The reason, I believe, is even if you fail in doing something ambitious, you usually succeed in doing something important.

My father, who grew up picking olives on the Greek island of Lesbos, was a doctor. So my family expected me to become a physician.

All told, according to the United Nations, poverty was reduced more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred.

To reach flow,” explains psychiatrist Ned Hallowell,22 “one must be willing to take risks.

I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.

If you believe that the developing world deserves the same standards of living that we do in the developed world, then to achieve that, they need resources. They need the metals and the minerals to build the industries and the buildings and so forth, and the energy.

As a result, a worldwide grand total of twenty-six websites in early 1993 mushroomed into more than 10,000 sites by August 1995, then exploded into several million by the end of 1998.6.

Every generation feels it has the problems that will destroy it. That’s because we can perceive them a long time before we have the ability to fix them.

We live in a world bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species in the year, in the form of solar energy.

Bill Joy famously pointed out: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.