I'm always amazed at the human capacity to not make fundamental changes, but instead merely adapt. I see these pictures of people in Beijing and New Delhi, walking around with masks on, because you can't walk outside your house and breathe? If you can't breathe?…If that's not the cue to make a fundamental change, I don't know what is!

We are the product of our past. We start each day where we left off the day before. Changing the way we dress, where we work and live, or even changing a name does not alter our basic constitution. Transformation of the self requires a radical alteration in the way that we perceive the world and derive meaning.

Whenever we find ourselves stuck, whenever we find ourselves lost or confused by the chaos of the world, we can be sure that the only way to free ourselves is to take action of some kind. Action is the only thing that ever changes anything and in a world that ever changes, it is the best way to keep ourselves in the flow of the world unfolding.

“Virtual or remote offices change the ways in which people communicate and work with each other, transfer information, establish authority and rules, and perform and measure performance. Although emerging collaboration, networking and remote access technologies provide the necessary infrastructure to support the implementation of virtual workplace, changes in organizational culture and behaviors will be the key to drive success.”

“The majority of the guys are happy he's back. … I don't know of anyone that's not happy about it. Some people say that change for the sake of change — new blood or a new voice — is a good thing. I disagree. You have a guy that's taken you to a Super Bowl, and now it's just a matter getting us back.”

Consider, for a moment, how profound is an education: every human-made object in the world is the result of one. Every car, computer, particle accelerator, thatched hut, hairstyle, soufflé, piano concerto. These are the products not only of the skilled hands and nimble minds of their creators, but the result of whole traditions and systems of education. Change education, and you change the world.

4 Don’t Die™ Principles:• Change your awareness and your perspective changes.• You teach what you need to learn.• You can make excuses or you can achieve your goals, but you cannot do both.• Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

But there were other, vaguer, harder-to-pin-down feelings, like: a pit in the stomach that means something is either really good or really bad or both. A feeling of being old and young at once. A sense of beginnings and endings happening at the same time. A certainty that your life is changing, but an uncertainty about how it's changing and whether you want it to.

I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.

I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.