Quotes by Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson

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

Being Wrong

Force

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio – all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

Batteries

Innovation

Radio

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete

Borders

Ideas

May

I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.

Dragons

Games

Sports

If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

Creating

Ideas

People

In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn’t have a command hierarchy. It doesn’t have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.

Boss

Decision

Hands

It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.

Achievement

Flying

President

It may not be possible to ‘win the future,’ in President Obama’s words, but if we’re going to encourage more innovation, it’s not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other’s instruments.

Hard Work

Play

Winning

Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there’s an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.

Memories

Simple

Writing

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

Curiosity

Intellectual

Snow

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Achievement

Art

Average

Batteries

Being Wrong

Borders

Boss

Creating

Curiosity

Decision

Design

Dragons

Dvds

Fans

Flying

Focus

Force

Gadgets

Games

Hands

Hard Work

Ideas

Impossible

Innovation

Instruments

Intellectual

May

Mean

Media

Meetings

Memories

Needs

One Day

Past

People

Permission

Perspective

Play

Practice

President

Radio

Simple

Smart

Snow

Sports

Technology

Thinking

Thrive

Water

Winning

The Future Blueprint

Tool

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

Tool

The Autobiography

Tool

The Behaviour Diary

Tool

The Dating Diary

Tool

The Relationship Therapist

Tool

Quotes by Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson

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

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio – all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete

I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.

If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn’t have a command hierarchy. It doesn’t have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.

It may not be possible to ‘win the future,’ in President Obama’s words, but if we’re going to encourage more innovation, it’s not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other’s instruments.

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

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Topics by Steven Johnson

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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