Times 100 Most Influential People Review

I just finished reading Time magazine’s article about “The world’s 100 most influential people.” Here are a few of the highlights.

Suzy Welch said about Suze Orman, “Here is a woman who sleeps four hours a night because she thinks the world is too exciting to turn off.” As I was reading that at 12:30 a.m., I wondered if that was why I hate going to sleep, but then thought that that couldn’t be true because I would love getting up early in the morning and actualizing all of my plans.

T. Boone Pickens said “A fool with a plan can outsmart a genius with no plan.”- I thought that was genius and decided to plan out my life with more precision and determination. Although, ironically, a few pages later E-commerce CEO Jack Ma said referring to the early days of his business, “There were three reasons we survived; we had no money, we had no technology, and we had no plan.”

Nandan Nilekani who is one of India’s corporate icons and a public policy shaping enthusiast said, “My objective in life is to be an object of change.” Makes me want to do something better with my life.

Most interesting to me was this statement that alludes to how plants split water into hydrogen and oxygen and how the plants machine falls apart and then rebuilds itself from scratch. He said “Allowing what’s worn out to die and then building something stronger shows up everywhere in nature. It’s a great model too for how we can replace a burned-out energy strategy with a clean new one.” I wonder if that is what happens to us on a different level.

We all like to be around happier people, but Nicholas Christakis has proved what we all knew already and I like how it is stated by Dan Ariely. “Happiness, like the flu, can spread from person to person. When people who are close to us, both in terms of social ties (friends or relatives) and proximity, become happier, we do too. For example, when a person who lives within a mile of a good friend becomes happier, the probability that this person’s good friend will also become happier increases 15%. More surprising is that the effect can transcend direct links and reach a third degree of separation; when a friend of a friend becomes happier, we become happier, even when we don’t know that third person directly.”