From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The people who influence the best are the ones who take the advice of the ancient Chinese military expert, Sun Tzu. Every battle is won before it's fought. If you put people in a mindset that is congruent with the major focus of the message you are yet to send them, it opens the door to persuasion.
I think when you have early trauma that gets disrupted, your mind gets separated from your body. Your mind becomes this sort of distracted, dissociated place to go when this alarm in your body—if your parents are screaming at each other or your dad's an alcoholic—there's only so much a child can take.
Great entrepreneurs are people with tremendous passion. Without passion you cannot go on a journey that requires such huge personal sacrifices, looks bleak, risky and impossible in the beginning…
You don't need to be a celebrity to suffer from what social media does to you; it's happening to everyone. For me, I have to find a routine and discipline with how I use my public image.
All the market research we have done shows that consumers use diamonds to mark special moments in their lives because they are timeless, have been in the ground 3 billion years and are unique.
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.
There's this wonderful intersection where I've personally felt successful for quite some time. I truly believe I'm living out my purpose. It reminds me of the saying, 'remember the time you wished for the things you have now.' I'm living that dream.
When those inputs are removed, it starts to prune function and structure, because those functions aren't needed anymore. It's still that same process — we just call it ageing. And it happens because we've removed physical activity, cognitive stimulus, and social connection. The brain responds accordingly.
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. A familiar example is predictive texting on smartphones. You start typing, and the phone anticipates the rest of the word. This process mirrors how our brains handle sensory input, triggering various internal models.
Endurance stays with you across everything, if you do it one place, you can do it anywhere. You're able to sustain because you've already trained your brain to do that.
Caregiving taught me about the dual nature of love—it's both an internal and external commitment. As a caregiver, I realised the importance of self-care, not just for my own well-being, but so that I could be there for him. This created a symbiotic and reciprocal relationship; in giving, I received abundantly, and we both were uplifted.
If you had to make everything up in your life, from the start, with no input whatsoever – that wouldn't be freedom – you'd be less free; you'd have to think constantly about what you should or should not do. There would be no structure for your life choices.