From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Our brains actively construct a model of the world, which is our actual experience. Incoming sensory data serves mainly to verify and correct this internal model.
Our brain is local and linear, and we live in a global and exponential world. If you want to keep pace, you have to perform and think at speed and scale – and we're not built for it. Flow is literally our leverage for keeping pace in a global, exponential world.
A less experienced, less comfortable, version of myself would get angry and then realise they were angry. The meditative version of me can anticipate when I'm going to get angry- and then, it becomes a choice. Do you want to be angry? Or have a different attitude? It's been enormously powerful, and I've been doing it for 8 years.
They described, for example, taste as if it were just electrical signals in the brain, but there's no way such signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That's the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.
Fear depends on your context, and how much you think you have to lose. You may be young or broke and have nothing to lose. In that case? Either you figure out a way to get something, or you don't get it. Simple.
Life is not a race against other people. Life is a competition with yourself. One of the greatest achievements in life is to outperform yourself and live your greatest life possible. Greatness lives in all of us, but we must all find what it is that ignites our souls.
Your brain has an agenda: to make you feel good about you. So if you're the CEO, and you decided to launch a product two weeks ago, your brain assumes, 'Well, that must have been the right decision.' It starts scanning the environment for proof — cherry-picking anything that confirms you were right.
When most people are asked questions, they try to jump into the other person's mind and second-guess what they're supposed to be saying. They want to sound interesting… they want to sound smart, like a mogul who's on the cover of Forbes. I just want to tell it like it is…
One way that we deal with the accelerating rate of change is by sort of riding on top of that tsunami of change rather than being crushed by it.
Vulnerability isn't oversharing; it isn't necessarily personal. And that's where some of the fear has come from—this sense that leaders might need to role-model less sharing about their personal lives. Yet vulnerability can look very different. Trust benefits from clearer boundaries, because trust needs clear expectations and clear limits.
Every person is different, but every sale is the same.
Gender identity drives self-socialization. People think adults socialise their children, but children socialise themselves. We see the same process in the Great Apes. Young females imitate their mother – and copy the diet and tool techniques of their mothers much more reliably than the young males do.