The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes;… — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
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. — Steven Johnson Copy Share Image
Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
“Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
“Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats,… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible. — Steven Johnson Copy Share
The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
“The birth of the civil rights movement was intimately bound up in the spread of jazz music throughout the United States. It was, for… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
“From am overall eclsyste,s perspective, if you're going to have 10million human beings trying to share an environment with other life-forms, it's much better… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
“An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.” — Steven Johnson Copy Share
Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons,… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
“It is a great testimony to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the tiniest life should be… — Steven Johnson Copy Share
