From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We're the only species on Earth that keeps pets, and that alone suggests there must be a good reason for it. It's hard to even imagine a world without pets. But we do need to be aware of all these issues—from abandoning animals to breeding them to extremes simply because they look 'cool' or different.
Rationality applies whether you believe in it or not. One idea follows from another – or it doesn't – and if you want some of your beliefs to lead to other beliefs, you have no choice but to be rational. We're committed to it by the very act of discussing, arguing, debating, persuading and convincing.
Having a purpose is the ultimate hack for making the entrepreneurial process enjoyable. It lets you move beyond endless discussions about work-life balance and the overused narrative that entrepreneurship is 'so hard.' The truth is, you've only made it difficult because it lacks personal meaning.
We want to be influenced because we want to be right. We want to take the more adaptive strategies in any situations in order to have good outcomes. It's an evolutionary psychological adaptation.
Space is a pretty scary place. Here on Earth, we're surrounded by nature and a nice blue sky. You don't realise that 16km above you, things start to go black…. 100km it's an inhospitable vacuum that will kill you in less than 60 seconds. Think how far we've come as humanity- we're a living species who have managed to escape our own planet.
Many people think the role of bioethics is to go and see what the scientists or doctors are doing and tell them to stop because they are acting, by hypothesis, unethically. However I often find when I go and see what the scientists are doing, they are doing wonderful things and I'm very inclined to say 'great guys, keep going!'
Even the most untrained eye can sense the degrees of discrimination seen in foreign policy responses to natural disasters and conflict. Discrimination which can only rationally be explained by morally abhorrent flaws in foreign-policy.
I think it's down to what Jeremy Bentham said which is, '…the question is not can they reason? Or can they talk? …But can they suffer?'
The smartest being on planet Earth is life itself. Life creates with abundance, not with scarcity. Life does not want to kill the tigers for the deer to survive. Life basically says more deer, more tigers, more everything.
To me literature was, and still is, an existential need. Books and stories have been that gateway for me. I wanted to find a gate to an 'elsewhere', to another land, a Storyland.
All we can control in this life is our dedication, our self-belief, our determination. I can guarantee you, I will always have that, and that's my legacy. That's what I want to leave as a gift to my kids – the message that they should never give up, never have regrets, to give everything, never back down in front of obstacles, and to always keep going, no matter what.
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.