Most people – maybe more than you think – are peace- and love-seeking creatures who are sometimes caught in bad situations. The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.

“That means seeing people with generous eyes, offering... See more

Travel in both its literal and symbolic avatars is the process of acquiring cognitive empathy. When you visit somewhere with different norms to those that you have known so far, the realization dawns that those norms are not “normal.” Every person’s experience of the world is particular, but this specificity only becomes obvious when another way of... See more

We often run into a lot of problems, when we start believing that our truth is THE TRUTH; when we start mistaking our beliefs for reality.

That moment—when “my truth” becomes the truth —is often when curiosity dies and conflict begins.

It’s subtle, too. We don’t usually notice it happening.

One day we’re exploring, the next we’re defending a fixed... See more

When we talk with others, we have no choice but to default to new age or religious language which carries a lot of cultural baggage. Words help us make sense of what we’re experiencing, but they also limit us.

What we need is twofold: to develop our own personal dialect for how we sense and communicate the nonordinary, and to cultivate the skill of... See more

Being intellectually humble involves embrac ing uncertainty and ambiguity, and 305 entertain ing the possibility that even one’s closely held beliefs might be incorrect