Quotes From "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Of Innovation" By Steven Johnson

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 and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago. Steven Johnson

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. Steven Johnson

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. Steven Johnson

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. Steven Johnson

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore. Steven Johnson

…it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these institutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and activists, and entrepreneurs alike. Steven Johnson

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank. Steven Johnson

Chance favors the connected mind. Steven Johnson

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings. Steven Johnson

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 Steven Johnson

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years. Steven Johnson

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

When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives. Steven Johnson

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water. Steven Johnson

Build a tangled bank. Steven Johnson