From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
A brand is really an emotional connection you have with a product or service. It's so emotional in fact that you become fairly irrational in the way you try to justify why you're using it. If you split our brain into a rational and irrational side…. a brand is what is operating at the irrational side.
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.
Our knowledge of the world is always fragmentary and incomplete and our explanations of how the world works have therefore to be considered as provisional. This means we have to accept that sometimes we will turn out afterwards to have been wrong.
Similar to the 'use it or lose it' principle that applies to muscles, our brains engage in a nightly routine that stimulates thoughts and ideas not typically relied upon during the day. This built-in process keeps our thinking adaptive and nimble, fostering divergent thoughts and offering an evolutionary advantage.
Nuclear weapons continue to be built for basically two reasons: power and prestige. In almost every case where a country has decided to acquire a nuclear weapon they have done it either for power—the power to protect their country from external threats or a desire to project their power in the region.
It is very common in politics that each party assume the other party cheated in every election if they lose. It's not that republicans are more suspicious than democrats or vice versa, but their constructive paranoia leads them to believe that the other party is doing something sinister.
Nothing happens by accident, everything is connected, and there are no coincidences: that is the essence of conspiratorial thinking.
Information overload means we are so bombarded with information that we can't make sense of it and so we become tribal, emotional and irrational, surviving using heuristics rather than facts. You can see this reflected in how our politics is changing – it's becoming more tribal, emotional and polarized.
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.
There's an old adage that the boxer is the last one to know – it's not true, he's the first one to know, but the last to acknowledge it. You can learn from defeat – it's not the end of the world, but you have to learn from it.
Songs are these magnetic creations of words and music, in very short form. A song needs to hit you in less than a minute and sometimes it can be an incredibly solitary, emotional experience where it's just you and the imagined relationship with that singer.
I'm a firm believer that creativity comes from restrictions, so I'm really grateful that I grew-up with so many restrictions around me. When you give someone complete freedom and a blank canvas, it could take forever to figure out what you want to do, but when you give people limitations and say, 'here's a canvas, but you can only paint with yellow..' – the wheels start turning, and you plan to get out of the box you're put in.