Quotes About Innovation

In the contemporary rendition, it's not that the slave technology grows stronger than us and learns to disobey our commands—it's that we deteriorate to the level of the machines. Smart technology makes us dumber.

Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn't the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace.

Amazingly, life went on largely undisturbed as Chesbrough's team raised the city's buildings. One British visitor observed a 750-ton hotel being lifted, and described the surreal experience in a letter: "The people were in [the hotel] all the time coming and going, eating and sleeping—the whole business of the hotel proceeding without interruption

Sooner or later, there's always a Jaws: a mental hurdle we can't clear, a decision too dangerous to attack head on. In those situations, sideways is forward.

Motivation is what gets you into this game; learning is what helps you continue to play; creativity is how you steer; and flow is how you turbo-boost the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations.

Flirting has to be the original form of guerrilla marketing, from back before markets even existed.

Creativity has a brain wave signature as well: alpha waves pulsing out of the brain's right hemisphere.

Abraham Maslow once famously said,22 "When all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." What he meant was, when it comes to problem-solving, we tend to get locked into using familiar tools in expected ways.

We all see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Imagination," says futurist and philosopher Jason Silva, "allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.

This means flow packs a double punch: it doesn't just increase our decision-making abilities—it increases our creative decision-making abilities. Dramatically.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his masterwork, Creativity.

Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger's device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories — for example, learning to play scales — then translates them into digital signals.

They are deliberately cultivating these states to solve critical challenges and outperform their competition. It isn't just grit, or better habits, or longer hours that are separating the best from the rest. To hear these trail-blazers tell it, the insights they receive in those states are what make all the difference.

When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It's the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?

That's why people who seek out group flow often join startups or work for themselves. Serial entrepreneurs keep starting new business as much for the flow experience, as for the additional success.

Guilford also realized that divergent thinking wasn't entirely free wheeling: It had four core characteristics. Fluency, the ability to produce a great number of ideas in a short time-frame; flexibility, the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles; originality, the ability to produce novel ideas; elaboration, the ability to organize those ideas and execute on them.

The quality most desirable in a CEO? According to a global survey conducted by IBM of 1,500 top executives in sixty countries: creativity.

creativity triggers flow; then flow enhances creativity.

That thrust was now being expressed in new forms, based on steel-frame construction, which allowed newspaper offices and insurance buildings to rise above the towering spire of Trinity Church; and Martin imagined great structures hundreds of stories high, each a city in itself, rising across the land.

It's both an alternative history of the novel and a history of the alternative novel.

There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.

As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47

human material existence is limited by ideas, not by stuff.