Quotes About Innovation

If you're not uncomfortable, then you're probably stuck at an "acceptable level.

it has the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.

Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics.

We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I'm arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic.

Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said

In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it's not commonplace; it's instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard—the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives. The

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital. To

The important thing about little bets is that they're bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This

Think Small, Act Big." It's in this understanding of career capital and its role in mission that we get our explanation for this title. Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of "small" thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a "big" action.

Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, "the superpower of the 21st century.

2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

the months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to earn him quick cash.

These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes.

A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it's an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible. This

True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe a lifestyle, not a series of steps that automatically spit out a mission when completed.

Here's what I respect: creating something meaningful and then presenting it to the world,

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

The superstar effect, in other words, has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted thirty years ago. An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors.

People ask me how I funded my business," he said. "I tell them first I sold one CD, which gave me enough money to sell two." It grew from there.

entrenched companies are often unexpectedly dethroned by start-ups that begin with cheap offerings at the low end of the market, but then, over time, improve their cheap products just enough to begin to steal high-end market share. Grove recognized that Intel faced this threat from low-end processors produced by upstart companies like AMD and Cyrix.

work on contributing a clever piece of computer code to an Open Source project.

Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.

By the early 2000s, however, if you stood on that same street corner, white earbuds would be near ubiquitous. The iPod succeeded not just by selling lots of units, but also by changing the culture surrounding portable music. It became common, especially among younger generations, to allow your iPod to provide a musical backdrop to your entire day—putting the earbuds in as you walk out the door and taking them off only when you couldn't avoid having to talk to another human.

In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive.