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c77432c
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Chance favors the connected mind.
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innovation
insightful
internet
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Steven Johnson |
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456e8e6
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The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
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opportunity
life-long-learning
living-life
open-mindedness
innovation
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Steven Johnson |
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18a9771
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Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material--much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft--and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they've stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among..
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reading
inspiration
innocencevation
self-improvement
ideas
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Steven Johnson |
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5f6d7f3
|
The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
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engineering
ideas
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Steven Johnson |
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65891a5
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This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network.
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people
innovation
insightful
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Steven Johnson |
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cc55b28
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Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
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good-ideas
innovation
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Steven Johnson |
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950f396
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This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see..
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Steven Johnson |
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6582957
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Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
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innovation
insightful
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Steven Johnson |
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636b8ba
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Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete
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innovation
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Steven Johnson |
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a205d25
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Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities--a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity--but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.
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hobbies
innovation
self-improvement
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Steven Johnson |
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10f650b
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When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
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permission
innovation
peace
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Steven Johnson |
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ad701cd
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Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.
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Steven Johnson |
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5ef829a
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When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not..
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Steven Johnson |
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f5d4393
|
the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.
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Steven Johnson |
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5f9877e
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How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.
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Steven Johnson |
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e0cd279
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Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.
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Steven Johnson |
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55b1559
|
when one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments.
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Steven Johnson |
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c7d62c2
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So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
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Steven Johnson |
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dce27c5
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A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer's knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.
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technology
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Steven Johnson |
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89b2dd2
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Johannes Gutenberg's printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. ..
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Steven Johnson |
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84684f5
|
The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?"
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perspective
legacy
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Steven Johnson |
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021cf8b
|
Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.
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Steven Johnson |
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8ce8053
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Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking - and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.
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critical-thinking
randomness
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Steven Johnson |
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09eac68
|
The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.
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Steven Johnson |
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19cfb23
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Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years.
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innovation
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Steven Johnson |
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344a713
|
Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don't even have to think about reading once we've learned how to do it.
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Steven Johnson |
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4f0f992
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That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior.
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Steven Johnson |
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b3c5cc1
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Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory,
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Steven Johnson |
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9e8f27d
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An absence of information is not the same as information about an absence." We're blind to our blindness."
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Steven Johnson |
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2a349ff
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But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity.
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Steven Johnson |
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c409903
|
cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties," she wrote. They get their order from below; they are learning machines, pattern recognizers--even when the patterns they respond to are unhealthy ones."
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Steven Johnson |
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e996164
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A city is a kind of pattern-amplifying machine: its neighborhoods are a way of measuring and expressing the repeated behavior of larger collectivities--capturing information about group behavior, and sharing that information with the group.
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Steven Johnson |
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b6e461f
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The first is to embrace--as a matter of philosophy and public policy--the insights of science, in particular the fields that descend from the great Darwinian revolution that began only a matter of years after Snow's death: genetics, evolutionary theory, environmental science. Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow's day depended on t..
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Steven Johnson |
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dfdd3a1
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Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
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Steven Johnson |
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0bfa5af
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Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.
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innovation
ideas
internet
|
Steven Johnson |
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6c65179
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The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.
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invention
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Steven Johnson |
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5d87e46
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Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It's also a threat to national security.
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Steven Johnson |
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4d83255
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His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.
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Steven Johnson |
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3c7fbcc
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But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren't storming the gates.
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Steven Johnson |
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6877551
|
The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own disciplin..
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Steven Johnson |
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e63d534
|
The time travelers are usually adapt at "intercrossing" different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole array of them littering your study or your garage."
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Steven Johnson |
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a25096b
|
Every time you glance down at your smartphone to check your location, you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.
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Steven Johnson |
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8c66355
|
There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incandescent electric lamps.
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Steven Johnson |
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4524768
|
today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute numbers, we have gone backward as a species.
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Steven Johnson |