Justifying the default system serves a soothing function. It’s an emotional painkiller: If the world is supposed to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it. But acquiescence also robs us of the moral outrage to stand against injustice and the creative will to consider alternative ways that the world could work.

Strong cultures exist when employees are intensely committed to a shared set of values and norms, but the effects depend on what those values and norms are. If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values.

Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.

friend is someone who sees more potential in you than you see in yourself, someone who helps you become the best version of yourself.

Across industries, there were three dominant templates: professional, star, and commitment. The professional blueprint emphasized hiring candidates with specific skills: Founders looked for engineers who could code in JavaScript or C++, or scientists who had deep knowledge about synthesizing proteins. In the star blueprint, the focus shifted from

in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection.

Along with providing time to generate novel ideas, procrastination has another benefit: it keeps us open to improvisation. When we plan well in advance, we often stick to the structure we’ve created, closing the door to creative possibilities that might spring into our fields of vision.

Steve Jobs was famous for making big bets based on intuition rather than systematic analysis.

Shin proposed that when you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea. As a result, you consider a wider range of original concepts and ultimately choose a more novel direction.