From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Despite every adversity, never give up on your dreams. I am living proof that having been born and brought up in the smallest country in the Southern Hemisphere, it is possible to fulfil your ambition and succeed despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
Consciousness is at the root of human identity. Fundamentally, we relate to each other as beings with feelings and experiences. Consciousness is at the root of everything that really matters in life from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, these are the things that make life worth living.
I had to remain in war mode. I had to continue confronting my captors, not accept what was happening to me. The relationship I had with my captors was based on suspicion.
One reason conflict resilience has declined is that it's become easier to fire off a snarky message or simply block someone and move on. If we share physical space, avoidance has limits; I can leave the room, but I might still run into you in the hallway. Online, though, I can just delete, mute, or block you with no further engagement.
You are surrounded by an endless series of expanded layers of social networks. Your inner core is 5, which extends to 50-150, 500 and eventually out to around 1500. As you go out through the networks, the number of people included increases, the average quality of these relationships declines.
The world of business is scared without realising that it, itself, is the cure.
Without understanding the rules of the game, you might assume that your outcomes are determined mostly by luck. People who end up unhappy about what they get conclude that they were unlucky or that the system was rigged against them. After enough of these experiences, they believe that's just how the world works.
Humans encounter difficulties and cover our innate purity, eventually forgetting our essential nature. We begin to believe that our personalities, our particular abilities or habits, are who we truly are, losing sight of the truth that lies beneath the surface.
The tendency is to avoid the need for more options because anything that's unfamiliar, as human beings we tend to flee uncertainty. We naturally go towards what we already know because we know how to deal with something we have done before.
The more dots you give your brain, the more of them it will connect!
Music can reveal the nature that lies within us, the part of us we cannot hide. When you hear a single note, a C, it's not a single sound, it's the result of many harmonies. It's like God hiding in plain sight.
As an entrepreneur, you're often doing things that haven't been done before, or doing them in ways that break the mould. All sorts of people are telling you, 'No, that's not how it's done,' and you're constantly running into obstacles. Without a lot of self-confidence, you can't even get started.