What is Big Think?

We are Big Idea Hunters…

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

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Transcript

Question: What inspires you?

Transcript:Other people. I have been helped throughout my life. I have gone through some hurdles, that is true. But I have also encountered human beings who have been so kind to me, who have given me the gift of knowledge, who have shared their homes with me, who shared their lives and a lot of friendship with me. That has inspired me to give something back in my own way. By having the privilege of going to school and to university, I learned about such things as changing the mindset of millions and billions of people, that’s not something that comes in a day. It’s a long process. It’s just incremental contributions from individuals within that system. And that has inspired me to know that I can do that. And there are the dangers and the perils; but then people, for instance, living in the Arab-Islamic world today are Christians who lived when the church was all-powerful in Italy and France, and that these people were working and risking their lives. And the peril for them was much greater than mine with my bodyguards and so on . . . have also inspired me to go on and to know that I have to be careful. I have to live and lead my life properly; but I can also give . . . make that little contribution that I am making now.