Where Good Ideas Come From Quotes

“The dissenting preacher John Mason wrote in 1745: Think it not enough to furnish this Store-house of the Mind with good Thoughts, but lay them up there in Order, digested or ranged under proper Subjects or Classes. That whatever Subject you have Occasion to think or talk upon you may have recourse immediately to a good Thought, which you heretofore laid up there under that Subject. So that the very Mention of the Subject may bring the Thought to hand; by which means you will carry a regular Common Place-Book in your Memory.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“When you work alone in an office, peering into a microscope, your ideas can get trapped in place, stuck in your own initial biases. The social flow of the group conversation turns that private solid state into a liquid network.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Radiation therapy or a double bypass might give you another decade or two, but an incubator gives you an entire lifetime.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“By felling poplars and willows to build dams, beavers single-handedly transform temperate forests into wetlands, which then attract and support a remarkable array of neighbors: pileated woodpeckers drilling nesting cavities into dead trees; wood ducks and Canada geese settling in abandoned beaver lodges; herons and kingfishers and swallows enjoying the benefits of the “artificial” pond, along with frogs, lizards, and other slow-water species like dragonflies, mussels, and aquatic beetles. As do those underwater colonies of coral, the beaver creates a platform that sustains an amazingly diverse assemblage of life.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Hunches that don’t connect are doomed to stay hunches.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

“Está en la naturaleza de las buenas ideas el subirse a hombros de los gigantes que las precedieron, lo que implica que, en alguna medida, toda innovación importante resulta ser fundamentalmente una red.”
― Steven Johnson, Las buenas ideas: Una historia natural de la innovación

“las ideas son como un trabajo de bricolaje: se construyen a partir de restos. Tomamos las que hemos heredado, o nos hemos encontrado por casualidad, y las reorganizamos dándoles nueva forma.”
― Steven Johnson, Las buenas ideas: Una historia natural de la innovación

“That cognitive overlap is what makes this mode so innovative. The current project can exapt ideas from the projects at the margins, make new connections. It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Once key ideas from idea-spaces that otherwise had little contact with one another were connected, they began, quasi-autonomously, to make new sense in terms of one another, leading to the emergence of a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“They weren’t off on separate islands, teaching creative writing seminars or doing design reviews. That physical proximity made the space rich with exaptation: the literary stream of consciousness influencing the dizzying new perspectives of cubism; the futurist embrace of technological speed in poetry shaping new patterns of urban planning.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“endangered joy of serendipity,”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“whether cities or bodies—find productive uses for the waste they create.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original “eureka” moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“THREE LAWS OF MOTION AND ORBITS OF COMETS (1687, 1705)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION (1686)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“CALCULUS (1684, 1693)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“PRESSURE COOKER (1679)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“HOOKE’S LAW (1676)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“SPEED OF LIGHT (FIRST QUANTITATIVE MEASURE) (1676)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“MICROORGANISMS (1674--1680)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“LIGHT SPECTRUM (1665)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“BOYLE’S LAW (1662)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“BALANCE SPRING WATCHES (1660)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“PENDULUM CLOCK (1656)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“VACUUM PUMP (1654)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“MECHANICAL CALCULATOR (1645)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“BAROMETER (1643)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“ANALYTIC GEOMETRY (1637)”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From