your body. Billions, perhaps trillions, of organisms live in your bowel and your immune system is formed and informed by those organisms.

An increasingly number of companies see their brand as the platform for running their business. The brand creates an identity for the product and/or company in the marketplace. It requires the company to think deeply about its mission, vision, and values. The company has to work hard at developing the image that it wants customers to have of the offering. The brand must not only convince prospective customers and draw them to the brand but also be deeply believed in by the employees and other stakeholders of the company.

BitTorrent is the first time in history that people found a way to make decentralised infrastructure work better and more efficiently than centralised. Transferring files through BitTorrent is 100-1000% faster than centralised infrastructure.

I often joke that social media is the 'NutraSweet' version—it seems good but doesn't deliver the psychological benefit we expect. In fact, our use of technology can be a big opportunity cost on a lot of the stuff that truly matters for happiness.

In the short-run, my fear would be that we've mismanaged the relationship with China through miscalculation to produce a 1914-like situation. I think it's a low-probability outcome, but it could of course be mismanaged. There's obviously the danger of nuclear weapons and a miscalculation leading to their use, and inevitably therefore, catastrophic outcomes.

The process of problem definition is a discipline that we rarely teach or learn. It is one of the most important things that we can invest our time in. What are the true underlying causes of a problem? How are people really affected?

Management that is forced into near time results and paybacks is not tuned for the sort of messages that design has to offer––those of long term customer relationships, of innovative approaches to creating desirable uniqueness.