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
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I like the scientific spirit–the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine–it always keeps the way beyond open–always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to... - Walt Whitman

  2. On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death.. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams... - John Muir

  3. A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death. - John F. Kennedy

  4. The lampshade on my head is for my bright ideas. I won't be able to convey them until Monday, when my curtain gets out of the dry cleaners. - Bauvard

  5. Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much. - Criss Jami

More Quotes By Steven Johnson
  1. 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...

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can...

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