Giving up Your Best Loved Ideas and Starting Over
“Any year that passes in which you don’t destroy one of your best-loved ideas is a wasted year,” says Charlie Munger. If only it were that easy. It’s mentally hard to come to an opinion and even …
Creativity
Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage
Innovation isn’t a single act, it’s an ongoing process of battling against what’s already established. Change is often not noticeable until it’s too late. The attacker’s advantage is the ability to …
How Do People Get New Ideas?
In a previously unpublished 1959 essay, Isaac Asimov explores how people find new ideas. Echoing Einstein and Seneca, Asimov believes that new ideas come from combining things together. Steve Jobs …
Ideas Are Not Singular
In isolation, good ideas alone are not enough to produce something great. The right people are what make ideas work. Read on to learn about how Pixar used that principle as the basis of its amazing …
Google and Combinatorial Innovation
In his new book, How Google Works, Eric Schmidt argues that “we are entering … a new period of combinatorial innovation.” This happens, he says, when “there is a great availability of different …
Edward Hess, Interview No. 6
This interview with Ed Hess is full of amazing insights but I don’t know if you’ll read it because a) it’s long and we live in a world of increasingly short attention spans and b) it’s an actual …
The Glass Cage: Automation and US
People have worried about losing their jobs to robots for decades now. But how is growing automation really going to change us? Let’s take a look at the limitations of automation and the uniquely …
What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd, has written a book: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions Here are a few questions, which I loved, that are sure to spark your …
Summary: Peter Thiel’s Zero To One
Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and investor who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and was an early investor in companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn, also …
John Keats on the Quality That Formed a Man of Achievement: Negative Capability
John Keats coined the term negative capability to describe the willingness to embrace uncertainty, mysteries and doubts. The first and only time Keats used the phrase was in a letter on 21 December …
Steve Jobs on Creativity
“Originality depends on new and striking combinations of ideas.” — Rosamund Harding In a beautiful article for The Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who has spent decades …
Paying for Outcomes
Iconic typography designer Paula Scher discusses her creative process, including the famous Citi logo. Interestingly, the idea came to her in seconds and that presented a problem for the client. They …
Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” If you were to make a list of the best commencement addresses ever, you’d find this one from Steve Jobs up there with the likes of David Foster Wallace, …
Seneca on Gathering Ideas And Combinatorial Creativity
“Combinatory play,” said Einstein, “seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” Ruminating on the necessity of both reading and writing, so as not to confine ourselves to …
Einstein on The Essential Feature of Productive Thought
“Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” *** There is a view, to which we subscribe that a lot of innovation and creativity comes from the combination of worldly …
the WAR of ART and the Unlived Life
A voracious reader and best-selling author emailed me shortly after my post Anne Lamott: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. He proceeded to tell me the book was full of terrible advice, the …