From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Our brains are not so well equipped, we just tend to assume patterns that look connected are causally connected. So a conspiracy theory is just another causal theory – why did these things happen?
I am not someone who puts a lot of pressure on myself. I love a challenge and live for the big stage of an Olympic Games or World Championships. Some people get nervous for the big events but I look forward to them.
Mirroring is a crazy skill, it's so insanely effective. Just repeating the last 3 words of what someone said or picking out 1-3 words from the middle of the statement, can get you the outcome you need. Using mirroring, you feel like you can work Jedi mind tricks!
We crystallize and store knowledge in specialised sounds and language, and then play with it – build and forge and mould it and model with it – using it to grip hold of the past and to imagine and plan the future.
Social anxiety stems from the fear of being judged, criticised, or scrutinised. However, adopting a mindset of curiosity—deciding to learn and ask questions—can make those fears dissipate. When you shift your focus from worrying about judgment to engaging in learning and exploration, the anxiety naturally begins to fade away.
There's an innate tendency in human-beings to sort ourselves by how much we want power. Some of us don't want it at all, some of us are absolutely obsessed with it. The interaction between the individual and the system is therefore critical.
Similar to the 'use it or lose it' principle that applies to muscles, our brains engage in a nightly routine that stimulates thoughts and ideas not typically relied upon during the day. This built-in process keeps our thinking adaptive and nimble, fostering divergent thoughts and offering an evolutionary advantage.
Nature has evolved the human race for individuals to be very different from each other. Half of us are thinkers, and we proceed according to the facts. The other half of us are feelers. Nature says you need both kinds of people to push humanity forward.
When you're trying to understand the motivations of people, quite often understanding the emotional drivers is at least as important as understanding the facts that took them there. In the case of Putin and the people around him, it's resentment and it's anger and it's determination to recover something they believe they lost.
The human mind, once the pinnacle of intelligence, is now overshadowed by computational intelligence in many domains. Algorithms understand and can guide me better than I can guide myself. The real game-changer is data. I'm willing to yield control to an algorithm that proves to be superior.
Ultimately, you have to fail at some stage with whatever you do, to get the successes that you need in the end.
We are a product of evolution, and the mechanism of evolution is natural selection. Evolution is selecting for survival, and the qualities we have are evolved to help us survive as well as possible. Our cognitive capability to reason has not evolved to find truth, it evolved to help us survive and that means that we sometimes find it easier to stay with a group rather than believe the correct thing.