We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
Interpretation
Connecting ideas leads to greater innovation and collaboration than merely guarding them.
This quote emphasizes the importance of collaboration and the exchange of ideas. It suggests that sharing and connecting different concepts can lead to more significant advancements and insights than simply holding onto ideas tightly, which can stifle creativity and growth.
In practice
In a team meeting discussing new project strategies.
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.
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.
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.
It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies.
Until you have lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
Always remember that your calmness under fire is your best defense in any argument or discussion.
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.
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