Steven Johnson Quotes

Quotes about:

• If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

  Steven Johnson

  Ideas, Creating, People

  "Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From". www.wired.com. September 27, 2010.

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• Chance favors the connected mind.

  Steven Johnson

  Motivation, Inspiration, Mind

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.110, Penguin

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• Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.

  Steven Johnson

  Force, Being Wrong

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.87, Penguin

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• The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

  Steven Johnson

  Shadow, Maps, Hovering

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.25, Penguin

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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.

  Steven Johnson

  Thinking, Engineering, Ideas

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.32, Penguin

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• 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

  Smart, Crowds, Individual

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.42, Penguin

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• 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

  Art, Mistake, Writing

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.156, Penguin

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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.

  Steven Johnson

  Smart, Ideas, Perspective

  "'Eureka moments' and other myths about tech innovation" by John D. Sutter, www.cnn.com. October 15, 2010.

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

  Steven Johnson

  Innovation, Permission, Thrive

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.131, Penguin

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• We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

  Steven Johnson

  Ideas, Connecting

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.20, Penguin

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• In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn't have a command hierarchy. It doesn't have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.

  Steven Johnson

  Hands, Decision, Boss

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• Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.

  Steven Johnson

  Ideas, People, Viewpoints

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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.

  Steven Johnson

  Innovation, Batteries, Radio

  "Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From". www.wired.com. September 27, 2010.

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• This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

  Steven Johnson

  Practice, Water, Intellectual

  Steven Johnson (2006). “The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World”, p.146, Penguin

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• Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them.

  Steven Johnson

  Children, Memories, Childhood

  Steven Johnson (2006). “Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter”, p.1, Penguin

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• Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago.

  Steven Johnson

  Past, Average, Years

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• Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there's an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.

  Steven Johnson

  Memories, Writing, Simple

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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.

  Steven Johnson

  Meaningful, Mind, Important

  Steven Johnson (2008). “The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America”, p.132, Penguin

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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

  Steven Johnson

  Ideas, Borders, May

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.20, Penguin

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• We need to play each others instruments.

  Steven Johnson

  Play, Needs, Instruments

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• What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.

  Steven Johnson

  Inspiration, Ideas, People

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• The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design.

  Steven Johnson

  Art, Technology, Design

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• One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg’s printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn’t really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways.

  Steven Johnson

  Book, Love Is, Europe

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• Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.

  Steven Johnson

  Thinking, People, One Day

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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.

  Steven Johnson

  Eye, Ivory Tower, Innovation

  "Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From". Interview with Kevin Kelly, www.wired.com. September 27, 2010.

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