Tag: Quotes

The Iconic Think Different Apple Commercial Narrated by Steve Jobs

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Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

— Steve Jobs, 1997

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about creativity and to what extent attitude plays a role.

The most creative people I know are often the ones who have a hell-raiser trait in them, regardless of whether this comes from nature or nurture.

These are people who think different, feel different, behave different. These are the people who can’t easily fit into the square corporate box.

Organizations both value and despise them. They make people uncomfortable. They challenge thoughts, processes, and the status quo. They disrupt and dismiss. They push. They raise the bar for everyone else and they call people out. They’re not being difficult on purpose — they’re being themselves. They see things differently. And that comes with both opportunities and challenges.

Many people — especially those who are less secure about themselves — have a hard time working with people that push boundaries and challenge the way things are done. They don’t want to be challenged. They don’t want the bar raised. They don’t want to explain why something needs to stay the same. All of this, after all, is exhausting. It’s much easier to just ignore, dismiss, or add layers of management to dilute the impact these people can have.

The problem with that approach, however, is that you dilute what your organization is capable of. Embracing people who think differently is not a sign of weakness as a leader (and I’m not advocating for embracing everyone who thinks differently, there is some nuance here). Allowing yourself to hear the perspective of others who think differently is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength.

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Two related Farnam Street Posts:

Steve Jobs on Creativity. Steve Jobs had a lot to say about creativity.

Steve Jobs on The Most Important thing. Life can be so much better once you understand this one simple fact.

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Joseph Tussman: Getting the World to Do the Work for You

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“What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything at all, is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.”

— Joseph Tussman

Nothing better sums up the ethos of Farnam Street than the quote above by Joseph Tussman.

How’s that for a guiding principle?

Tussman was a philosophy professor at Cal Berkley and an educational reformer. We got this beautiful quote from a friend of ours in California. Isn’t it brilliant?

The world will do a lot of the work for us if we only align with how it works and stop fighting it. Most of the time we want the world to work differently so we work against it. What Tussman really does is identify a leverage point.

Leverage amplifies an input to provide a greater output. There are leverage points in all systems. To know the leverage point is to know where to apply your effort. Focusing on the leverage point will yield non-linear results. Doesn’t that sound like something we want to look for?

Working hard and being busy is not enough. Most people are taking two steps forward and one step back. They’re busy, but they haven’t moved anywhere.

We need to work smarter not harder.

What Tussman has done is identify a leverage point in life. One that will increase what you can accomplish (through tailwinds) and reduced friction. When we work smart rather than hard, we apply energy in the same direction.

The person who needs a new mental tool and doesn’t have it is already paying for it. This is how we should be thinking about the acquisition of worldly wisdom. We’re like plumbers who show up with a lot of wrenches but no blowtorches, and our results largely reflect that. We get the job half done in twice the time.

A better approach is the one Tussman suggests. Learn from the world. The best way to identify how the world works is to find the general principles that line up with historically significant sample sizes — those that apply, in the words of Peter Kaufman, “across the geological time scale of human, organic, and inorganic history.”

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Members can discuss this post on the Learning Community Forum. 

Still Curious? Pair with Andy Benoit’s wisdom and make some time to think about them.

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Brené Brown: Your Critics Aren’t Always The Ones Who Count

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Brené Brown, author of Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead with an excellent talk on how we should think about critics.

“If you’re not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.”

—Brené Brown

I love that quote. It’s a play on Roosevelt’s famous quote. A good reminder that not all of your critics carry the same weight.

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“We get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.”

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If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invents a new perpetual-motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised that it doesn’t work. If we confine our attention entirely to the slang of the day, that is to say, if we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature, we get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself. In both cases we are likely to be deceived, and what is more important, to deceive others. Therefore, it is advisable for us in our own interests, quite apart from considerations of personal amusement, to concern ourselves occasionally with a certain amount of our national literature drawn from all ages. I say from all ages, because it is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realises how absolutely modern the best of the old things are.

Rudyard Kipling in A Book of Words

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The role of error in innovation

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The British economist William Stanley Jevons in 1874:

It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part.

From Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation:

“The errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.” This is not merely statistics. It is not that the pioneering thinkers are simply more productive than less “vigorous” ones, generating more ideas overall, both good and bad. Some historical studies of patent records have in fact shown that overall productivity correlates with radial breakthroughs in science and technology, that sheer quantity ultimately leads to quality. But Jevons is making a more subtle case for the role of error in innovation, because error is not simply a phrase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions.

Thomas Khun makes a similar argument for the role of error in Scientific advancement.

And, of course, without error evolution would stagnate. We’d be nothing more than a perfect copy, incapable of adaptation. Luckily, however, DNA—whether in the code itself or in copying mistakes—is susceptible to error so we are always testing new combinations out. “Most of the time,” Johnson writes, “these errors lead to disastrous outcomes, or have no effect whatsoever. But every now and then, a mutation opens up a new wing of the adjacent possible. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s not enough to say “to err is human.” Error is what made humans possible in the first place.”

Still curious? Susan Rosenbery found that “stress” dramatically increases the mutation rates of bacteria.

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Ignorance Increases the Further Away you Are

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While I’m not sure of the math, I enjoyed this quote from Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics:

Ignorance increases the square of the distance from a given event, so the odds that things won’t work out the way you expect must be multiplied by the squares of all the intervening events.

It reminded me of what Peter Bevelin Wrote in Seeking Wisdom:

The more independent steps that are involved in achieving a scenarios, the more opportunities for failure and the less likely it is that the scenario will happen. We often underestimate the number of steps, people, and decisions involved.

Add to this that we often forget that the reliability of a system is a function of the whole system. The weakest link sets the upper limit for the whole chain.

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