From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
A practitioner is the person who goes out and breaks the limits of the mind, the soul, the body. A practitioner listens, and understands that the voices who say things cannot be done are theorists.
When I talk about happiness, envision yourself at the ripe age of 85, comfortably seated on that metaphorical porch, reflecting upon your life. You're thinking, 'Good heavens, I've genuinely led a fulfilling life. I've established a loving family, spent my life with an extraordinary partner, and devoted myself to a profession that's injected an immense sense of purpose into my existence. I have minimal regrets and have maintained a light-hearted, playful approach to life.' This, to me, is what I would categorise as a profound sense of existential happiness.
The things that are trivially easy for humans turn out to be extraordinarily difficult for machines, and vice versa. I cannot do the square root of a large number in my head, but my pocket calculator can do that instantly. But my pocket calculator still cannot make me a cup of coffee.
No one has to be a genius, but everyone has to participate.
Ancient philosophy almost hasn't been bettered as a kind of therapeutic toolbox in 2400 years, and have a certain aesthetic to them which makes you feel part of a long tradition... You're part of a three millennia old tradition of wisdom that thousands and thousands of people have read the same book that you're reading, and found it therapeutic in very dark times.
What is the value of asking the right question to prompt the right answer? Since it is not a narrow discipline and one with great roots in cultivating subjective experiences the integration and contribution of design is often overlooked in a silo mentality.
Quantum mechanics is the most radical break in our thinking of reality that we have ever encountered... Quantum mechanics comes along and says that whole experience is misleading, and that the best you can ever do is to predict the probabilities of outcomes. Quantum mechanics says our world is nebulous, fuzzy, a haze of possibilities until it somehow snaps to attention upon an appropriate interaction, observation or measurement.
Flight is a very quick way to get from A to B. It's also a very good way to escape from predators who are stuck on the ground. The question to be asked is why doesn't everybody fly?
With technology, we're creating a lot more hammers – and with more hammers, we're able to find more nails. The question is whether those hammers are being made for the right purposes, and whether they will serve the right purpose.
When we were first able to make approximately what our fathers made by doing performance, we considered ourselves completely successful and had no ambition beyond that. If we were playing fairs and cruise ships, we were happy.
In life, we all take various risks- not knowing how serious an outcome will be when we start. For so many things we do, we have to take a risk on someone else's word, with only their judgement calculating what the risk will be to us.
I do believe there's something fundamentally essential about free play—the open-ended combination of elements not confined by a narrow context. This concept is vital not only to humanity but to life itself.