Wisdom in fragments

The field of positive psychology, and people in general, would benefit from thinking harder about what a good life is. A lot of people think we're pleasure motivated hedonists, but it turns out we have many other goals. We want happiness, but that comes in many different forms. We want pleasure, we want to be good people, we want to make a difference in the world, we want meaningful pursuits.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

Mixed martial arts aren't like boxing. In boxing, if you lose on your way up? It's pretty much career over. In mixed martial arts, there are so many ways to win and lose... When that happens, you say, 'OK, what did I do wrong?' – you have to be honest with yourself.

Former UFC Middleweight Champion & MMA fighter turned commentator

I knew I could still fight, and some of the people close to me said, 'not with one eye you can't' so I continued anyway... I lied, I cheated and scammed the system... I did whatever I could. It was highly stressful, but I believed in myself.

Former UFC Middleweight Champion & MMA fighter turned commentator

When you're getting defeated in training, you're getting better. You've got to get tested in life if you're going to improve. When you're training in the martial arts, you always want to be getting beaten in the practice room. That signifies you're fighting good people.

Former UFC Middleweight Champion & MMA fighter turned commentator

You're not going to be a warrior in battle unless you are a warrior in preparation. You have to be single-minded, you can't just show-up on the night... That's where the warrior mindset turns on – it's when you prepare so can do whatever it takes to win that fight.

Former UFC Middleweight Champion & MMA fighter turned commentator

It's ironic. You would assume that when you go in to compete in a sport like mixed martial arts, you'd want to wind yourself up, get angry, get mad, and get fired up... When you're angry, you're in a frantic state of mind, you are not the best version of yourself. When you're fighting the very best martial artists on the planet, you cannot react out of emotion. You have to be cool, calm, collected and in the moment.

Former UFC Middleweight Champion & MMA fighter turned commentator

We don't trust human beings to do things without being audited, and we're now getting AI to do those very same things without the same checks and balances.

Dean of Cornell University's Blavatnik School of Engineering

Because these systems don't see the world the way we do, they can extrapolate things in novel and unexpected ways that we haven't identified. Systems like Deep Mind's AlphaGo are not beating humans at games through speed and brute force, they're discovering new ways to play which we never conceived.

Dean of Cornell University's Blavatnik School of Engineering

While people have been worried about AI being embedded in humanoid robots from the science fiction world, our lives have been shaped and influenced by AI which makes tens of billions of decisions each day about what we see, and how we communicate.

Dean of Cornell University's Blavatnik School of Engineering

There's a delicate balance between making sure our values are encoded in these technologies as they come out- and not constraining them so much that we lose the technological race to other nations who don't hold our values.

Dean of Cornell University's Blavatnik School of Engineering

AI has been an area of technology for many decades, but the advances of the past five-years show us why this is one of the major technology events of the last several centuries. We haven't really had a technology like AI in the history of technological development – the closest analogy would be the movable type printing press, which came to the fore at the beginning of the enlightenment, some five hundred years ago.

Dean of Cornell University's Blavatnik School of Engineering

We didn't want to be the best shipper of plastic, nor the best streaming technology, we positioned ourselves as a great place to find stories. We could make that true in the DVD world and the digital world through things like our taste-engine meaning that whether the product came in the post or through a wire, customers saw it as the same.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

The people who were there at the beginning may not be the people who are scalable... As a founder, one of the hardest things you ever may need to do is take someone into your office who was there from the beginning... but who you now recognise doesn't have the skills for the next chapter of the business' journey.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

The layers of compliance that appear in companies are basically what the company does to protect itself against bad judgement. They build guardrails. At Netflix, we decided to flip that around – rather than building systems to protect ourselves from bad decisions, we built systems of judgement, systems that are optimised for the people who have good judgement.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

Culture is not aspirational, it's observational. It's not something you and your co-founders sit down, dream-up, put into PowerPoint, and create some posters from, for the break-out room. Culture, simply, is how you behave and how you treat your co-founders, employees, and customers.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

The right idea is one that fascinates you, that you can't get out of your mind, that's a puzzle you want to solve. The path from a raw idea to success is a long one- full of frustration, dead-ends.... If you don't have something that genuinely fascinates you, you're going to give-up long before the point you finally stumble on the thing that works.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer