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I think Leonardo da Vinci teaches us the value of both being focused on things that fascinate us but also, at times, being distracted and deciding to pursue some shiny new idea that you happen to stumble upon. Balancing intense focus with being interested in a whole lot of different things is something that we have to do in the Internet age.

Walter Isaacson

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Walter Isaacson
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: May 20
Biographer
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Idea
Value
Deciding
Also
Focus
Distracted
Whole
Happen
Teaches
Fascinate
Different
Teach
Pursue
Vinci
Something
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Leonardo
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Internet
Stumble

More quotes by Walter Isaacson

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Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.
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And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.
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for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.
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I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.
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...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.
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I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. Steve Jobs
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I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.
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The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.
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Leonardo da Vinci was lucky to be born the same year that Johannes Gutenberg opened his printing shop. As a young person, he could get information about whatever struck his curiosity. The Internet is to our age what Gutenberg's press was to his, so he would have loved being alive today.
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Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.
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I've asked Jobs why he didn't get an operation then and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened... I didn't want to be violated in that way.'
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I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.
Walter Isaacson
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Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.
Walter Isaacson
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Without Steve Jobs, you would have well-designed computers, probably open and not integrated, but they wouldn't have sex appeal, they wouldn't have romance.
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I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.
Walter Isaacson
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It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ...[Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of] promoting enemy propaganda...we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people.
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One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters
Walter Isaacson
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I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.
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I think that Benjamin Franklin felt very strongly in foreign policy in this world, that you needed to at least show some humility, especially when you were strong.
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Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.
Walter Isaacson