Mindfire Quotes

“People who truly have control over time always have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. A sense of priorities drives their use of time and it can shift away from the ordinary work that’s easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify. They protect their time from trivia and idiocy; these people are time rich. They provide themselves with a surplus of time. They might seem to idle, or relax more often than the rest, but that just might be a sign of their mastery, not their incompetence.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“Increasing creativeness doesn’t require anything more than increasing your observations: become more aware of possible combinations.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“As a rule, if you insist on speaking your mind, you will inevitably find yourself somewhere where everyone hates you.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“Anyone can criticize or accept praise, but initiating a positive exchange is a hallmark of a difference maker.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“a small idea, applied consistently, can have disproportionately large effects.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“Perfection is attained, not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“to call someone an artist means that they have a sense of higher purpose beyond commerce. Not that they don’t profit from their work, or promote themselves, but that the work itself has spiritual, philosophical, emotional or experiential attributes as central goals.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“At some point, all creative tasks become work. The interesting and fun challenges fade, and the ordinary, boring, inglorious work necessary to bring an idea to the world becomes the reality.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“Progress won’t be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“when you can laugh at your mistake, you know you’ve accepted it and no longer judge yourself on the basis of one single event. Reaching this kind of perspective is very important in avoiding future mistakes. Humor loosens up your psychology and prevents you from obsessing about the past.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“Learning from mistakes requires three things: Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes Having the self-confidence to admit to them Being courageous about making changes”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“information is a form of garbage and yet we're oddly addicted to cramming more of it in our brains.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“Either we don’t read the things we claim we do, or we read them with incompetence, preventing ideas in the book from changing our behavior.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“I call this the challenge of indifference. As we grow up we’re taught self-control, how to focus ourselves, and how to tune out things that are “wrong” or “juvenile” or “wastes of time.” We become indifferent to the whims of the child mind, trading it in for suits and resumes—the tools of success in the adult world.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“somewhere in the wash of interactions and split attentions is the missed possibility we’re looking for: meaning. Depth of experience. Connection.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“Persistence at a poorly defined problem is futile, and talent applied to an unsolvable problem is worthless. The challenge is knowing how to define problems with enough constraints to help creativity, but not so many that creativity, or any solution, is impossible. Mastering this skill is one secret that explains who successfully makes things and who doesn’t.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“When an idea is fully formed in your head, there’s no escaping the fact that for the idea to change the world, it has to leave your brain—a journey that only happens with hard work and dedication.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“self-knowledge. You can’t be productive as a creator if you’re not paying attention to your own behavior and cultivating the unique wonder in this universe that is you.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“Over time, creative masters learn to find, evaluate, and explore more combinations than other people. They get better at guessing which combinations will be more interesting, so their odds improve. They also learn there are patterns that can be used to develop new ideas.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“an idea is a combination of other ideas.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“Until you work backwards from the moments, hours or days before the actual mistake occured, you probably won’t see all of the contributing factors and can’t learn all of the possible lessons. The more complex the mistake, the further back you’ll need to go and the more careful and open-minded you need to be in your own investigation.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds