Peter Diamandis Quotes

Yet for these high, hard goals to really work their magic, Locke and Latham found that certain moderators — the word psychologists use to describe "if-then" conditions — need to be in place. One of the most important is commitment. "You have to believe in what you're doing," continues Latham. "Big goals work best when there's an alignment between an individual's values and the desired outcome of the goal. When everything lines up, we're totally committed — meaning we're paying even more attention, are even more resilient, and are way more productive as a result." This is another key point. When Kelly Johnson created the original skunk works, the goal wasn't to build a new plane in record time — that was just one of many things that happened on the way to the main big goal: saving the world from Nazi peril. This is the kind of big goal everyone can get behind. It's why the engineers agreed to work horrific hours in a foul-smelling circus tent. And most importantly, because this alignment between core values and desired outcomes jacked up performance and productivity, it became one of the fundamental reasons that plane was delivered in record time. The Secrets of Skunk: Part Two At the Lockheed skunk works, Kelly Johnson ran a tight ship. He loved efficiency. He had a motto — "be quick, be quiet, and be on time" — and a

In one of his later volumes, Earth, book XXXV, Pliny tells the story of a goldsmith who brought an unusual dinner plate to the court of Emperor Tiberius.

The plate was a stunner, made from a new metal, very light, shiny, almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith claimed he’d extracted it from plain clay, using a secret technique, the formula known only to himself and the gods. Tiberius, though, was a little concerned. The emperor was one of Rome’s great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune of gold and silver along the way. He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer than gold. “Therefore,” recounts Pliny, “instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.”

This shiny new metal was aluminum, and that beheading marked its loss to the world for nearly two millennia. It next reappeared during the early 1800s but was still rare enough to be considered the most valuable metal in the world. Napoléon III himself threw a banquet for the king of Siam where the honored guests were given aluminum utensils, while the others had to make do with gold.

To adapt to the reality of scale, meanwhile, Musk employs a number of other strategies. We'll start with first principles, which is a lesson he borrowed from physics. "Physics training is a good framework for reasoning," explains Musk. "It forces you to boil things down to their most fundamental truths and then connect those truths in a way that lets you understand reality. This gives you a way to attack the counterintuitive, a way of figuring out things that aren't obvious. When you're trying to create a new product or service, I think it's critical to use this framework for reasoning. It takes a lot of mental energy, but it's still the right way to do it."

Your microbiome looks perfect," Google tells you. "Also, blood glucose levels are good, vitamin levels fine, but an increased core temperature and IgE levels…" "Google — in plain English?" "You've got a virus." "A what?" "I ran through your last forty-eight hours of meetings. It seems like you picked it up Monday, at Jonah's birthday party. I'd like to run additional diagnostics, would you mind using the…" Well, take your pick. Alphabet's healthcare division, called Verily Life Sciences, is developing a full range of internal and external sensors that monitor everything from blood sugar to blood chemistry. And that's just Alphabet. The list of once multimillion-dollar medical machines now being dematerialized, demonetized, democratized, and delocalized — that is, made into portable and even wearable sensors — could fill a textbook.

Biotechnology isn't just accelerating at the speed of Moore's law, it's accelerating at five times the speed of Moore's law — doubling in power and halving in price every four months!

Growth of World Population and the History of Technology This graph shows how the rate of technological innovation has dramatically increased at the same time that the human population has increased. (Note: Selected technological milestones are subjective.) Source: Robert Fogel, University of Chicago.

Uber’s goal,” explained Holden from the stage, “is to demonstrate flying car capability in 2020 and have aerial ridesharing fully operational in Dallas and LA by 2023.” But then Holden went even further: “Ultimately, we want to make it economically irrational to own and use a car.

When Buzz [Aldrin] first walked on the Moon," he says, "I'll bet he was thinking that in forty years we'll be walking on Mars. But we're not, and we're not close. Space travel is still primitive. Our rate of spaceflight is pathetically low: less than one flight every two months. Rather than go on to Mars, we have retreated to low Earth orbit.

give more than you take” — which was a fancy way of saying “Share your trade secrets” — but

The exponential tech pattern: First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they regulate you. Then you're infrastructure. AI is hitting the "infrastructure" phase. Buckle up.

For ALL of human history, work has been around survival, a unit of labor in a scarcity machine. 

However, once we achieve universal basic services (where everyone is granted food, housing, healthcare, and more), human existence will rise to a level that kings couldn't afford 100 years ago.

In the late 1960s, University of Toronto psychologist Gary Latham and University of Maryland psychologist Edwin Locke discovered that goal setting is one of the easiest ways to increase motivation and enhance performance.

Eight months later, on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Musk tweeted again: "Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins." In the spring of 2018, with $113 million of Musk's own money, the Boring Company began boring.

The point is this: Being able to see around the corner of tomorrow and being agile enough to adapt to what’s coming have never been more important. And, in three parts, that’s exactly what this book will do.

Quite simply, good news doesn't catch our attention. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.