From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Excellence is not about perfection, it's about consistency and the relentless pursuit of something better. Every dish is an opportunity to elevate the craft.
I genuinely believe that if music comes from your heart and soul, that people will hear that and will be able to connect with the truth of it. For a musician, that's really important- you have to be true to yourself and to the feelings you have when you make music.
Opportunities generally arise from landscape change. But entrepreneurial ideas can come from anywhere. They can come from recognizing where the pain points, the bottlenecks, and the inefficiencies are. They can come from late-night conversations with friends, or from random eureka moments.
Especially at the beginning, it takes just the right amount of delusion to dedicate yourself to something ambitious. The reality is you're more likely to fail than succeed and so you need strong belief to commit your heart and soul to an idea.
Diamonds are a miracle of nature, they are millions of years old, they survived a hazardous journey to the earth's surface and the discovery of them is an exciting moment. To see the rough diamond and then watch it come to life on the polisher's wheel with incredible fire and scintillation is incredibly inspiring.
I dreamt of Farfetch for the love of fashion. I was absolutely determined to create something in the intersection of both fashion and tech – my two passions.
We have these myths about genius. We think those people have extra powers that we don't... that they were born differently... that they went to the right schools. I wanted to demystify this process. If you don't understand the process, you will never, ever, get there.
You cannot just say to people, 'oh be creative' and then there will be a waste of time. You have to be very clear in what you are looking for and listen to people.
Being creative is about being a collective. It's not something unique. Cirque is not a one man, or a one woman show. It's a collective. That's why we can nurture each other's creativity.
We always have this mix in each area, but people tend to categorise creativity by discipline rather than by the individuals within those disciplines.
Writer's block was only invented 100 years ago; the term didn't exist before that. Writer's block is simply a fear of bad writing, not an inability to write. Nobody gets talkers' block! Everyone can talk! Instead of calling it writer's block, we should say, 'I haven't done enough writing yet, so I feel blocked.'
Whenever I write a new song with somebody, it feels like the first time. I sometimes feel embarrassed, humiliated, like I don't know what I'm doing until we find a spark. You have to dare to go to this place where, even though you've done it before, it feels like you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.