Quote

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.

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
Important
Turning
Great
Meaningful
Gunpowder
Needs
Complete
Rubble
Every
Kinds
Exploded
Kind
Minds
Laying
Mind
Revolution
Paradigm
Something
Others
Grain
Become
Consistent

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We need to play each others instruments.
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Chance favors the connected mind.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
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That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.
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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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When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
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Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.
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Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
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