From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Empowerment means we are able to sustain hope in a situation that may – to many outsiders – look hopeless.
The world we see is always constructed by our brain. We never have direct access to the world in itself; we only have access to the model our brain is constructing. It works as a sort of 'best guess.' The brain isn't trying to find the absolute truth or create a perfect replica of the outside world's structure. It's trying to find a model that works—one that is adaptive and allows you to function.
Failure is an important tool with which one can reassess and reconstruct an idea or process, it is an essential element of the feedback loop. Failure should be used to step back and question your method and weaknesses. To recognize failure early can ultimately make one much stronger down the road.
When you go out to run 100 miles – the lessons of a lifetime get compressed into 24 hours of non-stop running.
You must tell yourself the truth about money if you're going to give it away well. If you can't live well with $999 million, there's something clearly wrong with you. Money gets inside us; it creates our perceptions and changes the way we operate. It changes the people among whom we are, and who we are. When we're not in touch with that reality, it can change us in heinous ways.
If you see less poor people in the streets, and abandoned children, it makes you feel better- and that helps us to build a more independent attitude in foreign policy. That, again, has feedback in Brazil- making people more confident feeling that we don't always have to say yes to whatever is presented.
We engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we're anxious about being excluded or left out.
My discipline lies in taking full responsibility; I don't blame anyone else. If I lose, it's on me to accept and address it. The very next day in the gym, I start working on what went wrong.
I don't label it as a self-care or self-help book; I describe it as a self-destruct book. The reason for this unconventional title stems from the inherent problem with self-care: we are often our own worst caregivers. Left to our own devices, we tend to blow things out of proportion and expect the world to change to make us happy.
ISIS and Al Qaeda don't radicalise anybody, what they do is tip people over the edge. The online phenomenon just speeds it up.
We crystallize and store knowledge in specialised sounds and language, and then play with it – build and forge and mould it and model with it – using it to grip hold of the past and to imagine and plan the future.
To change motivation, it is important to give hope and make people believe. But also to give concrete results. It is important to value the positive instead of only highlighting the worst.