Steven Johnson





Steven Johnson

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June 06, 1968 in The United States

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About this author

Steven Johnson is the author of the bestsellers Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and Mind Wide Open, as well as Emergence and Interface Culture. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites—most recently, outside.in—and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.


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Steven Johnson isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but he does have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from his feed.

People often ask me about my research techniques. You would think this would be a relatively straightforward question, but the truth is that I have to keep changing my answer, because my techniques are constantly shifting as new forms of search or discovery become possible. Right now, I'm in that thrilling stage of writing-while-still-researching my next book, and I just went through a little epis...

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Published on December 14, 2011 10:09 • 57 views
Average rating: 3.79 · 10,733 ratings · 2,092 reviews · 15 distinct works
The Ghost Map: The Story of Lo...
3.86 of 5 stars 3.86 avg rating — 5,360 ratings — published 2006 — 17 editions
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Everything Bad is Good for You
3.48 of 5 stars 3.48 avg rating — 1,866 ratings12 editions
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Where Good Ideas Come From: Th...
4.05 of 5 stars 4.05 avg rating — 988 ratings11 editions
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Emergence: The Connected Lives...
3.89 of 5 stars 3.89 avg rating — 863 ratings8 editions
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The Invention of Air
3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 avg rating — 805 ratings — published 2008 — 9 editions
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Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and...
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 648 ratings — published 1999 — 14 editions
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Interface Culture: How New Tec...
3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 avg rating — 120 ratings — published 1997 — 5 editions
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The Best Technology Writing 20...
3.6 of 5 stars 3.60 avg rating — 20 ratings — published 2009 — 2 editions
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The Innovator's Cookbook
3.0 of 5 stars 3.00 avg rating — 21 ratings — published 2011 — 6 editions
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Street Smart Trivia
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4.0 of 5 stars 4.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2007
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“This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.”
Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map

“Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.”
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation



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