86Thousand400:Tools of Titans 6

Sebastian Junger (Award winning journalist and No.1 New York Times best selling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A death in Belmont, War, and Tribe)

The upside of disaster

- "What's very fortunate, beautiful, wonderful, and also in a weird way, tragic about modern society, is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like the Blitz in London or an earthquake people had to rely on each other, so everyone - upper-class people, lower class people, peasants and nobility - sort of crouched around the same campfires. One of the survivors said, 'The earthquake gave us what the law promises but does not, in fact, deliver, which is equality of all men."

His message at a High School Commencement

- "You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you're ever going to do in your life is fail at something, and if you don't start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You'll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That's not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school: You have to be prepared to fail. That's how you're going to expand yourself and grow. As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you're capable of being."

What would your 70 year old self advise your current self?

- "The world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities, and the tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you've found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things - the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying - and getting the ratio right is very hard. I think my 70 year old self would say: 'Be careful that you don't err on one side or the other, because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are."

Kevin Kelly ('Senior Maverick' at Wired Magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. Also co-founded All Species Foundation, a non-profit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth)

- "Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences"

Sit, Sit. Walk, Walk. Don't wobble

- 'The Zen mantra is 'Sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don't wobble.'...It's the idea that when I'm with a person, that's total priority. Anything else is multitasking. No, no, no, no. The people-to-people, person to person trumps anything else. I have given my dedication to this. If I go to a play or a movie, I am at the movie. I am not anywhere else. It's 100% - I am going to listen. If I go to a conference, I am going to the conference,"

The Death Countdown Clock

- Countdown clock - estimated my age of death and I worked back the number of days. I tell you, nothing concentrates your time like knowing how many days you have left. I have 6000 something days. It's not very many days to do all the things I want to do.

- Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth catalog) organised his remaining days around 5 year increments. He says any idea that's significant, that's worth doing, for him, will last about 5 years, from the time he thinks of it, to the time he stops thinking about it. And if you think of it in terms of 5 year projects, you can count those off on a couple hands, even if you're young."

- Tim: Death countdown clock. Memento mori - remember that you're going to die. It's a great way to remember to live

Can you flip the deferred-life plan and make it work?

- "Many, many people are working very hard, trying to save their money to retire so they can travel. Well, I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young, when I had zero money. And I had experiences that, basically, even a billion dollars coudn't have bought."

Create a new slot

- 'The great temptation that people have is they want to be someone else, they want to be in someone else's movie. They want to be the best rock star, and there are so many of those already that you can wind up imitating somebody in that slot. To me, success is you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn't exist before. That's, of course, what Jesus and many others were doing. That's really hard to do, but I think that's what I chalk up as success."