Quotes from Tom Kelley

Friedrich Nietzsche said, "All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

So design your space for flexibility instead of inertia and the status quo.

No matter how high you rise in your career, no matter how much expertise you gain, you still need to keep your knowledge and your insights refreshed. Otherwise, you may develop a false confidence in what you already "know" that might lead you to the wrong decision.

Design thinking relies on the natural—and coachable—human ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional.

In our experience, one of the scariest snakes in the room is the fear of failure, which manifests itself in such ways as fear of being judged, fear of getting started, fear of the unknown. And while much has been said about fear of failure, it still is the single biggest obstacle people face to creative success.

Their ultimate "strokes of genius" don't come about because they succeed more often than other people—they just do more, period.

Noticing that something is broken is an essential prerequisite for coming up with a creative solution to fix

you are not limited to only what you have been able to do before.

Great groups are more optimistic than realistic. They believe they can do what no one else has done before. "And the optimists, even when their good cheer is unwarranted, accomplish more," says Warren.

The key is to be quick and dirty—exploring a range of ideas without becoming too invested in only one.

Empathy means challenging your preconceived ideas and setting aside your sense of what your think is true in order to learn what actually is true

relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices.

It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it's what you know for sure that ain't so" Mark Twain

It turns out that creativity isn't some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few—it's a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked. And unblocking that creative spark can have far-reaching implications for yourself, your organization, and your community.

Cool technology alone is not enough. If it were, we'd all be riding Segways and playing with robotic dogs.

Empathy means challenging your preconceived ideas and setting aside your sense of what you think is true in order to learn what actually is true. that people aren't conscious of.

We didn't know as children that we were creative. We just knew that it was okay for us to try experiments that sometimes succeeded and sometimes falied. That we could keep creating, keep tinkering, and trust that something interesting would result if we just stuck with it

That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.