We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes - understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success.

We take better care of our smartphone than ourselves. We know when the battery is depleted and recharge it

What preoccupies us is the way we define success. If you see your life purely in terms of money and power, then everything in your life becomes about 'Am I getting ahead?' and that is truly a barbaric way to live, because it eliminates huge chunks of our humanity.

Failure is an integral part of life and that perfection is not of this world.

It's no longer an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species.

I started asking the big questions that I had asked in college, that my compatriots the Greek philosophers had asked, like 'what is a good life?' Socrates famously said that 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' I started asking these questions from the starting point of 'what is success?'

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.