The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible.

Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries. Otherwise, your ideas are like carbon atoms randomly colliding with other atoms in the primordial soup without ever forming the rings and lattices of organic life. The challenge, of course, is how

Others, including Priestley and both Darwins, used their commonplace books as a repository for a vast miscellany of hunches.

people tend to condense the origin stories of their best ideas into tidy narratives, forgetting the messy, convoluted routes to inspiration that they actually followed.

This strategy of switching back and forth between asexual and sexual reproduction goes by the name “heterogamy,”

The poet and the engineer (and the coral reef) may seem a million miles apart in their particular forms of expertise, but when they bring good ideas into the world, similar patterns of development and collaboration shape that process.

That organism was Scleractinia, more commonly known as reef-building coral. Alive, an individual Scleractinia is a soft polyp, no more than a few millimeters long. Reef-building corals grow in vast colonies, with new polyps appearing as buds on the sides of their “parents.” It is one of the strange ironies of marine biology that the coral’s

in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.4

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.