From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You create change in other people when you're totally honest, transparent, and authentic. When you show people who you really are, with all your flaws, with all your vulnerabilities...it moves them. People would come up to me crying and thanking me for telling the truth.
Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. Trust isn't, at its essence, an asset or an attribute or a currency. It's a belief. It's what we believe about someone or something.
In the case of Brazil, one of the most important things is the huge ethnic and cultural mixture which makes us a country with dynamism, vibrancy, and the ability to understand the psychology of other nations. We have problems, of course, but this is one of our huge strengths, and a huge foreign policy asset.
I particularly like the six-month shift for operational decisions. But for life choices, look at Jeff Bezos. When deciding to start Amazon, he projected himself into the far future. He asked: 'When I'm 80, what will I regret more — starting the company and failing, or never starting it at all?'
White people have nothing to fear from understanding their history- they're not responsible for it. It's like having therapy… it's understanding our past behaviours so that we don't repeat them. I think we need to face up to our imperial history for the same reasons.
There's nothing more important in life than knowing who you are, the path that you are on and its final end. Who are you? What is your purpose in life? What is the path to living that purpose? Those three things are so critical to know.
It is natural that a society would want to keep what they think works, the status quo. We are also acutely aware that technological changes alters society in unpredictable ways. It is the uncertainty associated with change—especially the fear of losing what we value—that leads to resistance to change.
By the time the bomb was completed, that kind of carnage had become common place in World War II and the atomic bomb was then seen as little more than a bigger firebomb—the kind that been used on Tokyo and Dresden.
The awareness of life as being finite allows them (somewhat counter-intuitively) to live… This doesn't necessarily mean being reckless, but rather that they engage in activities which are positive for their well-being- things like travel, education, spending time with family and friends, and so on.
Comedy delivers the cerebral and the hyperbole, it can be funny and serious. Comedy is built on the idea of building pressure…. Building tension and then breaking it… a great punchline cuts after a ton of pressure you build up on a premise, and you know what? That's just how life works.
Disruption is treated as an event, and it is a constant and that is the interesting sort of fallacy. As humans we want this state of consistency but if we are taking it as a hypothesis, we are constantly being disrupted, constantly changing and the groundwork we are standing on is shifting all the time.
If you want to grow, you need to go through something uncomfortable and come out the other end. If you want to grow, you have to go forward in progressive steps. It should always be a little bit uncomfortable because otherwise there's no growth.