From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It's definitely affected the psychology of the marketplace. It could not have come at a worse time. We have to deal with this expeditiously and make the system more robust to these kind of issues.
Our brains consist of about 100 billion nerve cells and neurons, with a potential for making anywhere from tens to hundreds of trillions, some even say a quadrillion, connections known as synapses. Due to a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, our neural network continually restructures itself. Each time we learn something new or encounter a fresh experience, we trigger a reconfiguration of our brains.
When a coach gains the player's confidence and establishes a strong partnership, they can effectively motivate the player, boost their confidence, and help them break through barriers. This can elevate a player's career to new heights.
Our capacity to reason is recursive, combinatorial – we can reason about our reason – we can argue, criticise and develop tools that enhance our reason thanks to language and communication. We have the power to build on our reason, to enhance it.
When you're starting out, your ambition shouldn't be defined by someone else's success criteria. That's something I struggled with, and still do.
Dehumanizing the victim through the internet has enabled people to commit crimes and not worry about their conscience.
There's also a danger in acting of identifying yourself as an actor. We have to try to identify ourselves as human beings first, and our jobs second. I'm Sam, I act sometimes… not I am Sam, I am an actor.
I see games as psychology experiments that we conduct on ourselves. This realization struck me while playing Sudoku. When you first encounter Sudoku, you're acutely aware of the rules you're applying to solve the puzzle. It's a conscious effort, like turning a crank and watching the puzzle get solved. However, as you progress, those initial heuristics, those rules of thumb, become internalized. You stop being aware of them; they become second nature, and you start focusing on more subtle, higher-level heuristics.
Our brains are adept at concealing our motives from ourselves, convincing us that we are not as interested in status as we might actually be. This self-deception, paradoxically, enhances our ability to argue our lack of interest in status, which, in turn, can ironically increase our standing within the social group.
It is not an exaggeration to say that most of our fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.
It's awareness that leads to regulation—that's why it's information. Because it's giving us information about how we're feeling and what we need to do about those feelings.
Unless you learn and grow continuously, you're probably going to end up as one of the 90% who don't make it.