Floundering around, learning by doing but also by failing, is not only good but inevitable.

Until you have looked in depth at the system and found out where women in Egypt are not being cut through female genital mutilation, or where kids in Vietnam are not malnourished, or where hospitals in America are getting rid of the superbugs anyway - unless you have that level of curiosity about what's going on without you, you will always come in with your great new recipe and just ignore what's going on, and that will make you much less effective at what you're trying to achieve.

To be effective at selling ideas, at being a lobbyist, influencing other people, you have to be very sure of yourself.

People think there's a single solution to complex problems, and the solution is often making an enemy of a group of people - pulling back and rejecting the other.

When you get talking to people in positions of power, you find that often their worldview is framed either in terms of their disciplinary studies at university and/or the country where they first got interest in development.

There's a tendency for people who believe passionately in something to be so convinced of their rightness that if they just repeat themselves a lot at the person, that will convince them. And that hasn't worked on things like immigration or trade deals.

We should look at how "the enemy" - people that you wouldn't necessarily agree with - have done change and see whether there's bits in there that we could learn from.