From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
A designer is a designer, whether you're designing a dress or a toothbrush. The integrity, skill and creativity are all the same.
I came away from space flight realising that I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. Life is so amazing. Even the simplest organisms have millions of cells that have to randomly align in a perfect way, and those processes are infinitesimally less complex than emotions and consciousness. When you look at the universe and the forces of nature – science has to explain how it all works, but to my mind, there just has to be a creator.
There's a moment when the unconscious crystallises into consciousness, leading to all our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. In ancient texts, this moment is referred to as 'vedana', and we describe them as 'feeling tones.' These feeling tones are the mind's initial acknowledgment or categorisation of experiences as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
I'm interested in the 'modern' definition of magic which plays with epistemology, and the determinations we make about what's true, and what is real. The most important decisions you can make center around your perceptions of the world, and what makes you doubt them.
If you don't love the act of doing, you'll never find happiness. If your motivation is glory or money, you're bound to be disappointed. If you're more excited about lunch with investment bankers or the Harvard Club than dealing with the day-to-day realities—like working with bakers or being deeply involved in the entity—you'll end up unhappy.
Thriving as a human isn't some finish line you cross; it's an ongoing journey. You want a life where you can feel like you're thriving every single day—not just fixated on some peak you're aiming for, but actually savouring each step along the way.
The reason why I fight is that I'm fighting against the pain of seeing my family get sick and fighting against not being able to help them. That's more painful than anything. To see my kids, get sick tomorrow and not being able to help them? That's more painful than anything I would experience in a fight.
To me it was an adventure. I'm a hardened explorer and adventurer, and I remember the whole mission as an adventure with some awesome experiences and beautiful sights.
Quantum mechanics is a whole new way of thinking– it says that the world is all by itself as a wave function of the universe, but you can never observe that. You can never observe a wave function directly. There is a complex relationship between what the world is and what you see when you look at it, and that relationship involves the idea that you can never predict precisely what you will see, but you can simply say the probability of what you will see.
We must fundamentally change how we see children - not as objects of charity, but as individuals with rights, with potential, with the power to transform our world.
I think what's hard for us to appreciate today is that, for thousands of years of human history—let alone pre-history—there was never this sense, so common to us now, of a future likely to be radically different from the present. But that's a very recent development in human thought that really only dates back, as I argue in the book, to the 18th century.
I particularly like the six-month shift for operational decisions. But for life choices, look at Jeff Bezos. When deciding to start Amazon, he projected himself into the far future. He asked: 'When I'm 80, what will I regret more — starting the company and failing, or never starting it at all?'