I came away from space flight realising that I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. Life is so amazing. Even the simplest organisms have millions of cells that have to randomly align in a perfect way, and those processes are infinitesimally less complex than emotions and consciousness. When you look at the universe and the forces of nature – science has to explain how it all works, but to my mind, there just has to be a creator.
— Colonel Terry Virts NASA Astronaut & International Space Station CommanderMartial arts gave me my identity, my purpose, a passion for a pursuit in life. I wasn't particularly good at sports, I didn't have many friends, and was a bit of a loner. Martial arts changed everything. I finally found something I was good at... it became my identity... it helped my confidence... it gave me a social circle!
Essentially therefore you have a three-pronged approach. Firstly privatisation, secondly cutting the size of the state and thirdly- collecting existing taxes (rather than imposing any new ones).
Speed and pace are important – the circumstances that brought people to the table can change over time, nothing is forever, nothing is static.
There is a degree of laziness and political correctness which has crept into the justice system. Many judges are appointed not elected. They don't want to offend. Instead of making a decision, they 'cut the baby in half' and everyone is left being a little bit miserable.
Everyone has a little bit of warrior in them. We all grow up and have a little piece of us which wants to be a superhero, who goes and fights the bad guys. In real life, fighting is tough, you have to overcome your fears – nobody really wants to get into a fight! Escaping that fear is the reason so many people who get into combat sports.
After working with esteemed leaders across six continents, I've observed that the singular trait they all share is their imperfection. Recognizing and embracing one's imperfections, while acknowledging that you don't have all the answers, is the foundation of great leadership.
What we need now is the George C. Marshall of our era to help us train better than the Chinese and the Russians.
The hardest part of the job is telling those players that they are not playing, I remember from my playing days how that felt. This is when compassion is an important tool as well.
If you tap out the rhythm to a familiar song, say 'happy birthday…' how often do you think that someone listening to your taps will guess the song? The person tapping usually guesses about 50%, but in reality, it's about 2.5%! You are assuming the other person can hear the song you are tapping!
Disasters keep coming along at random intervals, they are not normally distributed. They either come randomly (in the case of war) or they are governed by power-laws (pandemics and earthquakes). That's hard for our brains to deal with… we don't like the idea that history is just a lot of random shocks without any predictable features.
For large corporations, globalization opened up opportunities without the correlate responsibilities which usually travel with that- so things that banks must do at home (in terms of being carefully regulated) they didn't have to do abroad... This took globalization out of balance, into a vicious cycle – and we're now dealing with the consequences of that.
Storytelling is an extraordinary powerful human skill that all of us are wired for; but its best used in the service of ideas.