bigthinkeditor
Journalist Claire Shipman discusses the role authenticity plays in the manifestation and expression of confidence. Shipman is co-author of the 2014 book The Confidence Code.
Biologist Edward O. Wilson speaks to the impact of synthetic biology and other advances that will reframe how human beings perceive life.
“Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn, and laughter…”
“People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.”
“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.”
The United States has a long history of using force to defend the property and interests of its citizens. MIT Research Fellow Michael Schrage asks why responses to cyberattacks deviate from that precedent.
“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
The author of The Internet is Not the Answer decries the free business model that has brought so much success to companies like Google and Facebook.
One of the field’s most acclaimed psychiatrists explains the dangers of neglecting the severity of intense traumatic experiences.
“An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.”
“I don’t say I was ‘proceeding down a thoroughfare.’ I say I ‘walked down the road.’ I don’t say I ‘passed a hallowed institute of learning.’ I say I ‘passed a school.’ You don’t wear all your jewellery at once. You’re much more believable if you talk in your own voice.”
“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”
Kip Tindell, featured today on the Big Think homepage, is CEO of the Container Store. He’s also an evangelist for integrity-based sales and brand-building through sales rather than marketing.
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
Life coach and author Tony Robbins had entered the world of personal finance with his latest book.
“Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that. That’s why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.”
The noted Mexican painter wrote in her diary of the solidarity she feels with others like her who feel like “the strangest person in the world.”
“There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is not bad that they should alternate.”
An expectant mother’s enhanced exposure to Vitamin D via summer rays likely explains new research that indicates children born in October and November have a step up athletically.
“I also strongly believe that science is no longer a vocation where an individual sits in a darkened lab with his instruments, tinkering away at some big question. Science is collaborative, and will become more so.”
Andrew McAfee of the MIT Sloan School of Management discusses the concept of creative destruction, which explains the phenomenon of automation simultaneously wiping out existing industries while creating new ones in their place.
The “Kindness Diaries” author recounts an inspirational story of generosity that changed his life.
We have developed a world economy that is increasingly dependent on our information and communication technologies, says former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen. That’s why the crux of our future welfare depends on the development of advanced cybersecurity.
“A second thing that an individual must do in seeking to love his enemy is to discover the element of good in his enemy, and everytime you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points.”
“Every book, remember, is dead until a reader activates it by reading. Every time that you read you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.”
“We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”
Author and entrepreneur Andrew Keen recently visited Big Think to discuss his new book “The Internet is Not the Answer,” which explores the negative effects of Silicon Valley innovations on society.
“I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”
In today’s featured discussion on pheromones, biologist Edward O. Wilson explains that there are massive amounts of natural stimuli that humans are not physically privy to.