"The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank." — Steven Johnson

“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” Johnson says that a key way to get more parts on the table is to put yourself in networks of other creatives who are striving for the same thing. He continues, “What kind of environment creates good

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In 2010 Steven Johnson writes in his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From:

The great driver of scientific and technological innovation [in the last 600 years has been] the increase in our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people, and to borrow other people’s hunches and combine them with our hunches and turn them into something new.