Wisdom in fragments

For me- I think we're all here to uplift the human condition, making lives better for ourselves and others.

Words like mistake, error and complication are not helpful. They carry visceral, emotive, weight which hampers learning and thus obscures what you may be able to take from an event. Over the past 20 years, we've moved away from that terminology towards the language of adverse events.

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. I often worry that when we talk about health-tech – it almost seems that in certain areas the tech is taking over the health.

Super-specialisation at the expense of a breadth of knowledge is a modern-day fallacy. Fundamentally, we need to be able to address facts in an unbiased fashion. If you're super-specialised in one particular area, at the expense of that breadth, at the expense of clarity of vision, it is natural you will accumulate biases that will factor into your decision making.

You need clarity of vision and purpose. You need to know the reason you're there at that surgical table with a knife in your hand. You have to be clear that you are using these sophisticated tools (tools which can cause a lot of harm) to fundamentally and primarily help that entity, that child in front of you. That mindset provides the energy and focus needed to carry out the task.

Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood. We look at information coming in from the external world, determine what is useful, determine how we understand it, build a fuller picture and effect change. A surgical mindset is very much that.

Walls are seductive though… what politician hasn't said, 'I can make it like the old-days again…' Bridges sound harder – how do you build them? What will they cost? Who will pay? In truth, build walls almost always yields a negative result.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

Our economic measures aren't wrong, they're incomplete. Smith noted that a successful economic system is one where everyone who participates can flourish. That's not about equality of outcome, but about the fact that everyone has the ability to flourish, equality of opportunity.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

If Smith were alive today, he'd say that in addition to the openness and competition and all the wealth we are creating, we need a sense of mutual sympathy and empathy. We need to give people the ability to compete.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

The genius of the classical economists was to think of economics and politics as the same. Remember, in Smiths' Day, there was no economics faculty, it was political economy. We may need to go back to that.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

We've had a collective gap of imagination around economic bridges. Lincoln used the government as a battering ram to bring opportunity to those left behind. The country was modernising, industrialising, and Lincoln wanted to empower people. We did that. Franklin Roosevelt did it with the GI Bill. We know how to build bridges; we just don't build them.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

Whether it's in economics, politics, or wider society, there's a debate about capitalism versus socialism; but I don't really think that's what's happening. If you look at the populist undercurrents around the world- it's really about walls & bridges. When there are big changes in the economy – like globalisation or technological change, the simple thing to tell voters is, 'we'll build a wall to protect you against those changes…' what you really need however, is bridges.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

Pleasure has limits, it's fleeting, we habituate to it quickly and get bored of it. You can only experience pleasure against a backdrop of pain, difficulty, or struggle. We allocate pain and pleasure; we balance them out in clever ways.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

Meaningful and moral are different in an interesting sense; something can be meaningful, and yet be morally terrible. Adolf Eichmann was clearly engaged in what he thought was a meaningful pursuit, perhaps he was even in a state of flow, thinking that what he was doing was 'good' – even though he was the architect of the death of millions.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

Purpose and meaning are inextricably tied to suffering and difficulty. If you tell me a pursuit that you view as meaningful and important, I can guarantee it won't be easy. If it was easy, it wouldn't be meaningful or important. We reserve the notion of meaning for things that have difficulty.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

Chosen suffering is part and parcel of a meaningful life. If you don't have any chosen suffering in your life, you're probably not living the best life you could. To put it primitively, we're the mammal that likes Tabasco sauce! We're the only creature that seeks out suffering and pain willingly.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research