If you view the world the same at 50 as you did at 20, then you wasted those 30 years – Muhammed Ali
If you view the world the same at 50 as you did at 20, then you wasted those 30 years – Muhammed Ali
Bill Gates on Expertise: 10,000 Hours and a Lifetime of Fanaticism
Bill Gates responds to Malcolm Gladwell‘s theory that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill. Apart from acknowledging luck, timing and an open mind, Gates suggests that a successful person survives many cycles of attrition to make it to 10,000 hours of experience. “You do have to be lucky enough, but also fanatical enough to keep going,” explains Gates.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates leads a conversation with his father Bill Gates Senior, titled “A Conversation with My Father,” in which the pair talk about parenting, philanthropy, commerce and citizenship.
Bill Gates Sr. was an attorney who co-founded his own firm and was on the board of Planned Parenthood. Since retiring from law in 1998, he has served as the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and as director for Costco Wholesale. He’s also the author of Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime as well as Wealth and Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.
Bill Gates III is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. In July 2008, Gates transitioned out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates continues to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.
Susan Blackmore: Memes and “temes”
Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology — and invents ways to keep itself alive
Susan Blackmore studies memes — those self-replicating “life forms” that spread themselves via human consciousness. We’re now headed, she believes, toward a new form of meme, spread by the technology we’ve created.
Why you should listen to her:
Susan Blackmore is dedicated to understanding the scientific nature of consciousness. Her latest work centers on the existence of memes — little bits of knowledge, lore, habit that seem to spread themselves using human brains as mere carriers. She’s exploring the existence of a new class of meme, spread by human technology. It’s temporarily named the “teme.”
She has written about memes, consciousness, and near-death experiences; has appeared on the British Big Brother to discuss the psychology of the participants; and writes for the Guardian UK.
“She took Richard Dawkins’ intuition about memes (ideas that, like genes, take a life of their own) and turned it into a fully fledged theory.” Bruno Giussani, TED Blog
Steven Pinker: Human nature and the blank slate
Steven Pinker‘s book The Blank Slate argues that all humans are born with some innate traits. Here, Pinker talks about his thesis, and why some people found it incredibly upsetting.
Linguist Steven Pinker questions the very nature of our thoughts — the way we use words, how we learn, and how we relate to others. In his best-selling books, he has brought sophisticated language analysis to bear on topics of wide general interest.
Why you should listen to him:
Steven Pinker’s books have been like bombs tossed into the eternal nature-versus-nurture debate. Pinker asserts that not only are human minds predisposed to certain kinds of learning, such as language, but that from birth our minds — the patterns in which our brain cells fire — predispose us each to think and behave differently.
His deep studies of language have led him to insights into the way that humans form thoughts and engage our world. He argues that humans have evolved to share a faculty for language, the same way a spider evolved to spin a web. We aren’t born with “blank slates” to be shaped entirely by our parents and environment, he argues in books including The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
Time magazine named Pinker one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. His book The Stuff of Thought was previewed at TEDGlobal 2005. His latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, looks at our notion of violence.
“‘Better Angels’ is a monumental achievement. His book should make it much harder for pessimists to cling to their gloomy vision of the future. Whether war is an ancient adaptation or a pernicious cultural infection, we are learning how to overcome it. “ Slate.com
Louise Leakey digs for humanity’s origins
Louise Leakey asks, “Who are we?” The question takes her to the Rift Valley in Eastern Africa, where she digs for the evolutionary origins of humankind — and suggests a stunning new vision of our competing ancestors.
Louise Leakey hunts for hominid fossils in East Africa, in the family tradition.
Why you should listen to her:
Louise Leakey is the third generation of her family to dig for humanity’s past in East Africa. In 2001, Leakey and her mother, Meave, found a previously unknown hominid, the 3.5-million-year-old Kenyanthropus platyops, at Lake Turkana — the same region where her father, Richard, discovered the “Turkana Boy” fossil, and near Tanzania‘s Olduvai Gorge, where her grandparents, Louise and Mary Leakey, discovered the bones of Homo habilis.
In August 2007 Louise and Meave, both National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, dug up new H. habilis bones that may rewrite humanity’s evolutionary timeline. We imagine that we evolved from apes in an orderly progression from ape to hominid to human, but the Leakeys’ find suggests that different species of pre-humans actually lived side by side at the same time for almost half a million years.
“[The] upper jaw bone of Homo habilis dates from 1.44 million years ago. This late survivor shows that Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived side by side in eastern Africa for nearly half a million years.” Koobi Fora Research Project
