“Scaling up is incredibly challenging; it's definitely been the hardest part of my own entrepreneurship journey. You might be familiar with The Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It's exactly the same in the real world: if you're good at your job, it leads to advancement in your career, and then you don't get to do those things anymore that made you deserve that advancement.”
— Stewart Butterfield
Co-Founder of Slack, Former CEO & Creator of Flickr

The quote archive

Wisdom in fragments

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

Music is something that affects your senses in a way that nothing else really can- it's like a time-travel portal! You can listen to something and it transports back to that place… that bar… that nightclub… that time with your friends….

— Sophie Ellis-Bextor

British Pop Singer & "Murder on the Dancefloor" Artist

At its best, music is empathic… we can relate to it… it moves us and makes us feel connected. The best music for me captures a zeitgeist, captures something of the time and something of what we feel.

— Nitin Sawhney

British-Indian composer and musician known for world music and film scores

Music leads you to a greater understanding. Einstein said that relativity came to him through musical intuition- he was a great violinist, and was also Chair of the Princeton Orchestra. Bach had a phenomenal, and intuitive, understanding of mathematics too.

— Nitin Sawhney

British-Indian composer and musician known for world music and film scores

Music is also incorruptible in many ways. I can hear when music isn't authentic, or when it isn't coming from the heart and soul. Music is a pure, universal, language that can transcend boundaries at a time. Particularly now, when politicians are using semantics to erect more boundaries, music continues to be more and more relevant.

— Nitin Sawhney

British-Indian composer and musician known for world music and film scores

I genuinely believe that if music comes from your heart and soul, that people will hear that and will be able to connect with the truth of it. For a musician, that's really important- you have to be true to yourself and to the feelings you have when you make music.

— Nitin Sawhney

British-Indian composer and musician known for world music and film scores

Music allows us to express our soul and feelings in a way that's very difficult to replicate with words. I've spent more of my life playing music than I have speaking, and I find it a much more effective way of communicating my feelings and thoughts than words have ever been.

— Nitin Sawhney

British-Indian composer and musician known for world music and film scores

Music is woven into the fabric of the universe. As far back as Pythagoras and Kepler, scientists were writing about the fact that music was intrinsic in the planets… part of the harmonic series in sound. We also have a whole branch of knowledge called zoomusicology, which shows that an appreciation of music and sound is a part of nature, not just unique to humans.

— Nitin Sawhney

British-Indian composer and musician known for world music and film scores

One of the most effective flip-floppers in American history was Abraham Lincoln. How lucky are we that he was willing to change that particular opinion? He stayed true to his values and adjusted his policies to advance those values.

— Adam Grant

Organizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential

We need to be more nuanced about how we define integrity. For me, it's not about sticking to opinions, but about sticking to values. I'm very flexible about the best way to live those values.

— Adam Grant

Organizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential

Too often when we find someone disagreeing with us, our question is about why. Why do you believe this ridiculous thing? What tends to work better is a how question… This kind of approach helps to view the real complexity of a situation and reveals gaps in knowledge.

— Adam Grant

Organizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential

I should be just as excited to find out I was wrong as to prove I am right. Perhaps I should be even more excited about being wrong, because if I am always proving myself right, I'm just affirming my beliefs and not evolving them… and that's not learning at all, is it?

— Adam Grant

Organizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential

Any time you get angry, frustrated or disappointed, it's worth remembering that those emotions are just a first draft. You would never publish a draft version of your blog, right? The same is true of emotion- a lot of people just go ahead and 'publish' – internalising how they feel – without stopping for a second and thinking that maybe they ought to do a revision.

— Adam Grant

Organizational psychologist & bestselling author on work culture and human potential

Cryptocurrencies follow a 3–4-year cycle that seems to repeat. We have 'crypto winter' which is when media interest is generally low, then sudden price rises that bring attention and cascading hype. I don't think of cryptocurrencies on the whole as being a bubble, but rather that they are bubbly-terrain depending on where we are in the cycle.

— Michel Rauchs

We are seeing the emergence, development and evolution of entire monetary systems live, unfolding before our eyes. You have Bitcoin and Ethereum and can imagine them as international monetary systems that bring-together local ecosystems. We used to have gold as a key reserve asset, and now it's the US dollar.

— Michel Rauchs

The potential for blockchain is to accelerate the digitization of financial markets. Blockchain gets everyone excited as it has the potential to convene these different parties together to reach the necessary agreements, in that sense it is a unique enabler, a coordination mechanism. That has massive implications on the structure of our financial markets.

— Michel Rauchs

Thanks to monetary policy, business cycles are far less volatile today than they were in the 19th century, when we had huge swings. But if cryptocurrency takes over the way its proponents would like, we could return to the ups and downs of the pre-monetary policy era.

— Eric Maskin

Nobel Prize Winning Economist & Game Theory Pioneer