What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.
Interpretation
Innovations and breakthroughs often come from persistent exploration rather than sudden inspiration.
In this quote, Steven Johnson emphasizes that significant advancements and ideas typically emerge from consistent effort and exploration rather than from spontaneous moments of inspiration. He suggests that those who push the boundaries of what is possible do so through a continuous process of inquiry and experimentation, rather than relying on sudden flashes of brilliance.
In practice
In a presentation about the importance of perseverance in innovation, this quote could highlight that true creativity often takes time and effort.
How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.
Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.
The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.
I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.
They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night.
We are Physical, Mental and Spiritual beings. If you don't deal with ALL OF LIFE you're not going to get all that life has to offer.
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
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