When they encountered a situation they didn’t like, they fixed it.

In a rapidly changing world, the lessons of experience can easily point us in the wrong direction. And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable. This makes intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis.

Individual Actions: A. Generating and Recognizing Original Ideas 1. Question the default. Instead of taking the status quo for granted, ask why it exists in the first place. When you remember that rules and systems were created by people, it becomes clear that they’re not set in stone—and you begin to consider how they can be improved.

Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.

The best way to get better at judging our ideas is to gather feedback. Put a lot of ideas out there and see which ones are praised and adopted by your target audience.

Status cannot be claimed; it has to be earned or granted.

To sustain our originality as we age and accumulate expertise, our best bet is to adopt an experimental approach. We can make fewer plans in advance for what we want to create, and start testing out different kinds of tentative ideas and solutions.

The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place.

Originals are people who take the initiative to make their visions a reality.