Irish professional boxer; Olympic champion 2012
Recorded · RTÉ · 2025
There are days when I wake up and don't want to move, but you must show up!
Stuck
For a bad week. What people do when they cannot think straight, what they carried out of the worst thing that happened to them, and what turned out later to have been the beginning of something.
25 people · 152 answers
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997-2009; Nobel Peace Prize 2005
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2006
First of all, you learn to manage stress. You learn to live with stress. I mean, stress is there all the time. There’s no question about it. It’s in the morning. It’s at night.
United States artistic gymnast
Recorded · Rev · 2021
Yes. Today has been really stressful. We had a workout this morning. It went okay. And then just that five and a half hour wait or something. I was just shaking, could barely nap.
Composer, record producer and visual artist
Recorded · Telekom Electronic Beats · 2011
My favorite method is stopping everything for a moment. It’s amazing how difficult I find it these days to simply sit quietly.
President of Czechoslovakia 1989–1992; President of the Czech Republic 1993–2003; playwright and dissident
Recorded · Václav Havel Library Foundation (havelcenter.org) · 1986
The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.
Novelist, poet and critic
Recorded · The Guardian · 2010
Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person.
How has a setback or failure set you up for later success?
Founder and long-serving chairman of FedEx Corporation
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1998
I was a student at Yale and wrote a paper about the computerized society that was on the horizon. ... Then I sort of let that lie. I didn’t get a particularly good grade on it, as I recall.
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
Recorded · Berkshire Hathaway Inc. · 1990
My first mistake, of course, was in buying control of Berkshire. Though I knew its business - textile manufacturing - to be unpromising, I was enticed to buy because the price looked cheap.
Atmospheric chemist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1995
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2007
At first the research did not seem to be particularly interesting – I carried out a systematic search for processes that might destroy the CFCs in the lower atmosphere, but nothing appeared…
26th President of the United States, 1901–1909; Governor of New York 1899–1900; Assistant Secretary of the Navy 1897–1898
Recorded · The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara · 1910
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
Founder of Teach For America; chief executive of Teach For All
Recorded · American Academy of Achievement · 2013
I applied to one firm in every sector. This was the most half-hearted job search.
American writer
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2005
Yeah. It’s a grandiose reaction. You are claiming you could really control this, but you failed.
What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it?
Education campaigner; co-founder of the Malala Fund; United Nations Messenger of Peace
Recorded · The Nobel Foundation · 2014
I had two options. One was to remain silent and wait to be killed. And the second was to speak up and then be killed. I chose the second one. I decided to speak up.
Poet and essayist
Recorded · Text Publishing · 2017
Downstairs, the boys gaze at a screen on the old futon in the playroom. We will figure out what to do about them soon enough.
Neurobiologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1986
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 1986
The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where…
Historian of American Christianity; professor at Duke Divinity School
Recorded · The New York Times · 2018
To so many people, I am no longer just myself.
Novelist and essayist
Recorded · London Review of Books · 2014
I try but I can’t think of a single aspect of having cancer, start to finish, that isn’t an act in a pantomime in which my participation is guaranteed however I believe I choose to play…
Playwright, poet and novelist; Nobel laureate in Literature, 1986
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2009
Writing became a therapy. First of all, it meant I was reconstructing my own existence. It was also an act of defiance. I wasn’t supposed to write. ...
In the last five years, what new belief, behaviour, or habit has most improved your life?
British professional tennis player, 2005–2024
Recorded · BBC News · 2017
I've never set out to be a spokesperson for women's equality.
President of Toyota Motor Corporation, 2009–2023; chairman from 2023
Recorded · Babson College (Babson Thought & Action) · 2019
Even I can't predict what kind of car we will be driving 20 years from now, but my time at Babson taught me to embrace change rather than run from it, and I urge all of you to do the same.
United States international footballer, 2001–2015
Recorded · Speakola · 2018
You see, soccer didn't make me who I was. I brought who I was to soccer, and I get to bring who I am wherever I go. And guess what? So do you.
Novelist and screenwriter; Nobel laureate in Literature, 2017
Recorded · The Nobel Foundation (nobelprize.org) · 2017
The reason why so many vivid, undeniably convincing characters in novels, films and plays so often failed to touch me was because these characters didn’t connect to any of the other…
Co-founder of Coursera and of Google Brain; founder of DeepLearning.AI
Recorded · DeepLearning.AI · 2020
I just finished reading BJ Fogg's new book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything.
Co-founder and chief executive of Nubank
Recorded · Sequoia Capital · 2018
Moving closer to work. I live in São Paulo, Brazil, and I used to spend an hour or more in traffic every day, just sitting in the car getting frustrated and anxious.
Everyone here · A–Z
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Charlie Munger, Chris Hoy, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, David Vélez, Derek Sivers, Edmund Hillary, George H. W. Bush, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, John Lewis, Malala Yousafzai, Mario Molina, Mellody Hobson, Mohamed ElBaradei, Neil Gaiman, Oliver Sacks, Richard Feynman, Shinya Yamanaka, Simone Biles, Steve Jobs, Tony Judt, Warren Buffett, Winston Churchill