Innovations And Life Quotes

Dreamers are mocked as impractical. The truth is they are the most practical, as their innovations lead to progress and a better way of life for all of us.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.

James Ed went to his office and sat down at his small, metal desk. He smiled as he considered Penny Jones’ plan to shame him out of her life. Would he let her do that? He shook his head as he thought, No way in hell!

The road to your highest achievements leads through environments that support you.

Creating alternative ways of living, innovative rules, or new games of life requires collective support. Shared adherence is needed if we don’t want to remain segregated or stay on the sidelines. ("When forgetting the rules of the game")

Some fish love to swim upstream. Some people love to overcome challenges.

People’s confidence in their abilities influences how they approach life. Their dreams are likely anchored to what they feel they can achieve.

Firestarters are flexible. They recognize situational needs and are able to flow into the accessible role identity most relevant to overcome emergent challenges.

Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.

The system will always be defended by those countless people who have enough intellect to defend but not quite enough to innovate.

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

Innovators are owners of the situation. They own it because they create it—quite literally. They embrace the world as it should match the vision in their heads. And when something is missing from that vision, they fill the gap.

As human beings, we have an innate need to create and innovate from within ourselves to address our own concerns, and writing helps fulfill that need.

What others view as setbacks, Firestarters see as opportunities to learn and grow more.

Clarity of mission is important for acceleration. If you have a mission, but others don’t understand or your actions contradict it, then it will be less contagious.

If you want to make a difference, you must live like no one else and strive to achieve goals that others view as impossible to reach.

Why doesn’t every fire once kindled, survive and thrive? Why doesn’t every person accomplish her dreams? The simple answer is that the Firestarter’s life is a constant fight against extinction.

Freedom in any moment is a product of two things: the autonomy you feel and the support for autonomy that the moment allows.

Being different and thinking different makes a person unforgettable. History does not remember the forgettable.

If you feel you don’t know the right people, turn to the next person you see on the street and introduce yourself—that connection could be the key to your future.

Interest isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you live.

The moment you will stop innovating, somebody else will make your product outdated and will become the market leader.

Success is not only dependent on understanding your own skill-set. It’s also important to recognize the talents of others and know how to profit from them.

Firestarters aren’t born lucky. They manufacture it.

Stop waiting for what you want, and start working what you have. This can turn your greatest frustration into your greatest potential innovation. If you'll do your part, God will begin to do what only He can do: He'll make your box bigger.

When you travel mentally from a low point to a high point, the ensuing inspiration eclipses the negativity of the initial downfall.

Introspection is a form of self-management. You reflect. You decide. You change. You allow yourself to grow.

Collaborators don’t steal others’ ideas, take advantage of people, or sit back while others accomplish their tasks for them. Collaborators take action to ensure that everyone with whom they work can enjoy the maximum potential outcome.

Belief that you can act is a powerful motivator. Belief that change can happen in a flash is an even stronger motivator.

You were born an original work of art. Stay original always. Originals cost more than imitations.

Grow with discipline. Balance intuition with rigor. Innovate around the core. Don't embrace the status quo. Find new ways to see. Never expect a silver bullet. Get your hands dirty. Listen with empathy and overcommunicate with transparency. Tell your story, refusing to let others define you. Use authentic experiences to inspire. Stick to your values, they are your foundation. Hold people accountable, but give them the tools to succeed. Make the tough choices; it's how you execute that counts. Be decisive in times of crisis. Be nimble. Find truth in trials and lessons in mistakes. Be responsible for what you see, hear, and do. Believe.

Your habit of avoiding mental and emotional discomfort is your #1 reason for your being stuck where you are in life.

…contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created.

... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own. [2002] p.46

Dance to the beat of your own drum; whether the world likes your rhythmic movements or not.

Resilience is based on the ability to embrace the extremes -- while no becoming an extremist. ... **Most companies don't do paradox very well.** (emphasis by author) [2002] p.25f

Firestarters are able to make associations between similar situations and use lessons learned from one sphere of their lives to inform actions and thoughts in seemingly unrelated situations. They look for patterns of success, and then they pounce on situations that have proven to be generators of that success.

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth. Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

The world accommodates you for fitting in, but only rewards you for standing out.

Our most precious gift is our brain. It is what allows us to learn, love, think, create, and even to experience joy. It is the gateway to our emotions, to our capacity for deeply experiencing life, to our ability to have lasting intimacy. It allows us to innovate, grow, and accomplish.

If being smart can improve the quality of lives, then choose to be and be smart.” - Auntabelle, Amazon Lee and the Ancient Undead of Rome by Kira G. and Kailin Gow

Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.

Before you get bored of yourself try creativity in your life.

Innovation needs preparation, collaboration and the light of the soul. Every challenge provides that light - a greater depth of understanding about life and truth.

The greatest innovators aren’t those who possessed great technical knowledge; they are visionaries who can see life from multiple aspects.

People will deem certain new ideas impossible, until they become part of everyday life.

As the pace of change accelerates, industry life cycles, company life cycles, and product life cycles are compressed.

No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.

Perfectionism reduces creativity and innovation,

Just because you have baggage doesn't mean you have to lug it around.

Creativity will become even more important as the world requires new solutions to new problems.

Failovation is the sort of failure that generates innovation, potentially prompting a standing ovation.

Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes; it made me curious; it made me ask, ‘Is this enough for me?

life is a continous journey of transformation

Whether personal or organizational, building capacity to effectively deal with change creates resilience, and without exceptional resilience there is no antifragility.

T-shaped people " those with a depth of knowledge in at least one discipline and a breadth of knowledge about innovation and entrepreneurship that allows them to work effectively with professionals on other disciplines to bring their ideas to life.

To travel is to live. Breathe some life into your life and go outside!

A major intent is to show that underlying the extraordinary complexity, diversity, and apparent messiness of the world we live in lies a surprising unity and simplicity when viewed through the lens of scale.

While exponential growth is a remarkable manifestation of our extraordinary accomplishments as a species, built into it are the potential seeds of our demise and the portent of big troubles just around the next corner.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive. We

In every company which I have done strategic planning, the number-one value people choose is always integrity. The second values may be quality of products and services, caring about people, excellent customer service, profitability , innovation, entrepreneurship, and others. But integrity always comes first.

A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored, that their mistakes won’t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.

Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.

Enthusiasm breeds quality and innovation

Change is inevitable, progress is not.

Rhetorical question: Did you get to where you are by accepting the status quo? I didn't.

Don't run with the crowd; fly with the stars.

The biggest lesson of my life – self-respect comes from respecting others; it is a two-way street.

The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

The two dominant components that constitute a city, its physical infrastructure and its socioeconomic activity, can both be conceptualized as approximately self-similar fractal-like network structures.

People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary. Our

At the heart of all sales and marketing is the ability to create demand even in the absence of logic.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.

Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.

Disruptors don't have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.

In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

When a great team loses through complacency, it will constantly search for new and more intricate explanations to explain away defeat. After a while it becomes more innovative in thinking up how to lose than thinnking up how to win.

Beginning is hard, but continuing is harder. Those who seek a glamorous life should not pursue art, science, innovation, invention, or anything else that needs new. Creation is a long journey where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead.

Another year older, but am I wiser? Wisdom comes from learning and changing for the better. Sometimes we just go through life living the same day over and over and never gaining true wisdom. Let that never be me.

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.

Women are taught that it is noble to lose themselves inside their marriage. To give up everything for home and children, even themselves. I often wonder how many stories, how many scientific breakthroughs, how many plays, musical scores, and innovations, have been tossed onto the pyre of human marriage.

Don't just think out of the box, stand on the box to see new possibilities and opportunities in becoming distinguished.

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

You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.

In a feast of fame and talks, Scandal flashing, raising tongue and brows. In a blast of bombing and power play, Fear and death dig more revenge. In a forgotten continent, Famine and drought devour lives. In an unfortunate eye of a rebelling weather, Crashing homes, leaving many in devastation and desperation. In a country shaking with violence, Innocent victims cry for justice and peace. In a home shaking with turmoil, Humble patient, hiding voice wants to be heard. In a tick of a second, A new breathe of life beats! To belong in this world. Constantly changing, decaying or improving? In a snap of innovation: Life goes big leap! Regression somewhere unseen, But felt in a slow, long run.

Theirs is the customary human reaction when confronted with innovation: to flounder about attempting to adapt old responses to new situations or to simply condemn or ignore the harbingers of change--a practice refined by the Chinese emperors, who used to execute messengers bringing bad news. The new technological environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to alter their old value structures. The literati find the new electronic environment far more threatening than do those less committed to literacy as a way of life. When an individual or social group feels that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change, its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury. But for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place.

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.

A lot of scientific evidence suggests that the difference between those who succeed and those who don't is not the brains they were born with, but their approach to life, the messages they receive about their potential, and the opportunities they have to learn.

**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23

Whatever fortune or misfortune awaits in the subsequent reincarnations, a purgatory by definition does not last forever. We will be forced to either go backward to the Amish way of life devoid of technology or move forward to a transhumanist world embracing technology.

Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world. What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a similar transformation: people begin as comrades and fellow citizens, then become labor resources and assets, and then, as their utility shifts or degrades, transmute into liabilities, and thus must be appropriately managed.

The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…

We get smarter and more creative as we age, research shows. Our brain's anatomy, neural networks, and cognitive abilities can actually improve with age and increased life experiences. Contrary to the mythology of Silicon Valley, older employees may be even more productive, innovative, and collaborative than younger ones... Most people, in fact, have multiple cognitive peaks throughout their lives.

No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what makes them original all over again.

All great people of history, all the heroes and leaders and innovators who lit humanity’s way out of darkness and ignorance, forged within themselves the courage to overcome their internal conflicts when it mattered most. In many ways, they are just like us: They worried. They procrastinated. They sometimes had lower opinions of their fellow human beings. But what made them celebrated, what pushed society forward, what gave birth to their legend, was their sheer will to overcome such impulses and to faithfully, actively, and lovingly fight for a better life for themselves and others. Let us learn from them, let us master ourselves, and let us now add our own chapter of courage to the good book of humanity.

Ideas, well exececuted, have the power to spark revolutionary new ways of being that improve and enrich life.

An innovator sees things not as they are, but as they could be.

Imagination is much more important than innovation. There will be no innovation without vivid imagination.

Imagination is the source of every innovation.

One of the things I’ve learnt about goals is people will write them or wrong them.

Living life dangerously is the key to recognizing that you can do whatever you want when you stop limiting what you believe in.

Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

Life isn't about having, it's about experiencing.

just as energy is the basis of life itself,and ideas the source of innovation,so is innovation the vital spark of all human change,improvement and progress

Data for data’s sake, or the mindless gathering of big data, without any conceptual framework for organizing and understanding it, may actually be bad or even dangerous.

All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.

Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.

Innovation, creativity and an ability to solve real life problems remain the most prized skills in today’s economy

It's inspiration that counts, not the drill.

Unless Lin made the whole thing up - and nobody has said that he did - it suggest that however innovative Obama's speeches and Lin's show might seem, they are, in fact, traditional. They don't reinvent the American character, they renew it. They remind us of something we forgot, something that fell as far out of sight as the posthumously neglected Alexander Hamilton, who spent his life defending one idea above all: "the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of this Country." Obama's speeches and Lin's show resonate so powerfully with their audiences because they find eloquent ways to revive Hamilton's revolution, the one that spurred Americans to see themselves and each other as fellow citizens in a sprawling, polyglot, young republic. It's the change in thought and feeling that makes all the other changes possible.

One major irony here is that law, which always lags behind technological innovation by at least a generation, gives substantially more protections to a communication’s content than to its metadata—and yet intelligence agencies are far more interested in the metadata—the activity records that allow them both the “big picture” ability to analyze data at scale, and the “little picture” ability to make perfect maps, chronologies, and associative synopses of an individual person’s life, from which they presume to extrapolate predictions of behavior.

From a scientific perspective the truly revolutionary character of the Industrial Revolution was the dramatic change from an open system where energy is supplied externally by the sun to a closed system where energy is supplied internally by fossil fuel.

I'm drawn again and again to obsessives. I like them. I like the idea that someone could push away all the concerns and details that make up everyday life and just zero in on one thing - the thing that fits the contours of his or her imagination. Obsessives lead us astray sometimes. Can't see the bigger picture. Serve not just the world's but also their own narrow interests. But I don't think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.

I mean, it’s not that we lack the technology or the resources to solve every one of the world’s problems, but we lack the political and moral will to prioritize people over profit, or people over power. We lack a worldwide spiritual wellness or a mutual love for others beyond our own tribe or religion, a humanity without racism or bigotry. Our prosperity has morphed into a ravenous, greedy cancer that transforms even basic life needs into cradle-tograve profit centers and corporate dynasties. Even worse, the average person has little control or real voice. Governments, technologies, and innovations systemically move wealth upward but do little or nothing to eliminate poverty or ignorance overall. At what point in time does humanity get honest with ourselves and have an intervention?

Knowing and being cognizant of the underlying principles and dynamics, seeing the problem in a broad systemic context, thinking quantitatively and analytically, all need to be integrated with the necessarily dominant focus on detail relevant to the specific problem in order to optimize design and minimize unintended consequences.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

It is all too often forgotten that the whole point of a city is to bring people together, to facilitate interaction, and thereby to create ideas and wealth, to enhance innovative thinking and encourage entrepreneurship and cultural activity by taking advantage of the extraordinary opportunities that the diversity of a great city offers.

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.

Joan was not only an actual human being but a most important one. A FEMINIST ICON WHO PROVED TO THE WORLD THAT WOMEN CAN ROCK EVEN HARDER THAN MEN. An innovator, an architect, a punk rock pioneer so powerful, she inspired generations of young women to pick up guitars and do the same.

I am billionaire bold bright omnipotent lively determined to go within to win opening my omnific eyes to realize wisdom innovation naturalizes… My cascading flow of financial love lavishly streams gold bars as I realize gold is intrinsic wealth as my intuitive imagination is my intrinsic innovations…

There are six canons of conservative thought: 1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls. 2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism." 3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom. 4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress. 5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power. 6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

sat down and wrote two versions of my own obituary – the one I wanted and the one I was headed for. They were very different; I realized I had to make some big changes if I was going to look back upon my life and be proud of my legacy.

The late maverick economist Kenneth Boulding perhaps best summed it up when testifying before the U.S. Congress, declaring that “anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

How much value do you want to get out of life? You get out what you put in. Approach your life with intent, courage, faith and hard work, and you’ll reap the beautiful value those sacrifices provide. That’s the way our strange world works.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” –Steve Jobs

It is impious, says the modern European superstition, to put a period to our own life, and thereby rebel against our creator: and why not impious, say I, to build houses, cultivate the ground, or sail upon the ocean? In all these actions we employ our powers of mind and body to produce some innovation in the course of nature; and in non of them do we any more. They are all of them therefore equally innocent, or equally criminal.

Once you start seeing systems—seeing connections between parts—you can begin to see ways to alter the most important systems in your life or organization to reduce unwanted failures and to promote greater innovation, efficiency, safety, or other valued outcomes.

Ultimately, a culture of levity creates a safe place for employees. When you feel safe and feel like you’re being led through levity versus fear, you’re much more apt to take chances. You’re more likely to try things without worrying about being ridiculed, or ostracized. You’re more willing to innovate—to push new ideas and to push against old ideas.

Don't go through life with a closed mind. Allow innovations and creativity to flow. We should always challenge ourselves to excel in more ways than one. Be open to ideas or suggestions on how to improve. And, the chances of reaching your goals will increase enormously.

In that sense stand-up is a lot like fashion. It demands innovation with every new show. And you're only as good as your last collection.

The American mind was shaped in the mold of early modern Protestantism. Religion was the first arena for American intellectual life, and thus the first arena for an anti-intellectual impulse. Anything that seriously diminished the role of rationality and learning in early American religion would later diminish its role in secular culture. The feeling that ideas should above all be made to work, the disdain for doctrine and for refinements in ideas, the subordination of men of ideas to men of emotional power or manipulative skill are hardly innovations of the twentieth century; they are inheritances from American Protestantism.

The greatest asset of the university has been its capacity for innovation. That capacity, in turn, rests partly on its traditions of small size, weak interdepartmental boundaries, and solid adminstrative support (or at least hunting licenses) for entrepreneurial undertakings.

Every subject is much easier than the people who wish to make money teaching it would have you know. So, for every single subject that can be systematized, there is a systematization that allows you to get 80% percent of the power with probably 5 or 10% of the effort. So the key question is that you have to prove that you have the superpower to rearrange the subject, to disintermediate the people who get paid for teaching it – which will always push you towards mastery, which is a question of getting the last 2 or 3% out of the system. And so the good news is that you can rearrange any subject to learn most of it very, very quickly. The bad news is that it will feel terrible because you will be told that you are doing the wrong thing and dooming yourself to a life of mediocrity as a jack of many trades, master of none – but in fact, the problem is that the jack of one trade is the connector of none. Good luck!

Scientists and inventors alike, they first guess a new explanation—a hypothesis—as wild and innovative as they can conjure. And then they test it rigorously, their hearts filled with the hope they’ll find a door or a window that reframes their understanding of the universe, of life, of a flower, or a cure for cancer. And it all starts with a guess, a good explanation as unlikely as it is plausible. A story at the knife’s edge of innovation, bleeding truth and pushing the limits of knowledge further afield. That impossibly sharp place where dreams and reality converge. A hard-to-vary idea as powerful as the one that broke Einstein’s General Relativity and his assumption that the laws of nature don’t depend on the motion of an observer.

With well-designed pedagogy, we can empower kids with critical skills and help them turn passions into decisive life advantages. The role of education is no longer to teach content, but to help our children learn—in a world that rewards the innovative and punishes the formulaic.

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

The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer’s life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request. In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed.

Real innovation comes not from top-down pronouncements and narrowly defined tasks. It comes from hiring innovators focused on the big picture who can orient themselves within a problem and solve it without having their hand held the whole time. We call it being loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

The English team’s revisions showed that the Cambrian had been a time of unparalleled innovation and experimentation in body designs. For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today. Name a creature, from a nematode worm to Cameron Diaz, and they all use architecture first created in the Cambrian party.

One of the study’s major findings was that in the successful relationships, positive attention outweighed negative on a daily basis by a factor of five to one. This positive attention wasn’t about dramatic actions like throwing over-the-top birthday parties or purchasing a dream home. It took the form of small gestures, such as: using a pleased tone of voice when receiving a phone call from the partner, as opposed to an exasperated tone or a rushed pace that implied the partner’s call was interrupting important tasks inquiring about dentist appointments or other details of the other person’s day putting down the remote control, newspaper, or telephone when the other partner walked through the door arriving home at the promised time—or at least calling if there was a delay These small moments turned out to be more predictive of a loving, trusting relationship than were the more innovative steps of romantic vacations and expensive presents. Possibly, that’s because small moments provide consistent tending and nurturing.

I have learned to prioritize my actions into three buckets: things that drain my energy, things I don’t mind and are important and useful, and things that give me energy and bring me joy. My goal is to break my daily actions down so that I spend none of my time on tasks that fall into the first category, 10 percent of my time on the second category, and 90 percent of my time in the final category, the one that Robert Greene calls primal inclinations. When I find myself drifting too far from the goal, I reset my actions.

Currently we see around us an ever more apparent loss of vigor of our society: increasing fixity of the power structure and bureaucratization of all levels of life; impotence of political institutions to carry off great projects; the proliferation of regulations affecting all aspects of public, private, and commercial life; the spread of irrationalism; the banalization of opular culture; the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend for themselves or think for themselves; economic stagnation and decline, the decleration of the rate of technological innovation...Everywhere you look, the writing is on the wall.

. The whole idea of heaven and hell is a perfect illustration of just how the core of Christian doctrine is antithetical to reason, rationality and even life. It elevates ignorance and non-productivity and suppresses creative and innovative thought. One competent scientist is worth more than a thousand evangelists.

A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation.

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.

The intellectual as ideologist, having had a leading role in purveying to the country each innovation and having frequently hastened the country into the acceptance of change, is naturally felt to have played an important part in breaking the mold in which America was cast and in consequence he gets more than his share of the blame.

The rich flow of creativity, innovation, and almost musical complexity we are looking for in a fulfilled work life cannot be reached through trying or working harder. The medium for the soul, it seems, must be the message. The river down which we raft is made up of the same substance as the great sea of our destination. It is an ever-moving, firsthand creative engagement with life and with others that completes itself simply by being itself. This kind of approach must be seen as the "great art" of working in order to live, of remembering what is most important in the order of priorities and what place we occupy in a much greater story than the one our job description defines. Other "great arts," such as poetry, can remind and embolden us to this end. Whatever we choose to do, the stakes are very high. With a little more care, a little more courage, and, above all, a little more soul, our lives can be so easily discovered and celebrated in work, and not, as now, squandered and lost in its shadow.

In terms of her painting, never mind the innovations she brought to bear on her private life, she forged a passage to a world of openness and freedom, as frightening as it was exhilarating. 'I've always been absolutely terrified every single moment of my life,' she said, 'and I've never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do,

Your work isn’t simply your job description, title, or industry. It’s when you wake up, what you wear, and your first 30 minutes in the office. It’s what your office is or is not, the five people you are physically closest to, and whether you can get up and walk or have to sit all day. It’s whether you fear for your job due to changing laws or innovation each day. It’s how it fits with your family and all the people and events that matter most. It’s the person you are when you come home.

Our lives are marked by the people who choose to matter more: the teacher who encouraged our curiosity, the neighbor who lent a helping hand in time of need, the great leaders and perceptive thinkers whose vision and innovation improve the quality of our lives. And that's what it means to matter more. It's not about pursuit of riches or fame. It's about making a difference in people's lives. Remembered or not, lived out in a small town or on the world stage, the journey of relevance matters.

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.

People love to say, “You gotta fake it till you make it.” But this implies that the fake you is someone better than who you inherently are, and this is simply not the truth. Let me say this loud and clear: the person you imagine yourself to be in the very best and most powerful moments of your life, is the authentic you. And in truth, I imagine you’re probably much more amazing even than that.

Townsfolk have no conception of the peace that mother nature bestows, and as long as that peace is unfound the spirit must seek to quench its thirst with ephemeral novelties. And what is more natural that that of the townsman's feverish search for pleasure should mould people of unstable, hare-brained character, who think only of their personal appearance and their clothes and find momentary comfort in foolish fashions and other such worthless innovations? The countryman, on the other hand walks out into the verdant meadows, into an atmosphere clear and pure, and as he breaths it into his lungs some unknown power streams through his limbs, invigorating body and soul. The peace in nature fills his mind with calm and cheer, the bright green grass under his feet awakens a sense of beauty, almost of reverence. In the fragrance that is borne so sweetly to his nostrils, in the quietude that broods so blissfully around him, there is comfort and rest. The hillsides, the dingles, the waterfalls, and the mountains are all friends of his childhood, and never to be forgotten.

I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.

Many of the most interesting phenomena that we have touched upon fall into this category, including the occurrence of disasters such as earthquakes, financial market crashes, and forest fires. All of these have fat-tail distributions with many more rare events, such as enormous earthquakes, large market crashes, and raging forest fires, than would have been predicted by assuming that they were random events following a classic Gaussian distribution.

We have a “fast-food mentality” that expects an instant return on our investment of time, attention, and effort, a return that is concrete and clear. We are so comfortable charging forward and succeeding through our aggression and innovation that the idea of patience can seem contrary to our instincts.

By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they’re losing control to their screens.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no—our own pain and misery aren’t a bug of human evolution; they’re a feature.

The typical Anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,—opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,—endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity, a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.” To the above characteristics, says Alvin F. Sanborn, must be added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanor, frugality and regularity, austerity, even, of living, and courage beyond compare.[2]

Scientific breakthroughs, as we just learned, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered. Here’s the leap I made as I pondered Pardis Sabeti around the same time I was pondering Johnson’s theory of innovation: A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible.

College does not equal job security. Entrepreneurship does not equal job security. For heaven's sake, "job security" does not equal job security. So what do you do? Don't be a one-trick pony. Add real value in everything you do. But most of all, study and apply business models. No matter what discipline you come from. Learn how to add value so that value can flow in the form of money to you. That, my friends, is job security. Learn where money comes from and you'll know where to turn when life throws a curve.

You can build your “willpower muscle” the same way you strengthen any muscle in your body: by doing hard things you don’t want to do. A simple trick I use is to keep a heavy-duty spring-loaded hand-grip trainer on my desk. When I think about it, I squeeze it until it burns and my arm tells me to stop and then keep squeezing. Another technique I use is to hold my breath until my lungs scream at me to breathe and then hold it longer. When you successfully do the things you don’t want to do, everything else seems easier by comparison. Your willpower grows.

There is always a price to pay when energy is processed; there is no free lunch. Because energy underlies the transformation and operation of literally everything, no system operates without consequences. Indeed, there is a fundamental law of nature that cannot be transgressed, called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that whenever energy is transformed into a useful form, it also produces “useless” energy as a degraded by-product: “unintended consequences” in the form of inaccessible disorganized heat or unusable products are inevitable. There

Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians’ introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract noun (which could not be readily drawn as a picture) by means of the sign for a depictable noun that had the same phonetic pronunciation. For instance, it’s easy to draw a recognizable picture of arrow, hard to draw a recognizable picture of life, but both are pronounced ti in Sumerian, so a picture of an arrow came to mean either arrow or life. The resulting ambiguity was resolved by the addition of a silent sign called a determinative, to indicate the category of nouns to which the intended object belonged. Linguists term this decisive innovation, which also underlies puns today, the rebus principle.

Byron published the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a romanticized account of his wanderings through Portugal, Malta, and Greece, and, as he later remarked, “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Beautiful, seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous, he was living the life of a Byronic hero while creating the archetype in his poetry. He became the toast of literary London and was feted at three parties each day, most memorably a lavish morning dance hosted by Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Caroline, though married to a politically powerful aristocrat who was later prime minister, fell madly in love with Byron. He thought she was “too thin,” yet she had an unconventional sexual ambiguity (she liked to dress as a page boy) that he found enticing. They had a turbulent affair, and after it ended she stalked him obsessively. She famously declared him to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” which he was. So was she.

When immigrants arrive in another country, we experience a lot of stress. We learn a new language, go to school, and work in a new environment, which is most likely some survival or transitional job initially. We probably lose social and professional status, and the overall experience is unpleasant and stressful. It sucks. I’ve been there myself. We also have less time compared with locals. For example, we have to spend time learning English - they don’t. Most likely, they can get a job with a higher pay. In our case, we most likely get a minimum-paying job first, which means we have to work more and longer hours. This means that if we want to progress in private and business life at the same rate as locals, we need to be better organized, more efficient, and more disciplined and use more effective and innovative tools and approaches. There is no other way around it. Therefore, I wanted to emphasize that we immigrants need our unique approach to dating.

USE EMOTIONS AS INFORMATION. Horses use emotion as information to engage surprisingly agile responses to environmental stimuli and relationship challenges: (a) Feel the emotion in its purest form (b) Get the message behind the emotion (c) Change something in response to the message (d) Go back to grazing. In other words, let the emotion go, and either get back on task or relax, so you can enjoy life fully. Horses don’t hang on to the story, endlessly ruminating over the details of uncomfortable situations -- from an October 30, 2013 article on the Intelligent Optimist magazine

It is the very character of domestic life to present the world as an enclosed owned space, and, although mankind adapts itself on the whole to this condition, both biologically and culturally, yet there remains a glimmer of the opposite tendency inside even the lowliest. He can’t help but experience this new state of things in late civilizations except with dread, the dread suspicion...an uncanny suspicion..... that the world is artificial. He begins to sense that this hothouse he lives in is the malevolent creation of a demiurge that likes to observe our sufferings, that He and his minions feed on them. In the remote future, should the evil of human innovation continue unchecked, we really will live in the world the Gnostics feared, and that spark of vital life and energy that is the gift of nature to all youthful peoples born from its womb, that spark will remain entrapped in “matter wrongly configured,” matter entirely foreign to its inborn desires and workings, but fashioned instead for the benefit of something else.

It's a blue collar thing... Middle-class kids are groomed to fly away, and they do. The working class likes to keep its young close to home. Tearing a working class person from the network that defines their life is a far heavier lift than insisting that a Harvard grad move to Silicon Valley. The professional elite values change and self-development; working-class families value stability and community. The professional elite associate change with challenge, excitement, opportunity, and innovation. But for families, a few paychecks away form losing their homes and stable middle-class lives, respect for stability reigns supreme.

Where are You Now? I was there whilst you cried, I was there to comfort you with smile, I was there to give you a hand, when all faith was lost. I was there to open doors of opportunities, I was there to share my passion for life, I was there to feed you, when you were hungry. I was there to listen to your turmoil, I was there to lift your spirit when you were broken. I was there when you were ill and alone. I was there when you were betrayed, lied to and ridiculed. I was there to understand, to care and to share. I was there … to play, to sing, to dance, to write, to love, to create and innovate. I was there … Where are you now? … by Natasha Parker

The problem with most smart people is that they are too dumb to distinguish necessity from luxury, that's why despite having the resources to deal with real problems that cause misery to humanity, they keep wasting those resources on pompous dreams. And you can have first-hand experience with such stupidity if you visit any CES event. Whether it is smart toilet or smart underwear, there is no end to intellectual, wealthy and pompous stupidity. Silicon Valley is no longer the valley of innovators who solve problems, it has turned into the valley of resourceful stupidity. They are a bunch of people wasting resources on creating products that do nothing more than fuel the predominant neurosis of consumerism.

as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did, in every part of life, without innovation: that some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth's men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country.

This background enables us to understand a fact that is symptomatic of the current phase of saturation: there are countless people who want to withdraw from the omnipresence of advertising, who even avoid it like the plague. Here too, it is helpful to distinguish between the states before and after. From the perspective of the burgeoning world of products, advertising could be justified by the argument that spreading the word about the existence of new means of life improvements was indispensable, as the populations of industrial and trading nations would otherwise have been cheated of major knowledge about discreet improvements to the world. As the ambassador of new bringers of advantage, early advertising was the general training medium for contemporary performance collectives thoughtlessly denounced in culture-conservative milieus as 'consumer societies'. The aversion to advertising that pervades the saturated infospheres of the present, however, is based on the correct intuition that, in most of its manifestations, it has long since become a form of downward training. It no longer passes on what people should know in order to access advantageous innovations; it creates illusions of purchasable self-elevations that de facto usually lead to weakenings.

We cannot get away from the infinite. It stares us in the face whether we look at atoms or stars, or at the becauses behind the becauses, stretching back through eternity. Flat-earth science has no more use for it than the flat-earth theologians had in the Dark Ages; but a true science of life must let infinity in, and never lose sight of it. In two earlier books I have tried to show that throughout the ages the great innovators in the history of science had always been aware of the transparency of phenomena towards a different order of reality, of the ubiquitous presence of the ghost in the machine -even such a simple machine as a magnetic compass or a Leyden jar. Once a scientist loses the sense of mystery, he can be an excellent technician, but he ceases to be a savant.

WE MAY FEEL...BUT WE DON'T We may feel the need to change employment, but we don’t. We may feel the need to start a specific project, but we don’t. We may feel the need to pursue higher education, but we don’t We may feel the need to heal a broken relationship, but we don’t. We may feel the need to work to improve our spiritual lives, but we don’t. We may feel the need to take steps toward a healthier physical or emotional life for ourselves and/or our family, but again, we don’t. (This list could likely go on for eternity.) The desire for progression is innate, but the problem we face is that the actual act of progression is also a choice. Without embracing our inherent need for progress, for positive growth and/or change, we’ll still go on living. ...But at what cost?

Einstein said, “ Imagination is more important than knowledge,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find schools or corporations that invest in people with those priorities. The systems of education and professional life, similar by design, push the idea-finding habits of fun and play to the corners of our minds, training us out of our creativity.[117] We reward conformance of mind, not independent thought, in our systems — from school to college to the workplace to the home — yet we wonder why so few are willing to take creative risks.

Might one not say that in the chance combination of nature's production, since only those endowed with certain relations of suitability could survive, it is no cause for wonder that this suitability is found in all species that exist today? Chance, one might say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number turned out to be constructed in such fashion that the parts of the animal could satisfy its needs; in another, infinitely greater number, there was neither suitability nor order: all of the later have perished; animals without a mouth could not live, others lacking organs for reproduction could not perpetuate themselves: the only ones to have remained are those in which were found order and suitability; and these species, which we see today, are only the smallest part of what blind fate produced.

Therefore, having a lot is not immoral. It is the good luck to be born in America or Japan or Denmark. The “luck” consists chiefly of a modern liberal ideology of innovism combined with reasonably honest courts and reasonably secure property rights and reasonably non-extractive governments and reasonably effective educational systems, and a reasonably long time for the reasonably good ideas, and especially the innovations, to do their work. By all means let’s spread the good luck around—by persuading people to a modern liberalism leading to the Great Enrichment, and a full life.

To achieve SEAL-worthy success, you must: • establish your set point, turning a deep sense of values and purpose into a touchstone that will keep your feet in the sand and your eyes on the goal • develop front-sight focus so nothing can derail you on your way to victory • bulletproof your mission to inoculate your efforts against failure • do today what others won’t so you can achieve tomorrow what others can’t • get mentally and emotionally tough, and eliminate the “quit” option from your subconscious • break things and remake them, improving them through innovation and adaptation • build your intuition to utilize the full range of your innate wisdom and intelligence • think offense, all the time, to surprise your competition and dominate the field • train for life to develop mastery of your physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual selves Though many of the

Let me give a simple example. The Uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90 per cent less frustrating. This innovation came from the founder’s flash of insight (while watching a James Bond film, no less*) that, regardless of what we say, we are much bothered by the uncertainty of waiting than by the duration of a wait. The invention of the map was perhaps equivalent to multiplying the number of cabs on the road by a factor of ten – not because waiting times got any shorter, but because they felt ten times less irritating.

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth. Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock. During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it’s fun to do. But there’s a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their “low contracted prejudices.” And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace, rather than fear, the cosmic perspective.

The case I’ve presented in this book suggests that humans are undergoing what biologists call a major transition. Such transitions occur when less complex forms of life combine in some way to give rise to more complex forms. Examples include the transition from independently replicating molecules to replicating packages called chromosomes or, the transition from different kinds of simple cells to more complex cells in which these once-distinct simple cell types came to perform critical functions and become entirely mutually interdependent, such as the nucleus and mitochondria in our own cells. Our species’ dependence on cumulative culture for survival, on living in cooperative groups, on alloparenting and a division of labor and information, and on our communicative repertoires mean that humans have begun to satisfy all the requirements for a major biological transition. Thus, we are literally the beginnings of a new kind of animal.1 By contrast, the wrong way to understand humans is to think that we are just a really smart, though somewhat less hairy, chimpanzee. This view is surprisingly common. Understanding how this major transition is occurring alters how we think about the origins of our species, about the reasons for our immense ecological success, and about the uniqueness of our place in nature. The insights generated alter our understandings of intelligence, faith, innovation, intergroup competition, cooperation, institutions, rituals, and the psychological differences between populations. Recognizing that we are a cultural species means that, even in the short run (when genes don’t have enough time to change), institutions, technologies, and languages are coevolving with psychological biases, cognitive abilities, emotional responses, and preferences. In the longer run, genes are evolving to adapt to these culturally constructed worlds, and this has been, and is now, the primary driver of human genetic evolution. Figure 17.1.

All this attempt to control... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old... The basic idea of science - that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational - that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn't really work any more. It didn't work economically, it didn't work intellectually, and it didn't fit the new world that was emerging... But now... science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting to not fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it can not tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways - air, and water, and land - because of ungovernable science... At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn't make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Godel's theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know what we call 'reason' is just an arbitrary game. It's not special, in the way we thought it was. And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rain storms we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old - the dream of total control - has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly... We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now... it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question - What should I do with my power? - which is the very question science says it cannot answer.

Why do you think so few women run away? WHy do you think nothing really changes for book eaters, century after century?”…. “We lack imagination,” Devon said, relentless. “Even if we used dictaphone and scribes, we’d never be able to write books the way humans can. We struggle to innovate, are barely able to adapt, and end up stuck in our traditions. Just eating the same books generation after generation, thinking along the same rigid lines. Creativity is our world and yet we aren’t creative.”…… ‘Our childhood books always end in marriage and children. Women are taught not to envision life beyond those bounds, and men are taught to enforce those bounds. We grow up in a cultivated darkness and not even realize we are blind.”……. “I should have run sooner,” Devon said, voice cracking a little. “But I didn’t. Know what really stopped me? My lack of imagination, the same one that all ‘eaters suffer from. I could not imagine a better or different future, Hes, and because I couldn’t imagine it, I assumed it didn’t exist.” Her throat was lumping up. “I was wrong. Life can be different.

Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes. You are more likely to come up with a good idea focusing on one outlier than on ten average users. We were discussing this recently in a meeting when a round of sandwiches arrived. ‘This proves my point exactly,’ I said, pointing at the food. The sandwich was not invented by an average eater. The Earl of Sandwich was an obsessive gambler, and demanded food in a form that would not require him to leave the card table while he ate. Weird consumers drive more innovation than normal ones. By contrast, it is perfectly possible that conventional market research has, over the past fifty years, killed more good ideas than it has spawned, by obsessing with a false idea of representativeness.

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.

With the invention of the city and its powerful combination of economies of scale coupled to innovation and wealth creation came the great divisions of society. Our present social network structures barely existed in their present form until urban communities evolved. Hunter-gatherers were significantly less hierarchical, more egalitarian and community oriented than we are. The struggle and tension between unbridled individual self-enhancement and the care and concern for the less fortunate has been a major thread running throughout human history, especially over the past two hundred years. Nevertheless, it seems that without the motive of self-interest our entrepreneurial free market economy would collapse. The system we have evolved critically relies on people continually wanting new cars and new cell phones, new widgets and gadgets, new clothes and new washing machines, new thrills, new entertainment, and pretty much new everything, even when they already have enough of “everything.” It may not be a pretty picture and it doesn’t work for everyone, but so far, it’s worked remarkably well for most of us, and apparently most of us seem to want it to continue. Whether it can is a topic I’ll return to in the last chapter.

Ever since then 'Buela is convinced I have magical hands when it comes to cooking. And I don't know if I really have something special, or if her telling me I got something special has brainwashed me into believing it, but I do know I'm happier in the kitchen than anywhere else in the world. It's the one place I let go and only need to focus on the basics: taste, smell, texture, fusion, beauty. And something special does happen when I'm cooking. It's like I can imagine a dish in my head and I just know that if I tweak this or mess with that, if I give it my special brand of sazón, I'll have made a dish that never existed before. Angelica thinks it's because we live in the hood, so we never have exactly the right ingredients- we gotta innovate, baby. My aunt Sarah says it's in our blood, an innate need to tell a story through food. 'Buela says it's definitely a blessing, magic. That my food doesn't just taste good, it is good- straight up bottled goodness that warms you and makes you feel better about your life. I think I just know that this herb with that veggie with that meat plus a dash of eso ahí will work. And that if everything else goes wrong, a little squeeze of lime and a bottle of hot sauce ain't never hurt nobody.

Of course, the champions of totalitarianism protest that what they want to abolish is "only economic freedom" and that all "other freedoms" will remain untouched. But freedom is indivisible. The distinction between an economic sphere of human life and activity and a noneconomic sphere is the worst of their fallacies. If an omnipotent authority has the power to assign to every individual the tasks he has to perform, nothing that can be called freedom and autonomy is left to him. He has only the choice between strict obedience and death by starvation.1 Committees of experts may be called to advise the planning authority whether or not a young man should be given the opportunity to prepare himself for and to work in an intellectual or artistic field. But such an arrangement can merely rear disciples committed to the parrotIike repetition of the ideas of the preceding generation. It would bar innovators who disagree with the accepted ways of thought. No innovation would ever have been accomplished if its originator had been in need of an authorization by those from whose doctrines and methods he wanted to deviate. Hegel would not have ordained Schopenhauer or Feuerbach, nor would Professor Rau have ordained Marx or Carl Menger. If the supreme planning board is ultimately to determine which books are to be printed, who is to experiment in the laboratories and who is to paint or to sculpture, and which alterations in technological methods should be undertaken, there will be neither improvement nor progress. Individual man will become a pawn in the hands of the rulers, who in their "social engineering" will handle him as engineers handle the stuff of which they construct buildings, bridges, and machines. In every sphere of human activity an innovation is a challenge not only to ali routinists and to the experts and practitioners of traditional methods but even more to those who have in the past themselves been innovators. It meets at the beginning chiefly stubborn opposition. Such obstacles can be overcome in a society where there is economic freedom. They are insurmountable in a socialist system.

But what lies ahead for those who are young now? I can say with confidence that their future will depend more on science and technology than any previous generation’s has done. They need to know about science more than any before them because it is part of their daily lives in an unprecedented way. Without speculating too wildly, there are trends we can see and emerging problems that we know must be dealt with, now and into the future. Among the problems I count global warming, finding space and resources for the massive increase in the Earth’s human population, rapid extinction of other species, the need to develop renewable energy sources, the degradation of the oceans, deforestation and epidemic diseases—just to name a few. There are also the great inventions of the future, which will revolutionise the ways we live, work, eat, communicate and travel. There is such enormous scope for innovation in every area of life. This is exciting. We could be mining rare metals on the Moon, establishing a human outpost on Mars and finding cures and treatments for conditions which currently offer no hope. The huge questions of existence still remain unanswered—how did life begin on Earth? What is consciousness? Is there anyone out there or are we alone in the universe? These are questions for the next generation to work on.

think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.

To a foreigner, it must have seemed that Russia had become the land of ten thousand lines. For there were lines at the tram stops, lines before the grocer, lines at the agencies of labor, education, and housing. But in point of fact, there were not ten thousand lines, or even ten. There was one all-encompassing line, which wound across the country and back through time. This had been Lenin’s greatest innovation: a line that, like the Proletariat itself, was universal and infinite. He established it by decree in 1917 and personally took the first slot as his comrades jostled to line up behind him. One by one every Russian took his place, and the line grew longer and longer until it shared all of the attributes of life. In it friendships were formed and romances kindled; patience was fostered; civility practiced; even wisdom attained. If one is willing to stand in line for eight hours to purchase a loaf of bread, the lone figure thought, what is an hour or two to see the corpse of a hero free of charge?

Even stranger than our teeth-brushing behaviour is our preference for stripy toothpaste. When it first appeared, in a product called Stripe, it aroused a great deal of debate over how it was made. Many people dissected the empty container; others froze a full tube and then cut it open in a cross section.* What was strange was that nobody ever asked ‘Why?’ After all, the moment toothpaste enters your mouth, all the ingredients are mixed together, so what was the point of keeping them separate in the tube? There are two explanations: 1) simple childish novelty and 2) psycho-logic. Psychologically, the stripes serve as a signal: a claim that a toothpaste performed more than one function (fighting cavities, tackling infection and freshening breath) was thought to be more convincing if the toothpaste contained three visibly separate active ingredients. In general, people are impressed by any visible extra effort that goes into a product: if you simply say ‘this washing powder is better than our old powder’, it is a hollow claim. However, if you replace the powder with a gel, a tablet or some other form, the cost and effort which have gone into the change make it more plausible to the purchaser there may have been some real innovation in the new contents.

Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.

Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were questioned and re-evaluated, often while being praised at the same time. But where there had been conventional modes of expression, reflecting ideal modes of behaviour - religious, heroic, or social - Renaissance writing explored the geography of the human soul, redefining its relationship with authority, history, science, and the future. This involved experimentation with form and genre, and an enormous variety of linguistic and literary innovations in a short period of time. Reason, rather than religion, was the driving force in this search for rules to govern human behaviour in the Renaissance world. The power and mystique of religion had been overthrown in one bold stroke: where the marvellous no longer holds sway, real life has to provide explanations. Man, and the use he makes of his powers, capabilities, and free will, is thus the subject matter of Renaissance literature, from the early sonnets modelled on Petrarch to the English epic which closes the period, Paradise Lost, published after the Restoration, when the Renaissance had long finished. The Reformation gave cultural, philosophical, and ideological impetus to English Renaissance writing. The writers in the century following the Reformation had to explore and redefine all the concerns of humanity. In a world where old assumptions were no longer valid, where scientific discoveries questioned age-old hypotheses, and where man rather than God was the central interest, it was the writers who reflected and attempted to respond to the disintegration of former certainties. For it is when the universe is out of control that it is at its most frightening - and its most stimulating. There would never again be such an atmosphere of creative tension in the country. What was created was a language, a literature, and a national and international identity.

A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container. The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques. “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.” Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.

When I was growing up it was still acceptable—not to me but in social terms—to say that one was not interested in science and did not see the point in bothering with it. This is no longer the case. Let me be clear. I am not promoting the idea that all young people should grow up to be scientists. I do not see that as an ideal situation, as the world needs people with a wide variety of skills. But I am advocating that all young people should be familiar with and confident around scientific subjects, whatever they choose to do. They need to be scientifically literate, and inspired to engage with developments in science and technology in order to learn more. A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it. I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.