From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Fundamentally, it's really hard to work on intellectual and complex projects collaboratively. Complexity is underestimated, even by the people who are in the thick of it. There's a lot of anxiety or even resentment towards the tools and process of business that manifests in satire with shows like 'The Office', the movie 'Office Space' or the cartoon 'Dilbert'.
To have a career, you have to be able to break out of your ways of thinking about success, otherwise you'll just end up disappointed.
When faced with the inevitable, get relative.
This crisis is rooted in the collective delusion that burnout is the necessary price we must pay for accomplishment and success. Recent scientific findings make it clear that this couldn't be less true. Performance is actually improved when our lives include time for renewal.
Uncertainty creates a strategic incentive for a rational man to go to war. That's not necessarily a mistake as, at the moment, people may wish they had better information, but they may also realise they've made the optimal choice.
There is a phrase, tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are. That is how I would see the quest for authenticity.
Currently, public services are extraordinarily hostile to those in poverty; a doctrine we've seen clearly in how the Home Office has handled the Windrush generation. This ideology believes people will respond positively to being treated with hostility; but that only works for emotionally regulated people who didn't grow-up in adversity. Our public services are emotionally illiterate.
People like to compare such rare payoffs to lottery tickets. This is way off. We know from the availability heuristic that people overestimate the likelihood of an event based on their ability to envision it—the risk of plane crash versus car crash is the best example of this.
We all have inertia in life, the more comfortable we are, the harder it is to change. One of the best pieces of advice I got was from Dr. Paul Hersey, I was working for him, and he said, '…you're making too much money, your clients are happy, that's your problem… you're not going to be who you could be…' I was comfortable – inertia had set-in, I was re-living the same day repeatedly. It was a nice day, but I wasn't going anyplace.
You are NOT a machine: There's a reason that presentations are often called 'death by PowerPoint,' and many of the most masterful presentations don't even need slides… More than anything, you need to realise that first and foremost, you're a storyteller – and in any pitch, you have to engage the emotions and interest of your audience.
Skiing gave me purpose, and a goal. As a kid, there are so many distractions, and so many different paths to take. I saw a lot of my friends, who were perhaps more talented than I was, without the same goals and determination- and it caused them to veer off course.
The rate of change has become exponential and us as human beings physiologically have not been able to adapt. We just cannot physiologically adapt that quickly – what does it mean for us? This is in some ways Darwinian because he said it wasn't about the strongest that survives, it's those that are most able to adapt.