Quotes from Peter Sims

If you try to shortcut the game, then the game will shortcut you," Jordan said.

recognize the value of seeking out active users and showing them works in progress to develop opportunities and ideas and to see how they react.

Praising ability alone reduces persistence, while praising effort or the processes a person goes through to learn leads to growth mind-set behaviors. Dweck has found this to apply regardless of age.

just failing is not the key; the key is to be systematically learning from failures.

When you hold the world in your palm and inspect it only from a bird's-eye view, you tend to become arrogant— you do not realize that things get blurred when seen from an enormous distance," Yunus wrote.

The problem with this approach was that product developers focused mostly on incrementally improving existing products, rather than coming up with new, potentially breakthrough, ideas.

Mountain biking was an enormous idea and market waiting to be discovered. Anyone learning from those early adopters would have seen it coming.

Practicing little bets frees us from the expectation that we should know everything we need to know before we begin.

Redefining problems and failures as opportunities focuses our attention on insights to be gained rather than worrying about false starts or the risks we're taking. By focusing on doing, rather than planning, learning about the risks and pitfalls of ideas rather than trying to predict them with precision up-front, an experimental approach develops growth mind-set muscles.

the value of prototyping: Potential users of ideas are more comfortable sharing their honest reactions when it's rough

If you look at four-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work," Gregersen observed generally. "But by the time they are six and a half years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.

the emphasis on linear systems, top-down control, relentless efficiency and eradicating failure left little room for creative discovery and trial and error.

You have to catch people making mistakes and make it so that it's cool. You have to make it undesirable to play it safe.

Design is a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe complex, ill-structured problems and develop approaches to solve them.

As education and creativity researcher and author Sir Ken Robinson puts it, "We are educating people out of their creativity." Another major factor is that, for years, organizational management has been developing methods for increasing productivity and minimizing risk and errors that tend to stifle creative experimentation.

You can sit down and spend hours crafting some joke that you think is perfect, but a lot of the time, that's just a waste of time," Ruby explains.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't set out to create one of the fastest-growing startup companies in history; they didn't even start out seeking to revolutionize the way we search for information on the web. Their first goal, as collaborators on the Stanford Digital Library Project, was to solve a much smaller problem: how to prioritize library searches online.

Unlike most CEOs, when trying something new, Jeff Bezos and his senior team (known as the S Team) don't try to develop elaborate financial projections or return on investment calculations. "You can't put into a spreadsheet how people are going to behave around a new product," Bezos will say.

All I really wanted to do was solve an immediate problem

Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.

At the core of this experimental approach, little bets are concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable.

Chris Rock, the Google founders, and Jeff Bezos and his team are examples of people who approach problems in a nonlinear manner using little bets, what University of Chicago economist David Galenson has dubbed "experimental innovators.

two basic types of innovators, which he calls conceptual and experimental.

Experimental innovators like Rock, Brin and Page, Bezos, and Beethoven don't analyze new ideas too much too soon, try to hit narrow targets on unknown horizons, or put their hopes into one big bet. Instead of trying to develop elaborate plans to predict the success of their endeavors, they do things to discover what they should do.