Quotes About Exploration

The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you.

endangered joy of serendipity

La cuestión es inventarse formas de explorar los límites posibles de lo que te rodea. Esto puede ser tan sencillo como cambiar el entorno físico en el trabajo, o cultivar un tipo específico de red social, o mantener ciertos hábitos en la forma de buscar y archivar la información.

to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.

The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.

Cities and markets recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the adjacent possible. As long as there is spillover between those minds, useful innovations will be more likely to appear and spread through the population at large.

If the commonplace book tradition tells us that the best way to nurture hunches is to write everything down, the serendipity engine of the Web suggests a parallel directive: look everything up.

JUPITER'S MOONS (1610)

subtle case for the role of error in innovation, because error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

Being wrong on its own doesn't unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.

good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

MICROORGANISMS (1674--1680)

Oscar! You found it! Wow! A flying mitten! Oh, it's only a little bird. I wonder if he stole my mitten to make a snuggly nest. No, he's too small to carry off a mitten. But an eagle could do it! Maybe an eagle took my mitten to keep his baby's head warm.

listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go. — E. E. CUMMINGS

the upper echelon of adventure sport athletes are grappling with the fundamental properties of the universe: gravity, velocity and sanity. They're toying with them, cheating death, refusing to accept there might be limits to what they can accomplish.

Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness

Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder," wrote Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, and she's not wrong.

When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery.

So I'm heading for Truth or Consequences. Aren't we all, says Lorenzo, aren't we all.

When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion.

Members of this school insist that the only way to find an opening to our underground world is to seek out a quiet and secluded spot. Close your eyes. Concentrate your attention inward. Descend.

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

Education is an admirable thing," wrote Oscar Wilde, "but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

And it explains why human beings have always been peripatetic, moving to wherever they can make the best lives. Roots are for trees; people have feet.