Quotes About Development

If you're trying to "transform reality" you need to give your ideas the time they need to mature; don't just look for sudden epiphanies. Cultivate your hunches.

The poet and the engineer (and the coral reef) may seem a million miles apart in their particular forms of expertise, but when they bring good ideas into the world, similar patterns of development and collaboration shape that process.

A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn't ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative.

A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.

The same pattern appears again and again throughout the evolution of life. Indeed, one way to think about the path of evolution is as a continual exploration of the adjacent possible.

Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of those parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems, or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place. Some of them are, literally, mechanical parts.

today. By the end of 1882, Edison's company is powering electric light for the entire Pearl Street district in Lower Manhattan.

Most hotbeds of innovation have similar physical spaces associated with them: the Homebrew Computing Club in Silicon Valley; Freud's Wednesday salon at 19 Berggasse; the eighteenth-century English coffeehouse. All these spaces were, in their own smaller-scale fashion, emergent platforms.

Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.

somewhere within a thousand years of the first cities emerging, human beings invented a whole new way of inventing.

anti-"lightbulb moment," the idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.

PRESSURE COOKER (1679)

CALCULUS (1684, 1693)

Part of that magic is economic: emergent platforms can dramatically reduce the costs of creation.

The Web is not simply an ecosystem; it is a specific type of ecosystem. It started as a desert, and it has been steadily transforming into a coral reef.

Buckminster Fuller said don't try to change human behavior. It's s a waste of time. Evolution doesn't mess around; the patterns are too deep. Fuller said go after the tools. Better tools lead to better people. Arctic doesn't develop products. We may cultivate them, occasionally, in our own particular way, but our business is change. Significant change.

We all see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness

Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder," wrote Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, and she's not wrong.

The move from self-authoring to self-transforming for example? Fewer than 5 percent of us ever make that jump.

Sow an action and you reap a habit, sow a habit and you reap a character, sow a character and you reap a destiny.

The one commonality was encouragement, a lot of encouragement. In each case, there was a parent or close relative who rewarded any display of talent, and ignored or punished the opposite. Prodigies, it seemed, were made, not born.

Provided the right environment and the proper encouragement, it meant that everyone had a shot at perfection.