From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If I finish a marathon at 4.02 (which is the fastest I've ever ran a marathon in my life), what is the first thing that occurs to me? Oh that was so close to 3.59, I wonder if I could do it. Then as soon as you imagine yourself crossing the line at 3.59 boom, you're in wonderhell because everything that you do, every time that you run you're like 'if I could just keep that up for 25 more miles that could be 3.59'. So as soon as you see it, you can't unsee it.
People like to compare such rare payoffs to lottery tickets. This is way off. We know from the availability heuristic that people overestimate the likelihood of an event based on their ability to envision it—the risk of plane crash versus car crash is the best example of this.
The most important versions of love and compassion are the ones we show to ourselves. We have to start there. It's not selfish or ignorant. If you don't make space for yourself to feel loved by you, the rest is impossible… you'll always end up burned-out or in a state of resentment.
If you go into a new situation where you don't know anybody and you want to be more influential, don't look around the room and say hmmm… who can most help me here?… instead, look around and say hmmm…. Who can I most help here? You will put that person in a position where they will be standing on the balls of their feet to help you!
You have to step back and focus on the merits of the offer- not the person who brought the offer to you. That's how you defend yourself. You recognise that there's something that goes on first as important as the message itself inclining you towards purchase or agreement.
At a point, we developed language sophisticated enough to transmit abstract ideas with precision from one mind to another. That enables high quality parallel processing of problems such that we literally have emergent cognition. When people gather, they talk about difficult puzzles they face, and the product of their thinking exceeds the sum of their individual capacity to reason through it.
A lot of people fail at what I do because they group all talent together. Just because they are labelled as 'talent,' doesn't mean they are similar at all. They are individuals with unique business models.
The moment you send Billy Connolly, Lenny Henry and Victoria Wood out somewhere to make an appeal – they are representatives of 'normal people' perhaps in some ways more than pop stars.... Comedians are a kind of humdrum kind of celebrity, and as such I think they're very good at evoking empathy.
The biggest challenge is a lack of confidence. Confidence is preventing businesses from investing significant amounts of their balance sheet strength, they simply do not feel they will get returns on that investment, and so they're holding cash.
We've found that innovation really happens when you constrain a problem very specifically and then throw it out to the world to solve. It's a slightly different way of thinking.
We are definitely seeing a shift in the skillsets that are needed. On our platform here at Udemy, we are seeing a lot more people taking courses around empathy and emotional intelligence and coaching. How do you ask the right questions? How do you enquire? How do you actively listen?
There is a rationality to believing in conspiracy theories that purport to identify somebody acting in secret to harm or gain an advantage that's illegal or immoral, over somebody else without their knowledge or consent.