From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We have this macho-willpower-crap, as if somehow willpower is the answer to everything in life and if someone needs help, it means they don't have the willpower. It's a nonsense.
Whether it's doodling with a pencil, or painting, the practice of art – in any shape or form – is hugely liberating and gets us into the sense, and state, of flow. Art helps us navigate our place in the world, and offers us a place of stillness – much needed in today's digital world.
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.
My mind just never stopped thinking about what we could be doing next.
Great entrepreneurs are people with tremendous passion. Without passion you cannot go on a journey that requires such huge personal sacrifices, looks bleak, risky and impossible in the beginning…
Empowerment means we are able to sustain hope in a situation that may – to many outsiders – look hopeless.
Changing the mood has an economic impact superior to many measures because companies and families, when they have more confidence, they act differently.
The idea that you will sit down with someone who's had 30 or 40 years of lived experience in a particular situation, and has been conditioned to analyze the world that way, and then somehow get them to change their mind in one sitting is implausible.
On the night of my 30th birthday, I was at a bar in San Francisco... I walked out of that bar at midnight, drunk. I didn't even own running gear, I had some comfortable silk boxer shorts on – took off my pants – and took off down an alleyway stumbling south without knowing that a town called Half Moon Bay was nearly 30 miles away. When the alcohol wore off, I had this epiphany. I looked up and saw heaven – I saw the stars – it was the first moment of clarity I had since I'd given up running. It made me realise that perhaps I was on this earth to be a runner – I wasn't happy being a business guy, it was making me miserable. I was comfortable, but miserable.
When discussing consciousness with my three sons, I describe it as an emergent phenomenon. Imagine 80,000 people in a stadium, each one representing a neuron. The collective roar you hear when you approach the stadium might be likened to consciousness.
When most people are asked questions, they try to jump into the other person's mind and second-guess what they're supposed to be saying. They want to sound interesting… they want to sound smart, like a mogul who's on the cover of Forbes. I just want to tell it like it is…
When you think you're at 100% of your physical or mental capacity, you're not. We have enormous reserves within us (which we don't tap into for good reason), but we are all capable of pushing ourselves a lot further than we think.