Exponential Thinking Quotes

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Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather it’s about providing all with a life of possibility.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series))
A person who is truly cool is a work of art. And remember, original works of art cost exponentially higher than imitations. Just take a look at the the coolest people in history. They will always be a part of history for being extremely original individuals, not imitations.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Anything we think we know today in relation to AI will change tomorrow.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption)
In our UN-VICE world (UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex & Exponential), the lines between the present and future are becoming blurred, more liminal.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption)
Do not expose yourself too much with the negative messages of the news media. Keep yourself informed but don't cultivate fear psychology.
Amit Ray (Power of Exponential Mindset for Success and Leadership)
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)
Human beings are designed to be local optimists and global pessimists.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series))
Simplicity was really important to me. I wanted people to expend their creativity thinking about new things to design, not about how to work the machines.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
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))
The number of gurus, yogis, swamis and psychics in a country increases exponentially with the fall of reason, and the fall of reason leads to the fall of civilization.
Abhijit Naskar
Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years.
Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
Trading is not the same as investing. Trading includes a lot of fear, lack, and scarcity thinking. Traders aim to buy low and sell high in the quickest turnaround time possible, always fearful of potential outcomes and always needing to incessantly monitor the status of things and micromanage results. However, Investing includes a lot of faith, vision, trust, and endurance. Investors look at larger societal patterns and systems. Investors have wealth consciousness and they expect to earn exponentially larger profits over a longer timeframe.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
[Author's Note:] It took me four years to research and write this novel, so I began long before talk about migrant caravans and building a wall entered the national zeitgeist. But even then I was frustrated by the tenor of the public discourse surrounding immigration in this country. The conversation always seemed to turn around policy issues, to the absolute exclusion of moral or humanitarian concerns. I was appalled at the way Latino migrants, even five years ago - and it has gotten exponentially worse since then - were characterized within that public discourse. At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings. People with the agency to make their own decisions, people who can contribute to their own bright futures, and to ours, as so many generations of oft-reviled immigrants have done before them.
Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
It’s incredible,” he says, “this moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series))
I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please. "The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere. "I'm working on it.
Andrew Sullivan
If you do not lead by example, you cannot expect your team to follow.
Sri Amit Ray (Power of Exponential Mindset for Success and Leadership)
If you want to conquer negative thoughts, balance your breath, balance your 114 chakras, and practice positive affirmations.
Sri Amit Ray (Power of Exponential Mindset for Success and Leadership)
Abundance is a global vision built on the backbone of exponential change, but our local and linear brains are blind to the possibility, the opportunities it may present, and the speed at which it will arrive. Instead we fall prey to what’s become known as the “hype cycle.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
As I discussed in the previous chapter, attachment researchers have shown that our earliest caregivers don't only feed us, dress us, and comfort us when we are upset; they shape the way our rapidly growing brain perceives reality. Our interactions with our caregivers convey what is safe and what is dangerous: whom we can count on and who will let us down; what we need to do to get our needs met. This information is embodied in the warp and woof of our brain circuitry and forms the template of how we think of ourselves and the world around us. These inner maps are remarkably stable across time. This doesn‘t mean, however, that our maps can‘t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe. In contrast, previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
We live in a world that is watching the church with one eyebrow raised. When Hollywood is viewed as doing more to feed the hungry and fight human trafficking than the church, we need to take a hard look at what we’re doing and ask if it’s enough. Jesus taught that when others see our good deeds they would assign value to God (Matthew 5:16). I can’t help but think that the same is true for his church.
Brandon Hatmaker (Barefoot Church: Serving the Least in a Consumer Culture (Exponential Series))
The way I think about it, if you want to invent, if you want to do any innovation, anything new, you’re going to have failures because you need to experiment. I think the amount of useful invention you do is directly proportional to the number of experiments you can run per week per month per year. So if you’re going to increase the number of experiments, you’re also going to increase the number of failures.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth and at least one balancing loop constraining the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.
Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems: A Primer)
The value of your network goes up exponentially when you view your contacts and resources not as a list but as a network of nodes on a graph. Think of the number of connections that can connect two different nodes on that graph. It’s exponential compared to the number of items in a list that connect directly to you. The way you create the network effect is by encouraging people in your network to connect to each other and to help each other.
James Altucher (Choose Yourself)
God has made provision for our sin in Christ. So when we struggle to believe and obey, we should run to Him, not from Him--the opposite of our pattern, in contradiction to our feelings? Why? Because He already knows! See the gospel just keeps changing everything. The cross should continually testify to us that God fully knew we would need to be justified. Therefore, unconfessed sin is actually the foolish decision to run away from our healing and growth rather than toward it. We hang on to things we believe will satisfy us, thinking we need those more than what God offers to provide. But how can we rejoice in and worship the majesty of a loving and forgiving God if in practice we don't believe He loves and forgives, if in practice we don't believe the gospel? How can our churches rejoice and worship corporately when our collective energy is expended carrying around the saddle of unconfessed sin and shame? When people walk in honesty about their fears, shortcomings, and needs--not in thoughtless disobedience but in grace-based freedom and forgiveness--they reveal a deep understanding of the gospel. To confess our sins to one another is to violently pursue our own joy and the glory of God...and to exponentially increase our rejoicing and worship, both individually and corporately.
Matt Chandler (Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church)
Growth is exponential, when your strategy is combinatorial.
Peter Hollins (Polymath: Master Multiple Disciplines, Learn New Skills, Think Flexibly, and Become Extraordinary Autodidact)
The ability to think and act independently is required of any kind of leader. Independence is a sign of maturity in leadership.
Dele Ola (Be a Change Agent: Leadership in a Time of Exponential Change)
Self-rejection paves the landing strip for the rejection of others to arrive and pull on up to the gates of our hearts. Think about why it hurts so much when other people say or do things that make you feel rejected. Isn’t it in part due to the fact they just voiced some vulnerability you’ve already berated yourself for? It hurts exponentially more when you’re kicked in an already bruised shin.
Lysa TerKeurst (Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out, and Lonely)
The first real threat it faced, today’s ridesharing model, only showed up in the last decade. But that ridesharing model won’t even get ten years to dominate. Already, it’s on the brink of autonomous car displacement, which is on the brink of flying car disruption, which is on the brink of Hyperloop and rockets-to-anywhere decimation. Plus, avatars. The most important part: All of this change will happen over the next ten years.
Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
Jerry Michalski notes that in the past, scarcity meant value. That is, without scarcity, you didn’t have a business. Now that notion has been upended. Dave Blakely of IDEO thinks about ExOs in the following way: “These new organizations are exponential because they took something scarce and made it abundant.” Nokia bought Navteq, trying to buy, own and control scarcity, only to be leapfrogged by Waze, which managed to harness abundance.
Salim Ismail (Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it))
Lessons in magic from a mysterious boy who belonged to a hidden Ferisher court called the Wild — I couldn't think of anything that would horrify my parents more. Therefore, the proposition became exponentially more enticing.
Ann Aguirre (Corsets & Clockwork: 13 Steampunk Romances)
Manifestation and magnetic desire are useful for raising your awareness of what you want and focusing your attention on it, guiding your actions to make it happen. Patience and harmony will help ensure you stick with your goals and that they align with your deepest self. Finally, becoming aware of abundance and universal connection encourages you to think about your goals in the context of other people and the wider world; to consider your place in it and provide you with a powerful sense of purpose that will guide The Source, making you more resilient, compassionate and integrated in your thinking. This shift leads to an exponential increase in the consciousness of your own power.
Tara Swart (The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain)
By the end of her first year at the Academy, Eris also realizes the Fun Fact of the Day, which is that the degree of a shithead you are, and the degree of anti-oppression you think you foster, create a positive exponential function.
Eris S. Nyx (Eristocracy: a Confederacy of Peepants)
In all of these areas, the human brain is asked to do and handle more than ever before. We are dealing with several fields of knowledge constantly intersecting with our own, and all of this chaos is exponentially increased by the information available through technology. What this means is that all of us must possess different forms of knowledge and an array of skills in different fields, and have minds that are capable of organizing large amounts of information. The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. And the process of learning skills, no matter how virtual, remains the same. In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them—those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn. The Apprenticeship Phase is more relevant and important than ever, and those who discount this notion will almost certainly be left behind. Finally, we live in a culture that generally values intellect and reasoning with words. We tend to think of working with the hands, of building something physical, as degraded skills for those who are less intelligent. This is an extremely counterproductive cultural value. The human brain evolved in intimate conjunction with the hand. Many of our earliest survival skills depended on elaborate hand-eye coordination. To this day, a large portion of our brain is devoted to this relationship. When we work with our hands and build something, we learn how to sequence our actions and how to organize our thoughts. In taking anything apart in order to fix it, we learn problem-solving skills that have wider applications. Even if it is only as a side activity, you should find a way to work with your hands, or to learn more about the inner workings of the machines and pieces of technology around you. Many Masters
Robert Greene (Mastery)
Synthetic biology56 is built around the idea that DNA is essentially software—nothing more than a four-letter code arranged in a specific order. Much like with computers, the code drives the machine. In biology, the order of the code governs the cell’s manufacturing processes, instructing it to make specific proteins and such. But, as with all software, DNA can be reprogrammed. Nature’s original code can be swapped out for new, human-written code. We can co-opt the machinery of life, telling it to produce—well, whatever we can think of.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
This difference is key. Thinking in probabilities—this business has a 60 percent chance of success—rather than deterministically—if I do A and B, then C will definitely happen—doesn’t just guard against oversimplification; it further protects against the brain’s inherent laziness.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
The thunder god stared for a while, broken only by bouts of acute blinking. Chester A. Arthur XVII scratched his shoulder. Catrina scratched the back of her neck. “Is he OK?” Timmy wondered. “He’s just thinking,” explained Catrina. “Oh god,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “Should we help him?” “Give him a second. I think he can do it.
Eirik Gumeny (High Voltage (Exponential Apocalypse #3))
...And maybe folks in Muskox Hollow thought their arrangement was strange, or their parties too rambunctious, or that a lady should have a family and children instead of two gentlemen and thirteen tiny dogs, but no...I don't think Peder Johansen was terribly scandalous.' 'Scandalous or not, my love for the legend of Sullen Johansen was now exponential.
Carly Heath (The Reckless Kind)
It is a human tendency to take our recent past and project it in a linear fashion into the future. We are hardwired to think linearly and to expect any accelerations in the rate of change to be consistent, for exponential rates of change are hard for humans to comprehend. The next twenty years, we figure, will more or less unfold as the last twenty years have. Not a chance.
Sean A. Culey (Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity)
We’re heading toward a future where AI will make the majority of our buying decisions, continually surprising us with products or services we didn’t even know we wanted. Or, if surprise isn’t your thing, just turn that feature off and opt for boring and staid. Either way, it’s a shift that threatens traditional advertisers, while offering considerable benefits to the consumer.
Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
From the very beginning of time until the year 2003,” says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “humankind created five exabytes of digital information. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes—or a 1 with eighteen zeroes after it. Right now, in the year 2010, the human race is generating five exabytes of information every two days. By the year 2013, the number will be five exabytes produced every ten minutes … It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series))
The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can’t see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases—like my ALS—without also glimpsing its dangers. Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage. We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our potential and create a better world for the whole human race. We need to take learning beyond a theoretical discussion of how AI should be and to make sure we plan for how it can be. We all have the potential to push the boundaries of what is accepted, or expected, and to think big. We stand on the threshold of a brave new world. It is an exciting, if precarious, place to be, and we are the pioneers. When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
You who came of age in the past decade have had eight years of a Black U.S. president, and that gloss looked good, and there were even a few inches gained on some issues such as health care, and maybe that can cause a person to relax a bit. But think of how exponentially drone attacks increased under Obama, how many Black people were shot by police under Obama, because the violence is systemic. How many of the people now hearteningly pledging to sign up for a Muslim registry signed up for a Black Lives Matter or protested the discriminatory immigration program NSEERS? The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System subjected my students from the Middle East to hours of interrogation and intimidation every time they reentered after going home to visit their families, arbitrarily barred tons of innocent people from entry, and was ineffective against terrorism anyway. It's systemic injustice we are after changing, and we should not ever be lulled.
Mohja Kahf (Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times)
The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century. This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs—such as affordable aerial ridesharing—will not be an occasional affair. They’ll be happening all the time. It
Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
You can choose to receive $5 million now or instead receive a penny a day doubled for a month. Most people would take the $5 million and run, avoiding the pennies altogether. Let’s first think it through. That’s a penny today. Then two pennies tomorrow. Four pennies the next day. Eight pennies the day after that, and so on. How rich are you at the end? If you do the math, on the thirty-first day you will be handed $10,737,418.24. And the sum of pennies from your previous thirty days brings your total to $21,474,836.47. That’s the power of an exponential.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization)
And this is one of the first things one learns from Musk’s example—he is relentless in his pursuit of the bold and, the bigger point, totally unfazed by scale. When he couldn’t get a job, he started a company. When Internet commerce stalled, he reinvented banking. When he couldn’t find decent launch services for his Martian greenhouse, he went into the rocket business. And as a kicker, because he never lost interest in the problem of energy, he started both an electric car and a solar energy company. It is also worth pointing out that Tesla is the first successful car company started in America in five decades and that SolarCity has become one of the nation’s largest residential solar providers.9 All told, in slightly less than a dozen years, Musk’s appetite for bold has created an empire worth about $30 billion.10 So what’s his secret? Musk has a few, but none are more important to him than passion and purpose. “I didn’t go into the rocket business, the car business, or the solar business thinking this is a great opportunity. I just thought, in order to make a difference, something needed to be done. I wanted to have an impact. I wanted to create something substantially better than what came before.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
Think of ownership design like organizing dinner for a group of friends. The task gets exponentially harder as the crowd grows. He’s vegan; she’s gluten free; they eat only sushi; this one’s on a juice cleanse; and the other is only free on Tuesdays. If everyone gets a dinner veto, no one dines together. The Senate works this way, with every senator able to filibuster the chamber into gridlock on most issues; similarly, the United Nations is often paralyzed, with the five permanent members of the Security Council—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—each able by design to veto the others’ agendas.
Michael A. Heller (Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives)
While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.” This perspective shift is key. It encourages risk taking and enhances creativity while simultaneously guarding against the inevitable decline. Teller explains: “Even if you think you’re going to go ten times bigger, reality will eat into your 10x. It always does. There will be things that will be more expensive, some that are slower; others that you didn’t think were competitive will become competitive. If you shoot for 10x, you might only be at 2x by the time you’re done. But 2x is still amazing. On the other hand, if you only shoot for 2x [i.e., 200 percent], you’re only going to get 5 percent and it’s going to cost you the perspective shift that comes from aiming bigger.” Most critically here, this 10x strategy doesn’t hold true just for large corporations. “A start-up is simply a skunk works without the big company around it,” says Teller. “The upside is there’s no Borg to get sucked back into; the downside is you have no money. But that’s not a reason not to go after moonshots. I think the opposite is true. If you publicly state your big goal, if you vocally commit yourself to making more progress than is actually possible using normal methods, there’s no way back. In one fell swoop you’ve severed all ties between yourself and all the expert assumptions.” Thus entrepreneurs, by striving for truly huge goals, are tapping into the same creativity accelerant that Google uses to achieve such goals. That said, by itself, a willingness to take bigger risks
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one’s own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance in (Hawthorne again) “the communications of a solitary mind with itself.” The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.
Philip Roth (The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3))
Peter’s Laws™ The Creed of the Persistent and Passionate Mind 1. If anything can go wrong, fix it! (To hell with Murphy!) 2. When given a choice—take both! 3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. 4. Start at the top, then work your way up. 5. Do it by the book . . . but be the author! 6. When forced to compromise, ask for more. 7. If you can’t win, change the rules. 8. If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. 9. Perfection is not optional. 10. When faced without a challenge—make one. 11. No simply means begin one level higher. 12. Don’t walk when you can run. 13. When in doubt: THINK! 14. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing. 15. The squeaky wheel gets replaced. 16. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. 17. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself! 18. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite. 19. You get what you incentivize. 20. If you think it is impossible, then it is for you. 21. An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how something can’t be done. 22. The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. 23. If it was easy, it would have been done already. 24. Without a target you’ll miss it every time. 25. Fail early, fail often, fail forward! 26. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. 27. The world’s most precious resource is the persistent and passionate human mind. 28. Bureaucracy is an obstacle to be conquered with persistence, confidence, and a bulldozer when necessary.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
Take the New York–based Lemonade, arguably the best funded of today’s crowdsurance startups. Via an app, Lemonade brings together small groups of policyholders who pay premiums into a central “claim pool.” Artificial intelligence does the rest. The entire experience is mobile, simple, and fast. Ninety seconds to get insured, three minutes to get a claim paid, and zero paperwork. Adding more technology to this arrangement, companies like the Swiss firm Etherisc sell “bespoke insurance products” on the Ethereum blockchain. Because smart contracts remove the need for employees, paperwork, and all the rest, all sorts of new insurance products are being created. Etherisc’s first offering is something not covered by traditional insurers: flight delays and cancellations. Individuals sign up via credit card, and if their plane is more than forty-five minutes late, they’re paid instantly, automatically, and without the need for any paperwork.
Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
Her problem was that she thought too much- “toxic thinking” and so forth- so she tried to stop, but a physical sensation of exertion remained. Was it her fault that her husband made more money? That it made more sense for her to quit her job than for him to quit his? Was it her fault that he was always gone, rendering her a de facto single mom for the majority of the week? Was it her fault that she found playing trains really, really boring? That she longed for even the smallest bit of mental stimulation, for a return to her piles of books, to her long-abandoned closet of half-formed projects, to one entire afternoon of solitude and silence? Was it her fault that, though she longed for mental stimulation, she still found herself unable to concoct a single, original thought or opinion? She did not actually care about anything anymore. Politics, art, philosophy, film: all boring. She craved gossip and reality TV. Was it her fault that she hated herself for her preference for reality TV? Was it her fault that she had bought into the popular societal myth that if a young woman merely secured a top-notch education she could then free herself from the historical constraints of motherhood, that if she simply had a career she could easily return to work after having a baby and sidestep the drudgery of previous generations, even though having a baby did not, in any way, represent a departure from work to which a woman might, theoretically, one day return. It actually, instead, marked an immersion in work, and unimaginable weight of work, a multiplication of work exponential in its scope, staggering, so staggering, both physically and psychically (especially psychically), that even the most mentally well person might be brought to her knees beneath such a load, a load that pitted ambition against biology, careerism against instinct, that bade the modern mother be less of an animal in order to be happy, because- come on, now- we’re evolved and civilized, and, really, what is your problem? Pull it together. This is embarrassing.
Rachel Yoder (Nightbitch)
The main circulating pumps began to cavitate and fill with steam, reducing the flow of valuable cooling water and allowing steam voids (pockets of steam where there should be water) to form in the core. A positive void coefficient was occurring: the absence of cooling water causing an exponential power increase. In simple terms, more steam = less water = more power = more heat = more steam. Because 4 of the 8 water pumps were running off the decelerating turbine, less and less water was supplied to the reactor as power increased. Throughout the building, ‘knocks’ were heard from the direction of the main reactor hall. Akimov’s control board indicated that the rods hadn’t moved far before freezing, only 2.5 meters from their raised position. Thinking quickly, he released the clutch on their servomotors to allow the heavy rods to fall into the core under their own weight, but they didn’t move: jammed. “I thought my eyes were coming out of my sockets. There was no way to explain it,” recalled Dyatlov, six years later. “It was clear that this was not a normal accident, but something much more terrible. It was a catastrophe.”118
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
Suppose you live in a place that has a constant chance of being struck by lightning at any time throughout the year. Suppose that the strikes are random: every day the chance of a strike is the same, and the rate works out to one strike a month. Your house is hit by lightning today, Monday. What is the most likely day for the next bolt to strike your house? The answer is “tomorrow,” Tuesday. That probability, to be sure, is not very high; let’s approximate it at 0.03 (about once a month). Now think about the chance that the next strike will be the day after tomorrow, Wednesday. For that to happen, two things have to take place. First lightning has to strike on Wednesday, a probability of 0.03. Second, lightning can’t have struck on Tuesday, or else Tuesday would have been the day of the next strike, not Wednesday. To calculate that probability, you have to multiply the chance that lightning will not strike on Tuesday (0.97, or 1 minus 0.03) by the chance that lightning will strike on Wednesday (0.03), which is 0.0291, a bit lower than Tuesday’s chances. What about Thursday? For that to be the day, lightning can’t have struck on Tuesday (0.97) or on Wednesday either (0.97 again) but it must strike on Thursday, so the chances are 0.97 × 0.97 × 0.03, which is 0.0282. What about Friday? It’s 0.97 × 0.97 × 0.97 × 0.03, or 0.274. With each day, the odds go down (0.0300 . . . 0.0291 . . . 0.0282 . . . 0.0274), because for a given day to be the next day that lightning strikes, all the previous days have to have been strike-free, and the more of these days there are, the lower the chances are that the streak will continue. To be exact, the probability goes down exponentially, accelerating at an accelerating rate. The chance that the next strike will be thirty days from today is 0.9729 × 0.03, barely more than 1 percent.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
In many cases we can do this and avoid the exponential blowup. Suppose you’re leading a platoon in single file through enemy territory in the dead of night, and you want to make sure that all your soldiers are still with you. You could stop and count them yourself, but that wastes too much time. A cleverer solution is to just ask the first soldier behind you: “How many soldiers are behind you?” Each soldier asks the next the same question, until the last one says “None.” The next-to-last soldier can now say “One,” and so on all the way back to the first soldier, with each soldier adding one to the number of soldiers behind him. Now you know how many soldiers are still with you, and you didn’t even have to stop. Siri uses the same idea to compute the probability that you just said, “Call the police” from the sounds it picked up from the microphone. Think of “Call the police” as a platoon of words marching across the page in single file. Police wants to know its probability, but for that it needs to know the probability of the; and the in turn needs to know the probability of call. So call computes its probability and passes it on to the, which does the same and passes the result to police. Now police knows its probability, duly influenced by every word in the sentence, but we never had to construct the full table of eight possibilities (the first word is call or isn’t, the second is the or isn’t, and the third is police or isn’t). In reality, Siri considers all words that could appear in each position, not just whether the first word is call or not and so on, but the algorithm is the same. Perhaps Siri thinks, based on the sounds, that the first word was either call or tell, the second was the or her, and the third was police or please. Individually, perhaps the most likely words are call, the, and please. But that forms the nonsensical sentence “Call the please,” so taking the other words into account, Siri concludes that the sentence is really “Call the police.” It makes the call, and with luck the police get to your house in time to catch the burglar.
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
This white broth... ... is soy milk!" "That's right! I mixed a dash of parmesan cheese and a little dollop of miso paste into the soy milk and then lightly simmered it. This is my pike dish... Pike Takikomi Rice, Ojiya Style!" OJIYA Also called "Zosui," Ojiya is soup stock and seasonings added to precooked rice, vegetables and fish and cooked into a thick porridge. It is distinctly different from dishes like risotto, which is uncooked rice that is first sautéed in butter and oils before adding liquid... and Okayu, which is a rice gruel cooked to soupy softness in extra water. "Soy milk?" "Ah, so you finally see it, Alice. Like all soups, the most important part of Ojiya porridge is the stock! He built this dish to be porridge from the start... ... with soy milk as the "stock"!" "Soy milk as soup stock?!" "Can you even do that?!" "So that's what it is! Soup stock is essentially meant to be pure umami. Like kombu kelp- a common stock- soy milk is packed with the umami component glutamic acid. It's more than good enough to serve as a sound base for the Ojiya porridge! Not only that, umami flavors synergies with each other. Adding two umami components to the same dish will magnify the flavor exponentially! The inosinic acid in the pike and the glutamic acid in the soy milk... combining the two makes perfect, logical sense! " "Soy milk Ojiya Porridge. Hm. How interesting!" " Mm! Delicious! The full-bodied richness of the cheese and the mild, salty flavor of the miso meld brilliantly with the rice! Then there are the chunks of tender pike meat mixed in... ... with these red things. Are they what I think they are?" "Yep! They're crunchy pickled-plum bits!" "What?!" "Again with the dirt cheap, grocery store junk food! Like that cracker breading and the seaweed jelly pearls..." "He totally dumped those in there just for the heck of it!" "These pickled plums are a very important facet of the overall dish! They have a bright, pleasing color and a fun, crunchy texture. Not only that, their tart flavor cuts through the rich oiliness of the pike meat, giving the dish a fresh, clean aftertaste. And, like all vinegary foods, they stir the appetite- a side effect that this dish takes full advantage of! Finally, these plums are salt pickled! It is no wonder they make a perfect accent to the pickled pike at the center of the dish!"
Yūto Tsukuda (食戟のソーマ 13 [Shokugeki no Souma 13] (Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, #13))
Who is going to fight them off, Randy?” “I’m afraid you’re going to say we are.” “Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers aren’t going to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them. This isn’t very nice, but it’s a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis.” “Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or—” “Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a battle that is out-and-out won by a new technology—like longbows at Crecy. For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack, of which the Southerners believe exactly the same thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That’s as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in military technology takes off—it’s the elbow in the exponential curve. Now it takes the world’s essentially conservative military establishments a few decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we’re in the thick of the Second World War, it’s accepted by everyone who doesn’t have his head completely up his ass that the war’s going to be won by whichever side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we’ve got rockets, jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire-guided missiles. And on the Allied side we’ve got three vast efforts that put basically every top-level hacker, nerd, and geek to work: the codebreaking thing, which as you know gave rise to the digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you know why we won the Second World War, Randy?” “I think you just told me.” “Because we built better stuff than the Germans?” “Isn’t that what you said?” “But why did we build better stuff, Randy?” “I guess I’m not competent to answer, Enoch, I haven’t studied that period well enough.” “Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.” “And am I supposed to gather that you, or
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
intelligence. This is not surprising because our present computers are less complex than the brain of an earthworm, a species not noted for its intellectual powers. But computers roughly obey a version of Moore’s Law, which says that their speed and complexity double every eighteen months. It is one of these exponential growths that clearly cannot continue indefinitely, and indeed it has already begun to slow. However, the rapid pace of improvement will probably continue until computers have a similar complexity to the human brain. Some people say that computers can never show true intelligence, whatever that may be. But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way. And if they are intelligent they can presumably design computers that have even greater complexity and intelligence. This is why I don’t believe the science-fiction picture of an advanced but constant future. Instead, I expect complexity to increase at a rapid rate, in both the biological and the electronic spheres. Not much of this will happen in the next hundred years, which is all we can reliably predict. But by the end of the next millennium, if we get there, the change will be fundamental. Lincoln Steffens once said, “I have seen the future and it works.” He was actually talking about the Soviet Union, which we now know didn’t work very well. Nevertheless, I think the present world order has a future, but it will be very different. What is the biggest threat to the future of this planet? An asteroid collision would be—a threat against which we have no defence. But the last big such asteroid collision was about sixty-six million years ago and killed the dinosaurs. A more immediate danger is runaway climate change. A rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide. Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250 degrees centigrade (482 degrees Fahrenheit). 8 SHOULD WE COLONISE SPACE? Why should we go into space? What is the justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of moon rock? Aren’t there better causes here on Earth? The obvious answer is because it’s there, all around us. Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a desert island not trying to escape. We need to explore the
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
With the Internet, our marketplace of ideas became exponentially bigger and freer than ever, it’s true. Thomas Jefferson said he’d “rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it”—and it would all be okay because in the new United States “reason is left free to combat” every sort of “error of opinion.” However, I’m inclined to think if he and our other democratic forefathers returned, they would see the present state of affairs as too much of a good thing. Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the Internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside—this proliferation and reinforcement of nutty ideas and false beliefs, this assembling of communities of the utterly deluded, this construction of parallel universes that look and feel perfectly real, the viral appeal of the untrue—seems at least as profound as the upside.
Kurt Andersen (Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)
For Page, like Musk and Branson and Bezos, that answer always sits at the intersection of long-term thinking and customer-centric thinking:
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
Our philosophy is that the things that people use often are really important to them and we think that over time, you can make money from those things.43
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
So what’s his secret? Musk has a few, but none are more important to him than passion and purpose. “I didn’t go into the rocket business, the car business, or the solar business thinking this is a great opportunity. I just thought, in order to make a difference, something needed to be done. I wanted to have an impact. I wanted to create something substantially better than what came before.” Musk, like every entrepreneur in this chapter, is driven by passion and purpose. Why? Passion and purpose scale—always have, always will. Every movement, every revolution, is proof of this fact. Plus, doing anything big and bold is difficult, and at two in the morning for the fifth night in a row, when you need to keep going, you’re only going to fuel yourself from deep within. You’re not going to push ahead when it’s someone else’s mission. It needs to be yours.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
To adapt to the reality of scale, meanwhile, Musk employs a number of other strategies. We’ll start with first principles, which is a lesson he borrowed from physics. “Physics training is a good framework for reasoning,” explains Musk. “It forces you to boil things down to their most fundamental truths and then connect those truths in a way that lets you understand reality. This gives you a way to attack the counterintuitive, a way of figuring out things that aren’t obvious. When you’re trying to create a new product or service, I think it’s critical to use this framework for reasoning. It takes a lot of mental energy, but it’s still the right way to do it.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
We need to look at what will make the message word of mouth worthy (WOMworthy). Who will transmit it through what channels and why? How will we know what will amplify the effects of the message? The Six Ms I find it helpful to think of the six Ms Message content Mavens transmitters Means via Motivation energized by Measurement results Multiplication amplification So we have a measured message spread by motivated mavens using multiplying means.
George Silverman (The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth)
In Plato's thinking, our desire for immortality is what drives us to reproduce (hence to heterosexual expression). The great philosopher would not have clearly understood that any particular eukaryotic legacy declines exponentially toward the vanishing point in subsequent generations....
John L. Culliney (The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation)
Too many marketers have allowed themselves to become intimidated by those who would have us believe that marketing is disreputable, money is dirty, business is sleazy, persuasion is manipulative, and promotion is deceptive. I’m sick and tired of hearing that marketing is hype. Unfortunately, however, the disdain with which some people view marketing is understandable. There is a tremendous amount of hype and manipulation. Too many marketers still view the marketplace narcissistically, from the perspective of their own companies and products, not from that of the customer. They think they are looking from the customer’s point of view, but they are really just looking at the customer.
George Silverman (The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth)
Too many marketers have allowed themselves to become intimidated by those who would have us believe that marketing is disreputable, money is dirty, business is sleazy, persuasion is manipulative, and promotion is deceptive. I’m sick and tired of hearing that marketing is hype. Unfortunately, however, the disdain with which some people view marketing is understandable. There is a tremendous amount of hype and manipulation. Too many marketers still view the marketplace narcissistically, from the perspective of their own companies and products, not from that of the customer. They think they are looking from the customer’s point of view, but they are really just looking at the customer. They are like the person who looks like he is intently listening to you, but you realize he’s just waiting for an opening to make his point.
George Silverman (The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth)
Conscious leadership is the intention, awareness and choices designed to inform, impact and guide better thinking, feeling, and actions, to achieve meaningful and valuable results.
Tony Dovale
In the early phases, the structure exhibits exponential growth. This identifies the reinforcing loop. However, the balancing loop is effectively dormant. It's only later in time that the balancing loop reveals itself in the data set.
Rich Jolly (Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight)
eight exponentially growing fields were chosen as the core of SU’s curriculum: biotechnology and bioinformatics; computational systems; networks and sensors; artificial intelligence; robotics; digital manufacturing; medicine; and nanomaterials and nanotechnology. Each of these has the potential to affect billions of people, solve grand challenges, and reinvent industries.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
Low-cost fuels, high-performing vaccines, and ultrayield agriculture are just three of the reasons that the exponential growth of biotechnology is critical to creating a world of abundance.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
Change the game: 1. Adjust the arena. 2. Re-rig the rules. 3. Attack the plan. Change the story: 1. Describe the alternative. 2. Organize in narratives. 3. Make your fight a fable. Change the equation: 1. Act exponentially. 2. Act reciprocally. 3. Perform your power.
Eric Liu (You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen)
The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
Some churches seem to confuse multiculturalism with the gospel itself. I’ve even heard some talk about “the gospel of racial reconciliation.” While I understand their heart, I think that’s deadly dangerous nomenclature. The gospel is fundamentally about God’s reconciliation of us to himself in Christ (a vertical reconciliation), and the fruit of that reconciliation is reconciliation with everything else (horizontal reconciliations), including racial reconciliation. (As a general rule of thumb, anytime you hear “the gospel of . . .” and what follows is something other than Christ’s finished work on the cross, chances are a fruit of salvation is being substituted for its means!)
J.D. Greear (Gaining By Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send (Exponential Series))
But who knows when night’s going to fall anyway.” “Well, you should. Shouldn’t you?” “No, why would I –” “Isn’t that part of your job?” “Knowing in intimate detail the prerogatives of a fickle and broken sky?” “Yes.” “You are aware that even professional astronomers and astrophysicists are unable to explain why the atmosphere changes colors at random and why the sun can rise and set three times in an hour and why we haven’t all just died already, right?” “Yes.” “But you still think I have the answer to that universal mystery. Because I work for a Holiday Inn.” “Yes.” “You’re kind of special, aren’t you?” “That’s what my mommy likes to say.” “I’m gonna... go now. I’ve got... towels.” Catrina
Eirik Gumeny (High Voltage (Exponential Apocalypse #3))
This difference is key. Thinking in probabilities—this business has a 60 percent chance of success—rather than deterministically—if I do A and B, then C will definitely happen—doesn’t just guard against oversimplification; it further protects against the brain’s inherent laziness. The
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
Finally, many people simply think better thoughts when in dialogue with others. Remember I^We: an individual’s power is raised exponentially with the help of a network. This is partly because when information moves back and forth between knowledgeable people who care, the signal strengthens. Two (or more) well-coordinated brains beat one every time.
Reid Hoffman (The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career)
Henry Ford, when asked about his employees, said it best: “None of our men are ‘experts.’ We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind a great number of things become impossible.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?” He smirks, resting his hands on my waist. “Hoped.” My cheeks ache from smiling, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything but Darren and him kissing me again. I trace the smooth skin around his mouth. “You better be careful,” he says, kissing the tip of my finger with each word. “I’ve been known to bite.” We laugh and he tightens his hold at my waist and pulls me against him, pressing our lips together. I rake my fingers through his hair and grab a fistful, tugging him closer and deepening the kiss. Electricity courses through me from my chest to hips and back again. His warm, wet hands explore my bare back, setting every inch of my skin on fire. His shoulder muscles tense and release in synchronization with his hands all over me. He takes my face in his palms and slows the kiss down, our breathing still heavy. I’ve never been so dizzy in my whole life. My head, my body, are part of the sea, ebbing and flowing with the tides. I get it now. This is what kissing is really supposed to be. Any others before were merely run-throughs with understudies. Darren is a leading man. Our foreheads rest together and the pads of his fingers slowly trail up and down my arms. “What do we do now?” he asks. I inhale deeply, trying to clear my mind, to be struck with a brilliant solution. “I have no idea.” He plays with the wet ends of my hair. “I think we just made saying good-bye the next time exponentially more difficult.” “Infinitely more difficult.” But I’ll worry about that tomorrow.
Kristin Rae (Wish You Were Italian (If Only . . . #2))
I think up through probably 35, I was very much a control freak, because the size of the organizations I commanded, and I was part of, were small enough where I could micromanage them. I had a fairly forceful personality, and if you worked hard and studied hard, you could just about move all the chess pieces, no problem. Around age 35 to 40, as you get up to battalion level, which is about 600 people, suddenly, you’re going to have to lead it a different way, and what you’re really going to have to do is develop people. The advice I’d give to anyone young is it’s really about developing people who are going to do the work. Unless you are going to go do the task yourself, then the development time you spend on the people who are going to do that task, whether they are going to lead people doing it or whether they are actually going to do it, every minute you spend on that is leveraged, is exponential return.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Psychologically, success can be dangerous, because it tricks us into thinking of ourselves as experts and it kills our curiosity.
Andy Fromm (The Curiosity Muscle: How Four Simple Questions Can Uncover Powerful Insights and Exponential Growth)
The second set of principles offers a higher-level view of how mental extension works, in accordance with an understanding of what the brain evolved to do. The brain is well adapted to sensing and moving the body, to navigating through physical space, and to interacting with other members of our species. On top of this basic suite of human competencies, civilization has built a vast edifice of abstraction, engaging our brains in acts of symbolic processing and conceptual cognition that don’t come as naturally. These abstractions have, of course, allowed us to expand our powers exponentially—but now, paradoxically, further progress may depend on running this process in reverse. In order to succeed at the increasingly complex thinking modern life demands, we will find ourselves needing to translate abstractions back into the corporeal, spatial, and social forms from which they sprang—forms with which the brain is still most at ease.
Annie Murphy Paul (The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain)
The word “exponential” signifies not just a theory but also a warning: the business world is beginning to move so quickly and so purposefully that if you’re not already changing your business model and thinking differently (and way bigger), you are going to be fatally left behind. ExO: Second Generation The original Exponential Organizations book was published in 2014.
Salim Ismail (Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact)
The major thus-far-unframed effect is that runaway exponential accumulation of wealth share tends to kill off the provision of public resources that makes a satisfying and healthy private life possible.
George Lakoff (The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate)
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Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
The best on horses you think will lose are a valuable "insurance policy." When rare disaster strikes, you'll be glad you had the insurance. 71 The exponential growth of wealth in the Kelly system is also a consequence of proportional betting. As the bankroll grows, make larger bets. 98 [2 questions are central to John Kelly's analysis] What level of risk will lead to the highest long-run return? What is the chance of losing everything? 286 As Fred Schwed, Jr. author of Where are the Customer's Yatchs? put it back in 1940, "Like all of life's rich emotional experiences, the full flavor of losing important money cannot be conveyed in literature." 304 Claude Shannon: A smart investor should understand where he has an edge and invest only in those opportunities. 308 The longer you hold a stock, the harder it is to beat the market by much. 316
William Poundstone (Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street)
Exponential Results Requires Exponential Thinking and High Performance Teamworking with Growth Oriented Mindsets.
Tony Dovale
As far as a time frame for reaching these targets, everything outlined in the preceding pages (and much more to be discussed later) should be achievable within twenty-five years, with
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series))
knowledge-based one. And this is just beginning. Ten years ago we had five hundred million Internet-connected devices. Today there are about eight billion. By 2020 there will be fifty billion and a decade later we’ll have a trillion Internet-connected devices as we literally information-enable every aspect of the world in the Internet of Things. The Internet is now the world’s nervous system, with our mobile devices serving as edge points and nodes on that network. Think about that for a second: we’ll be jumping from eight billion Internet-connected devices today to fifty billion by 2025, and to a trillion a mere decade later. We like to think that thirty or forty years into the Information Revolution we are well along in terms of its development. But according to this metric, we’re just 1 percent of the way down the road. Not only is most of that growth still ahead of us, all of it is. And everything is being disrupted in the process.
Salim Ismail (Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it))
In fact, I’ve come to think of making stone soup as the only way an entrepreneur can succeed.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
Evolutionary pressures shaped Homo sapiens to have an average life expectancy of roughly thirty years. The logic is easily understood. “Natural selection favors the genes of those with the most descendants,” explains MIT’s Marvin Minsky. “Those numbers tend to grow exponentially with the number of generations, and so natural selection prefers the genes of those who reproduce at earlier ages.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
Don’t think outside the box. Go box shopping. Keep trying on one after another until you find the one that catalyzes your thinking. A good box is like a lane marker on the highway. It’s a constraint that liberates.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
People think that bold projects don’t get funding because of their audacity. That’s not the case. They don’t get funded because of a lack of measurability. Nobody wants to make a large up-front investment and wait ten years for any sign of life. But more often than not, if you can show progress along the way, smart investors will come on some pretty crazy rides.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
the number of dirigibles made per year has not increased according to this pattern. The average number of cats per household has not increased exponentially. This made, briefly, for a fun game. It’s not too hard to come up with metrics that have not kept pace with the Great Acceleration. Yet, in the end, this exercise in contrarian thinking only reinforces the point: any set of meaningful measures will reveal the same pattern. Venus
David Grinspoon (Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future)
And since Thor totaled my car," said the donut merchant, "this is really our only option. Unless you think we can walk the fifteen hundred miles to Las Máquinas without some kind of horrible fate befalling us." "I'll get Charlie's corpse out of the trunk," said Thor.
Eirik Gumeny (Dead Presidents (Exponential Apocalypse Book 2))
In the industrial space especially, we’re seeing the number of sensors and their capabilities going up at an exponential rate,” Ruh said. “We think of this as the Internet of Things applied to the industrial space. We see the opportunity for enormous productivity and efficiency gains in energy, transportation, aviation, and healthcare through the interconnection of devices enabled via huge amounts of sensors. The key is really analytics on the data, the ability to get deep inside those assets and the processes that surround them and allow people to get more productivity and efficiency out of their assets.
Mark Raskino (Digital to the Core: Remastering Leadership for Your Industry, Your Enterprise, and Yourself)
How should you go about claiming your award money? There are two possible directions to take. You can try to prove that P = NP or you can aim to show that P is not equal to NP. To show that P = NP, all you have to do is take one of your favorite NP-Complete problems and find a polynomial algorithm that solves it. As we have seen, if you do find such an algorithm, then all NP problems will be solvable in a polynomial amount of operations. It might seem strange to think that a problem that demands an exponential or factorial amount of operations can be done in a polynomial amount of operations. It might seem strange to think that a problem that demands an exponential or factorial amount of operations can be done in a polynomial amount of operations. However, we saw something similar with the Euler Cycle Problem. Rather than look through all n! possible cycles to see if any are Euler cycles, we used the trick of checking if the number of edges touching each vertex is even or not. Does a similar trick for the Hamiltonian Cycle Problem exist? For many years, the smartest people around have been looking for such a trick or algorithm and have not been successful. However, you might possess some deeper insight that they lack. Get to it! On the other hand, you can try to show that P is not equal to NP. One way to do this is to take an NP problem and show that no polynomial algorithm exists for it. It so happens that it is very hard to prove such a claim: there are a lot of algorithms out there. This has turned out to be one of the hardest problems in mathematics. As a final hint, it should be noted that most researchers believe that P is not equal to NP.
Noson S. Yanofsky (The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us)
you should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching: someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did—one, two, or three years ago—better than you did it. If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of, and you’re constantly learning from them, you’re going to be exponentially better than you are.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
You increase your productivity and creativity exponentially when you think about the right things at the right time and have the tools to capture your value-added thinking.
David Allen (Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity)
said: “I have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999 percent of people is no. I think we need to be training people on how to change the world.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))