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.

Burt, Ronald S. “Social Contagion and Innovation: Cohesion Versus Structural Equivalence.” American Journal of Sociology 92, no. 6 (1987): 1287. ―――. Social Origins of Good Ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003. http://www.uchicago.edu/​fac/ronald.burt/research/SOGI.pdf.

Wright, Robert. NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.

A good

De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors

When you think about ideas in their native state of neural networks, two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing.

evolution has, in a sense, “tuned” the error rate to the optimal balance between too much mutation and too much stability.

Gruber, Howard E. “Networks of Enterprise in Creative Scientific Work.” In Psychology of Science: Contributions to Metascience, edited by Barry Gholson et al., 246. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ―――. “The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work.” Creativity Research Journal 1, no. 1 (1988): 27–51.