From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Diamonds are a miracle of nature, they are millions of years old, they survived a hazardous journey to the earth's surface and the discovery of them is an exciting moment. To see the rough diamond and then watch it come to life on the polisher's wheel with incredible fire and scintillation is incredibly inspiring.
The camera doesn't lie, but the photographer does. And that's the beauty of it. Photography is about interpretation, it's about your point of view, it's about how you see the world.
Happiness is a measure that reflects the success with which people achieve their personal objectives of living levels, happy and healthy families and satisfying work.
The most common mistake is to stop challenging when things are going well. I recognise failure as not having made a business better than when you were first involved.
A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain.
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 postmodernism, there are no absolute truths; everything is relative, of course other than the one absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. This is a form of intellectual terrorism, nihilism.
If you start with a solution, there's a risk you might construct something that no one finds useful, leading to immense frustration. But when you centre your efforts on the problem, it serves as the guiding North Star of your journey.
We want to be influenced because we want to be right. We want to take the more adaptive strategies in any situations in order to have good outcomes. It's an evolutionary psychological adaptation.
History is not linear, like the chapters of a book… History moves through seasons, and so winters are inevitable.
The endurance of games like backgammon or chess lies in their continual presentation of an interesting problem. These strategy and decision-making games are like a well from which we draw insights. As a game designer, I can attest that while creating games, most rule combinations aren't inherently fascinating. Often, a game concept might initially seem uninteresting or static, and despite efforts to invigorate it, it remains lifeless.
I've learned that people exist on a spectrum, and that's something many observers don't like to acknowledge. But it's a reality across all the wars we cover, on all sides of every conflict. No one thinks exactly the same; some people hold very hawkish views on certain issues while being less so on others.