Disruption And Innovation Quotes

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Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.
Clayton M. Christensen (Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns)
Disruptive technologies typically enable new markets to emerge.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care)
Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
Alignment is an evolutionary process, which involves continuous questioning and searching.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
Maybe the most important rule for creating miracles is breaking the rules!
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
When you make the decision to start something new, first figure out the jobs you want to do. Then position yourself to play where no one else is playing.
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
The more you practice thinking on your feet and the more you prepare for future scenarios, the better you get at improvising when they arise.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
People will deem certain new ideas impossible, until they become part of everyday life.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
As the pace of change accelerates, industry life cycles, company life cycles, and product life cycles are compressed.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
To achieve alignment by stakeholders across time horizons, long-term thinking needs to prevail in a world of endemic short-termism.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
If we are to remain relevant, we must create innovative social and economic ecosystems that become stronger under stress and through shocks.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
Harnessing the value of speculation and creativity, science fiction helps both individuals and organizations become and remain relevant in the face of our rapidly changing world.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
It is the outside actors who challenge assumptions and ask new questions that beat incumbents in imagining and innovating on what might come next.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
The cow is facing its own existential crisis, as industrial cattle farming is being disrupted by alt proteins and plant-based milks that offer alternatives.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
Understanding the nature of change is critical for overcoming resistance.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
Failovation is the sort of failure that generates innovation, potentially prompting a standing ovation.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume III - Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World)
Creativity will become even more important as the world requires new solutions to new problems.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume III - Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World)
We define Greenaissance as an era of renewal with momentous innovation and investment opportunities aligned across fields with the common objective of sustainable energy transition.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption)
The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
Telephone did not come into existence from the persistent improvement of the postcard.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Whether personal or organizational, building capacity to effectively deal with change creates resilience, and without exceptional resilience there is no antifragility.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume III - Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World)
Certainty is fleeting, but through experimentation, systems innovation and trial-and-error, instructive patterns emerge as guidance.
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
To drive innovation, it’s a good idea to have bad ideas, and many of them.
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
To achieve real innovation, one needs to imagine novel ideas, question assumptions, and offer diverse perspectives. Aligning values while challenging conventional wisdom creates new solutions.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty)
Rhetorical question: Did you get to where you are by accepting the status quo? I didn't.
Richie Norton
Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.
Jay Samit
Disruptors don't have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
the best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators)
Scenarios are dynamic living narratives, and require updating as the world itself evolves.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
Domino effects give way to butterfly effects given nonlinearity. “Outsized” conflates with “unpredictable” as a small cause yields disproportionate effects.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
Many of these technologies are proven, even beyond controlled environments, so their success will be driven by the value proposition, adoption, and ability to scale in the real world.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
If we are to remain relevant, we need to build antifragile foundations to prepare for disruption and benefit from any disorder. We must create innovative, fluid, and adventurous mindsets as well as social and economic networked ecosystems that strengthen from stress, random events, and shocks.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
If we are to remain relevant and not delegate our strategic decision-making to machines, we must create innovative social and economic ecosystems that become stronger under stress and through shocks.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption)
Inflection points are moments when major shifts from one stage to another take place. They can be seen in social movements, technological innovations, and business transitions. Regardless of context, one cannot merely continue the same behavior after an inflection point.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care)
At the heart of all sales and marketing is the ability to create demand even in the absence of logic.
Jay Samit
Disruptive innovation is entrepreneurs changing their industry with unique creativity.
Onyi Anyado
To create truly novel breakthrough innovations, you must discard your hard-held beliefs.
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
The permission to wander around, imagine, ask questions and challenge assumptions makes the magic happen.
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
Disruption is no longer a single or recurring event, but a steady state expanding its impact.
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
Failure is a necessary ingredient to invention.
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
The true impact of innovation isn’t in its disruptiveness; rather, it lies in its ability to ignite hope, unlock new possibilities and catalyse positive transformations across systems.
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
We call the effect from the combination of Amara’s Law and exponential growth the “Inflection Paradox.” One issue which exacerbates the Inflection Paradox is that innovations are often explored in isolation. In reality, breakthroughs occur across fields. This is why change is often slow… until it isn’t.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
My concern, however, is that decision makers are too often caught in traditional, linear (and nondisruptive) thinking or too absorbed by immediate concerns to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation shaping our future.
Klaus Schwab (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)
The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.
Jay Samit
All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
Creativity is the new currency, so, are you credited with new thoughts or overdrawn in old thinking?
Onyi Anyado
When commercializing disruptive technologies, they found or developed new markets that valued the attributes of the disruptive products, rather than search for a technological breakthrough so that the disruptive product could compete as a sustaining technology in mainstream markets.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
Ultimately, incentive structures and systems drive ESG investing, which can be disingenuous. Structurally, public market investors continue to focus on the incentives which maximize their financial returns, even while taking certain ESG inputs into account in their portfolio allocations. Only by regulating and incentivizing the actual outcomes might investors alter their investment strategies towards new rewards based on ESG outputs.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
When you disrupt yourself, you are looking for growth, so if you want to muscle up a curve, you have to push and pull against objects and barriers that would constrain and constrict you. That is how you get stronger.
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
Most [organizations] think the key to growth is developing new technologies and products. But often this is not so. To unlock the next wave of growth, companies must embed these innovations in a disruptive new business model.
Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
Brands that stand out from the competition are purposefully disruptive or different
Bernard Kelvin Clive
Don’t follow your passions; follow your effort. It will lead you to your passions and to success.
Brant Cooper (The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets)
Insight and drive are all the skills you need. Everything else can be hired.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
You'll never know how close you are to victory if you give up.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
No one who ever led a nation got there by following the path of another.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
Your energy is a valuable resource, distribute it wisely.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
Starting each day with a positive mindset is the most important step of your journey to discovering opportunity.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living in the past and present can follow.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure
Jay Samit
Speed to fail should be every entrepreneur's motto. When you finally find the one idea that can't be killed, go with it.
Jay Samit
The most important tool you have on a resume is language.
Jay Samit
To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
recent IBM poll of fifteen hundred CEOs identified creativity as the number-one “leadership competency” of the future.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators)
Companies preach creativity, hire for conformity and call consultants when they fail who tell them to be more creative.
Richie Norton
At SpaceX, we specialize in converting things from impossible to late.
Elon Musk
The future is closer than you think. You can pay attention now or watch the transformation happen right in front of your eyes
Nicky Verd (Disrupt Yourself Or Be Disrupted)
Disrupting yourself is critical to avoiding stagnation, being overtaken by low-end entrants (i.e., younger, smarter, faster workers), and fast-tracking your personal and career growth.
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
The establishment’s reply is that dissenting students are bent, not on positive innovation, but on negative disruption. Against this, however, it can be argued that these two processes are very closely related and that the former only degenerates into the latter when it finds itself blocked.
Desmond Morris (The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal)
With few exceptions, the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms’ managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
Breakdowns create breakthroughs. Breakthroughs create more breakthroughs. More breakthroughs create friction because idiots be jealous or don’t get it or protect their little corner and act out of spite. So you breakdown for another breakthrough. If you’re about to break, go for broke. If you’re not breaking, you’re not really living.
Richie Norton
In a noisy and disruptive era, no one owes you their attention
Bernard Kelvin Clive
What you were taught 10-20 years ago is fast becoming obsolete. Upskill yourself and recreate your world
Nicky Verd
people prefer known risks to ambiguity.
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
A free and open Internet is a despot's worst enemy.
Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
The more closed your network, the more you hear the same ideas over and again, reaffirming what you already believe, while the more open your network, the more exposed you are to new ideas.
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
It turns out that for most people who have chronic diseases with deferred consequences, "improve my financial health" is a much more pervasively experienced job than "maintain my physical health.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care)
Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits—typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers.3
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Creating and Sustainability Successful Growth))
Every organization would benefit from having Holistic Wealth Project Groups comprised of groups of employees in each region who are energized and motivated to help each other achieve Holistic Wealth both at work and in their personal lives, and therefore drive organizational purpose, resilience, innovation, wellness, and success.
Keisha Blair (Holistic Wealth (Expanded and Updated): 36 Life Lessons to Help You Recover from Disruption, Find Your Life Purpose, and Achieve Financial Freedom)
Dissociation is the ultimate form of human response to chronic developmental stress, because patients with dissociative disorders report the highest frequency of childhood abuse and/or neglect among all psychiatric disorders. The cardinal feature of dissociation is a disruption in one or more mental functions. Dissociative amnesia, depersonalization, derealization, identity confusion, and identity alterations are core phenomena of dissociative psychopathology which constitute a single dimension characterized by a spectrum of severity. Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience 2014 Dec; 12(3): 171-179 The Many Faces of Dissociation: Opportunities for Innovative Research in Psychiatry
Verdat Sar
Every original and innovator doesn’t have to have psychedelic hair. There’s a cliché version of who’s an original. It’s always somebody making a lot of noise, and being disruptive of some status quo. His originality spoke for itself.
Maxwell King (The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers)
The key point here is that large companies typically fail at disruptive innovation because the top management team is dominated by individuals who have been selected for delivery skills, not discovery skills. As a result, most executives at large organizations don’t know how to think different. It isn’t something that they learn within their company, and it certainly isn’t something they are taught in business school. Business schools teach people how to be deliverers, not discoverers.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators)
as architect of choosing... choose. to. live. awakened. entirely. wholly. wildly powerful,  deeply masterful,  authentically creative, thriving.  this is not a hoped-for possible self. [reminder: this is an immutable Law of your being] needing not to learn the skill of being whole,  the antidote is to unlearn the habit of living incompletely here’s the practice: ‘know thyself‘—its about spirit  righteousness is underrated elevate connection with the changeless essence seek similitude with the will of Source and will of self 'choose thyself'—its about substance sacred. sagacious. spacious. in thought, word and deed— intend to: honor virtue. innovate enthusiastically. master integrity. 'become who you are'—its about style  a human, being an entrepreneur of life experiences a human, being a purveyor of preferences being-well with the known experience of soul, in service your relationship with insecurities, contradictions, & failures? obstacles or...invitations to grow? [mindset forms manifestation] emotions are messengers are gifts data for discernment: dare to deconstruct them your fears a belief renovation: fear.less. & aspire towards ascendance, anyway support your shine lean into the Light be.come. incandescent as architect of choosing, I choose...  to disrupt the energy of the status quo, to eclipse the realms of ordinary, & to live--a life-well lived. w/ spirit, substance & style.
LaShaun Middlebrooks Collier
Some spoke critically of neoliberalism, the sense that the idea of the free market has somehow crowded out all others. This was true enough, but the very use of the word was usually a kowtow before an unchangeable hegemony. Other critics spoke of the need for disruption, borrowing a term from the analysis of technological innovations. When applied to politics, it again carries the implication that nothing can really change, that the chaos that excites us will eventually be absorbed by a self-regulating system. The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess. —
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
If good management practice drives the failure of successful firms faced with disruptive technological change, then the usual answers to companies, problems—planning better, working harder, becoming more customer- driven, and taking a longer-term perspective—all exacerbate the problem.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail)
There is no such thing as creativity in the abstract. Likewise, there is no such thing as innovation in the abstract. To describe yourself as an entrepreneur or a disrupter is as meaningless as describing yourself as an athlete or a thinker. Really? What sports do you play? What do you think about? What
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (Creative Lessons in History))
I believe our civilization stands on the cusp of a technological revolution with the power to reshape life as we know it. To ignore the millennia of human struggle that serves as our society’s foundation, however—to merely “disrupt,” with the blitheness that has accompanied so much of this century’s innovation—would be an intolerable mistake. This revolution must build on that foundation, faithfully. It must respect the collective dignity of a global community. And
Fei-Fei Li (The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI)
Instead of the education system banning ChatGPT from schools, the focus should be geared towards educating students on how to properly use AI tools. Schools should be at the forefront of innovation and technological progress NOT a place for preserving obsolete learning methods and clinging onto archaic practices that are no longer relevant for the world we live in.
Nicky Verd (Disrupt Yourself Or Be Disrupted)
Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. There
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
Many people believe that problem solving is the source of innovation. However, problem solving is by definition focused on addressing what exists and attempting to make it better. True innovation comes from reaching for the potential in something: its possible manifestations that don’t yet exist. Bringing entirely new things into existence is what makes innovation so disruptive, and this is precisely what gets shut down when thinking is defined or circumscribed by problems.
Carol Sanford (The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes)
Innovation was a curious thing. It never failed to amaze him. And yet this place confirmed what they’d long known: that truly disruptive innovation rarely came from the expected sources. They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it—and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions. No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed.
Daniel Suarez (Influx)
Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization—laws—that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists seek to liberate us from the constraints of our current realities through those transitions. Science defines those constraints, drawing the outer limits of the boundaries of possibility. Our greatest technological innovations thus carry names that claim our prowess over the world: the engine (from ingenium, or “ingenuity”) or the computer (from computare, or “reckoning together”). Our deepest scientific laws, in contrast, are often named after the limits of human knowledge: uncertainty, relativity, incompleteness, impossibility. Of all the sciences, biology is the most lawless; there are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal. Living beings must, of course, obey the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, but life often exists on the margins and interstices of these laws, bending them to their near-breaking limit. The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe,” James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
So the question arose now, as it had in the wake of the Mongol holocaust: if the triumphant expansion of the Muslim project proved the truth of the revelation, what did the impotence of Muslims in the face of these new foreigners signify about the faith? With this question looming over the Muslim world, movements to revive Islam could not be extricated from the need to resurrect Muslim power. Reformers could not merely offer proposals for achieving more authentic religions experiences. They had to expound on how the authenticity they proposed would get history back on course, how their proposals would restore the dignity and splendor of the Umma, how they would get Muslims moving again toward the proper endpoint of history: perfecting the community of justice and compassion that flourished in Medina in the original golden moment and enlarging it until it included all the world. Many reformers emerged and many movements bubbled up, but all of them can sorted into three general sorts of responses to the troubling question. One response was to say that what needed changing was not Islam, but Muslims. Innovation, alterations, and accretions had corrupted the faith, so that no one was practicing the true Islam anymore. What Muslims needed to do was to shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine, original form. Another response was to say that the West was right. Muslims had gotten mired in obsolete religious ideas; they had ceded control of Islam to ignorant clerics who were out of touch with changing times; they needed to modernize their faith along Western lines by clearing out superstition, renouncing magical thinking, and rethinking Islam as an ethical system compatible with science and secular activities. A third response was to declare Islam the true religion but concede that Muslims had certain things to learn from the West. In this view, Muslims needed to rediscover and strengthen the essence of their own faith, history and traditions, but absorb Western learning in the fields of science and technology. According to this river of reform, Muslims needed to modernize but could do so in a distinctively Muslim way: science was compatible with the Muslim faith and modernization did not have to mean Westernization.
Tamim Ansary (Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes)