Powers of Two Quotes

“The individuals in great dyads will be very different from each other and very much alike. These simultaneous extremes generate the deep rapport and energizing friction that define a creative pair.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: How Relationships Drive Creativity

“High-level creative exchange depends on both hierarchical and fluid power relationships.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: How Relationships Drive Creativity

“Any system that focuses on order at the exclusion of disorder soon becomes a rigid, homogeneous equilibrium system where no change is likely or even possible.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

“infinite games are constantly adjusted so that both players can remain standing.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

“Unfettered thinking generates the thousand. Analytical thinking helps us see the one that works.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

“balance our fundamental urge for connection with the urge to experience our own agency.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

“We need to be able to get wired up without overheating, and disconnect without going cold.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

“After you’ve found your voice,” Collins continued, “you realize there’s only one person to imitate and that’s yourself … This allows you to be authentic. That’s one of the paradoxes of the writing life, that the way to originality is through imitation.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

“Rilke said it again: “Go within, and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth … For the creative artist must be a world of his own and must find everything within himself and in nature, to which he has betrothed himself.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

“so if a side of ourselves is not getting expressed—say, we are all ‘persona’ but no ‘shadow’—we unconsciously seek out compensatory opposites, often via relationships”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs

“We come to ourselves by giving up the self. The psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues, including his wife, Elaine Aron, help bring this peculiar truth to life with “self-expansion theory.” Aron argues that people are motivated, down to their core, by a wish to become more. One achieves this self-expansion most consistently and dramatically by forming a new attachment with another person, whereby “the resources, perspectives, and identities of a close other are experienced, to some extent, as one’s own.” Two people do more than get to know each other or come to love each other. They absorb each other.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: How Relationships Drive Creativity

“An argument can be made—a rigorous, persuasive argument—that every good new thing results from a teeming complexity.”
― Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: How Relationships Drive Creativity