Quote

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.

Steven Johnson

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Steven Johnson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: June 6
Author
Journalist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Steven Berlin Johnson
Thoughts
Engineering
Bigs
Isolation
Around
Trick
Ideas
Tricks
Trying
Glorious
Good
Table
Think
Tables
Thinking
Parts

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Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.
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That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.
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Chance favors the connected mind.
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Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
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As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.
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Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.
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I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.
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When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
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We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
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If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
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We need to play each others instruments.
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If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.
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We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.
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I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life.
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Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.
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Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'
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It may not be possible to 'win the future,' in President Obama's words, but if we're going to encourage more innovation, it's not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other's instruments.
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The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.
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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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What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It's not that the network is smart.
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