Psychology

If you're not careful, possessions can end up owning you. Eventually, the car became part of my identity; it represented who I was, which isn't healthy. I want everyone to become wealthy and experience this firsthand because once they do, they'll realize material possessions aren't fulfilling.

Risk is actually an asset. Fear isn't meant to be dismissed; it's intended to be embraced. Fear sharpens your focus, enhances your performance, and boosts your resilience. This is something many haven't realised—fear is a superpower meant to be embraced, not avoided.

Having a purpose is the ultimate hack for making the entrepreneurial process enjoyable. It lets you move beyond endless discussions about work-life balance and the overused narrative that entrepreneurship is 'so hard.' The truth is, you've only made it difficult because it lacks personal meaning.

If you want a caricature, life satisfaction is your self‑smugness rating—how smug you feel about your life. Western smugness has definitely slid over the past ten years.

I often have odd conversations where people say, 'Should we take happiness seriously?' And I pause and ask, 'How do you feel about misery and suffering—are those not bad? Do they not matter at all?' Then they admit, 'Oh yeah'. I then ask 'so, don't you think it's good if people enjoy their lives?' And they say, 'I suppose so.' So, everyone agrees happiness matters to some extent – but we often forget this and need to bring it to the surface.

There's no way electrical signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That's the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

One of the psychological effects of that is it can blur the boundaries between self and group and create this feeling that you are the group, and the group is you. And this obviously has the capacity to promote quite strong forms of pro-group action.

Cognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms

Social synchrony is a big feature of human behaviour—it's a weird thing if you think about it, but we do things like marching in time and parading and singing in choirs in ways that are highly coordinated and synchronised.

Cognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms

I'm particularly interested in the human propensity to copy behaviours that lack any kind of knowable causal structure. This is how we learn arbitrary conventions—and I think it originates in a distinctively human way of building group identities.

Cognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms

We engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we're anxious about being excluded or left out.

Cognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms

Let me be clear: 90% of what people like I do is about failure. I embrace failure every single day. It's not bad. In the pursuit of excellence, clearly every day is going to involve failure.

Founder of Pret A Manger, British fast-food entrepreneur and businessman

Unless you learn and grow continuously, you're probably going to end up as one of the 90% who don't make it.

When these people are under stress, they make bad decisions. They get reactive. One of the key findings in our conclusions is that the unsuccessful founders were more reactive. They weren't measured. They weren't deliberate. They didn't make decisions based on facts — their emotions carried them away.

Rich, sometimes you treat a wisp of intuition as though it were a four-lane highway. It's not that you shouldn't trust intuition — it's that you need to validate it.

I mean, people ask me, 'Should I do a startup?' And I say, 'Well, how important is work-life balance to you?' And if they say anything other than 'It's not important,' I say, 'You shouldn't do it.' Because it's a killing field.

That confidence and perseverance can sometimes lead you to keep charging ahead headfirst, when what's really needed is a pause and a course adjustment. I think that's the challenge when strengths get overused.