To the extent that we ignore this, forget about it, become complacent, or believe that it is so infinite that it can take care of itself, we are in trouble.

I realized very early that non-egality would work better in the parts of the world I wanted to inhabit. What do I mean by non-egality? I mean John Wooden, when he was the number one basketball coach in the world. He just said to the bottom five players, “You don't get to play. You're sparring partners.” The top seven did all the playing.

But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

It is simplistic in the following sense that you cannot institute democracy from above. It’s a very difficult process. And democracy is not the only dimension of institutions that matters. Although my work does emphasise that democracy by itself matters as well. But the problem is really alive today in the industrialised world, where you would think, and many political scientists have claimed that democracy is safe and secure and would never be under threat. It is under threat. Support for democracy is at an all time low, not just in the US, although really jarringly in the US but not just in the US, throughout the western world. So democracy is not easy to make work because democracy is about democratic citizenship. It’s about consensus, it’s about communication. It’s about accepting defeat, making compromises, talking and understanding the other side. All of those things are always difficult. They become more difficult during times of turbulence, which, you know, we are living through and they become harder when the infrastructure, for example, the communication infrastructure, makes this sort of democratic citizenship harder, which I think is not the only factor. But social media has certainly played that role.

From these remarks it will be evident that, allowing only ordinary ability and opportunity, we may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put, and which, in both temporal and spiritual affairs, is the true miracle worker. Every one may avail himself of this marvellous power, if he will. There is no royal road to perfection.