From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Comedy delivers the cerebral and the hyperbole, it can be funny and serious. Comedy is built on the idea of building pressure…. Building tension and then breaking it… a great punchline cuts after a ton of pressure you build up on a premise, and you know what? That's just how life works.
Financial markets depend on trust, and we had precious little trust as it was. The LIBOR scandal has done nothing to restore that trust. We have to do a lot more work on our regulations, procedures and regulators to re-establish that level of trust.
The number one thing I've discovered is that people deny that they have any of these traits. We always want to say it's that other person who is a narcissist, the other person is aggressive, they have envy, but no…. not us. We deny we have these qualities and make out as if we are the exception.
It's taken for me to get into my 30s to realise I am more than the media told me I was- I have more to say, so do my friends. We are intelligent, we are strong, we are multi-faceted, we are vulgar and we are funny.
In the case of Brazil, one of the most important things is the huge ethnic and cultural mixture which makes us a country with dynamism, vibrancy, and the ability to understand the psychology of other nations. We have problems, of course, but this is one of our huge strengths, and a huge foreign policy asset.
Despite being a perpetrator, Holmes began with a noble objective: to create a technology that would benefit society. We're well aware that her venture veered off course, but her initial intention was rooted in altruism. Perhaps the adage 'fake it 'til you make it' took on a life of its own in her case.
High performance is- truly- a checklist. It's waking up, understanding how many things you can do that day to the best of your ability, getting those things done, allowing yourself time to exercise, eat, rest, engage in active recovery, get some social support, have some mindfulness and gratitude time.
We found that those who enjoyed the best health, and not just the greatest happiness, were the individuals who had nurtured stronger relationships with others. From this, we deduced that those who put considerable effort into maintaining their relationships navigated life's challenges with greater ease.
A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. The human brain is a great example. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain. You have to hook them together just right, of course, but the result is completely fundamentally different than what you started with.
I have anxiety and depression, I don't 'suffer with them' as the description would normally go. I have them in the way I have arms, legs, eyes and a mouth, they are a part of me.
I look at life as a game rather than as success and failure. For most people, failure is a dirty word... they avoid anything to do with failure, they won't go anywhere near it. It stops them trying – stops them committing – stops them experimenting.
Everyone has a little bit of warrior in them. We all grow up and have a little piece of us which wants to be a superhero, who goes and fights the bad guys. In real life, fighting is tough, you have to overcome your fears – nobody really wants to get into a fight! Escaping that fear is the reason so many people who get into combat sports.