Everything Is Connected

Danny Meyer the restaurateur has called ABCD: “always be collecting dots, so that you can always be connecting dots.” Dots or breadcrumbs, if your whole life is oriented around that collection, which mine is, then you're always preparing.

People don’t exist independently of a place. Places bring out who we are.

James Turrell took inspiration from astronomy and perceptual psychology. Coco Chanel was most influenced by nuns and religious symbols. David Adjaye drew from Yoruban sculpture, and Steve Jobs from Zen Buddhism and calligraphy. We could continue this list forever, but that’s not the point. The point is to look outside the confines of our industry t... See more

It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.

When I think of you, I think of community. You’re so devoted to uplifting the voices of others. Can you talk about this impulse in yourself?

What I'm devoted to is the idea that a brain is really the result of its connections to other brains. A life is really the result of its connection to other lives. So we’re the sum of our connections. Those co... See more

Complexity basically means that everything is circuitous and hard to understand. Hard to understand means that the things that lead to the things you want aren't the things you want. They're very complex. So you need to do things like work on vacuum tubes to get to computers because vacuum tubes are in the first computers, even though vacuum tubes ... See more