Quote

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.

Dean Kamen

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Dean Kamen
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: April 5
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Dean L. Kamen
People
Write
Along
Paths
Ends
Dead
Historian
Summaries
Come
Mistake
Appear
Nonlinear
Take
Path
Straight
Summary
Writing
Lines
Kinds
Historians
Kind
Possible
Mistakes
Longest
Make
Simple
Line
Numerous
Like
Process
Walking
Messy

More quotes by Dean Kamen

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The word entrepreneur is associated with success and adventure. From my life, the only thing I can tell you that's consistently associated with entrepreneurship is failure, and the only thing consistently associated with invention is frustration. There is a long road between the idea and the reality.
Dean Kamen
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An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.
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I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care
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[Chuck's wife] was standing behind me at the time and she said, 'Chuck hasn't fed himself in 19 years. So, you've got a choice: We keep the arm, or you keep Chuck.'
Dean Kamen
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Life is so short. Why waste a single day of it doing something that doesn't matter, that doesn't try to do something big?
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A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention
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Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private.
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You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.
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I think in our lifetime, that level of acceptance of well, we couldn't do any better, won't be tolerated. We're going to start to see individual therapies customized for individual patients, and it's going to change the way people get healthcare.
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Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.
Dean Kamen
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I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.
Dean Kamen
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Nothing that has value, real value, has no cost. Not freedom, not food, not shelter, not healthcare.
Dean Kamen
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We live in a world where virtually everybody expects there's going to be some reasonable therapy for virtually any situation.
Dean Kamen
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I'm a human entropy producer.
Dean Kamen
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As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought
Dean Kamen
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I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.
Dean Kamen
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I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate
Dean Kamen
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My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.
Dean Kamen
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It’s not what you do – it’s what you are becoming.
Dean Kamen
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Innovation needs to be nurtured throughout an organization. Management is doing things right, whereas leadership is doing the right things.
Dean Kamen