From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
So many things in life divide us – the colour of our skin, the language we speak, the god we worship, but when we run, we're the same. When we run, we're united, it's a commonality across our species like nothing else. You feel deeply connected with other people when running together.
The only way you can experience the cosmic is by enhancing your perception. If your doors of perception are enhanced, everything becomes cosmic.
The more we recognize that we are the ocean and the waves represent different aspects of our being, the less any individual wave of difficulty will consume, overwhelm, or define us. We can remember that while these waves are a part of us, they do not encompass our entire existence.
Power requires oppression. In order to be powerful, you have to stand upon something. Strength comes from within. Strength is replacing power. People are sick of power, especially the young.
We are made up not of atoms, but of stories.
We compensate for our failure to exercise actual control over events by creating a generalized, subjective sense of control by undertaking acts the effect of which on the environment is illusory.
I think intelligence is best understood as an entity that has the ability to improve a metric through repeated exposure over time. By that definition, machine learning algorithms are learning systems — they get better with more data and more exposures. A dog is a learning system. A cat is a learning system — you teach it a trick, reward it a few times, and it just does it from there on. And humans, of course, are the ultimate example of a learning system.
The fact that you and I are alive is against stupendous odds. One day we will die, and that's sad, but there are people who will never die because they were never born. We're the lucky ones, we get to die. You can only die if you were alive.
Chosen suffering is part and parcel of a meaningful life. If you don't have any chosen suffering in your life, you're probably not living the best life you could. To put it primitively, we're the mammal that likes Tabasco sauce! We're the only creature that seeks out suffering and pain willingly.
Even if I had all the money in the world, no problem worth fixing can be solved in my lifetime. The best I can do is to be part of the process, and to help the world figure it out.
I didn't know that having face to face contact with people and being curious would be my medication…. And would save me. I didn't know curiosity was going to become a superpower in my life.
Businesses, or rather their leadership, is often saddled with a set of problems and daily issues that prevents them from taking an objective view of their realities…forget the trees, often there is too much leaf watching to notice they are in a forest.