From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It's the disadvantages that offer a more fertile ground for learning, albeit for a smaller cohort. The depth of learning and engagement derived from tackling difficulties is substantially richer compared to that gleaned from facing advantages.
When you invest in training individuals, they often become more devoted to your organization. It's almost like a karmic cycle - creating a virtuous cycle of growth and loyalty.
When you're training in the martial arts, you always want to be getting beaten in the practice room. That signifies you're fighting good people. When you're getting beaten, you're getting better, you're learning.
We recently set ourselves the goal of educating 10 million children in the next decade; it's ambitious, but we're attracting incredible people and partners to help us on this journey, and I genuinely believe we'll achieve it.
We believe people don't have to fear the innovation age as being victims of it. They can actually embrace it by saying 'okay, I've got to have some additional skill sets I can go back to'.
The process can kill their musicianship. The process can drown-out the music so much that you can't hear it anymore… you end-up so cut off from your intuitive self that it's a series of obstacles playing a piece of music rather than something which is an expression.
People who learn fast and who have some level of 'natural' talent may go home from practice early because they don't have to work as hard as others to get to their target level of achievement, but when you study super-achievers, you find that instead of going home early, they work late, and really pull-away from the crowd.
I argue that the ecosystem where idea pathogens originate from is the university; it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the most moronic ideas possible.
We've had a collective gap of imagination around economic bridges. Lincoln used the government as a battering ram to bring opportunity to those left behind. The country was modernising, industrialising, and Lincoln wanted to empower people. We did that. Franklin Roosevelt did it with the GI Bill. We know how to build bridges; we just don't build them.
Seventeen of the top twenty universities in the world are in the USA, one third of all students who leave their countries to study in another come to the USA.
One of the unique aspects of a prize, and particularly an X-Prize, is that it doesn't require letters after your name, specific degrees or backgrounds or so on. We simply define what it is we want solved, and award the prize to whomever is able to accomplish that.
My advice to young players today is really simple, you have to be the best you can on the pitch, but also to educate yourself, show an interest in the world, and not let football restrict you. The way football is going, it will become more tactical, more strategic and so the more you open your brain, the better you will be.