Quotes About Progress

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them... Environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they want to connect, fuse, recombine.... They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete. The single maxim that runs through the book: Where Good Ideas Come From .

when one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments.

The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.

An event in which you did not achieve your desired outcome (definition of failure).

Failure when analyzed will provide the building blocks for future successes that will be far greater than the failure itself.

They converted their dreams into goals, their goals into steps, and their steps into tasks.

Fulfillment—the Third Ingredient Essential to Producing Passion. Fulfillment is the third ingredient necessary to produce a passion. The good news is that you don't have to do anything extra to develop this ingredient. It happens automatically as you complete each step toward your dream. Each time you complete a task, step, or goal, you think to yourself, "Wow! I did it! I'm that much

Dreams without clearly defined goals, and goals without clearly defined steps, will never be achieved expeditiously or efficiently, and will rarely be achieved at all.

If you're interested in mastery," says University of Cambridge, England, neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, "you have to learn this lesson. To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk—you're just never going to have a breakthrough without it.

The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

Where–if anywhere–do our actual limits lie?

growth. he said that if any feature didnt do that, he was not interested.

there is something really optimistic and inspiring about waking up every day as if it's a new day, and not being defined in terms of who you were yesterday

He had no sympathy for people who wanted to know how things worked, people who wanted to explore things, people who wanted to improve the systems they studied and dreamed about.

in keeping with the Hacker Ethic, no artificial boundaries were maintained.

Arthur Clarke once remarked that the best technology was indistinguishable from magic.

In early 2004, she gave a progress report at a Google Product Strategy meeting. Eric Schmidt asked her how many publishers AdSense had signed up. He figured the number would be in the thousands. But she reported a number well up in the hundreds of thousands. "They almost fell off their chairs," she said. But not Brin. "That's pretty good," he said. Later people would explain to Malone that Brin's "pretty good" is the equivalent of a Nobel Prize.

You can't dwell on problems too early, or they will swamp the virtues and you will decide not to do the project.

engineering comes down to two real principles: The first is that you think of every problem as a system. And every system can be better. No matter how good or bad it is, you can make anything better—