You cannot make anything worthwhile in this world unless you have first developed and transformed yourself.

There's a real tension between it being a collaborative art process, which is almost like performance art of yourself, and, as we talk about the movie, it's kind of a mix between melodrama and cinéma vérité. This involves ideas about playing the role of yourself and the movie of your life and all these other things.

Understand: people will constantly attack you in life. One of their main weapons will be to instill in you doubts about yourself – your worth, your abilities, your potential. They will often disguise this as their objective opinion, but invariably it has a political purpose – they want to keep you down.

You're not going to be persistent and tenacious enough if you don't love what you're doing. If it's not something that excites you, that appeals to you deep down inside.

There's spatial intelligence. they're, which end up being, people going into math or music. there's mechanical where you work well with your hands. There's an intelligence with language that would lead someone into writing. So it's not necessarily that you're six years old and you know you're going to be a lawyer Or you're going into tech startups or computers. It's something more elemental than that. It's that this is a skill, a way of thinking that comes naturally to me that I was drawn to and it was very clear in childhood.

A lot of things in history are timing, and it's very peculiar because in retrospect things [and] people can look more brilliant or necessary than they actually were.

The key to power, then, is the ability to judge who is best able to further your interests in all situations. Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.