“Give people what they want in a way they're not expecting.”

“It's tough to be good at something you're not interested in. It's nearly impossible to be great at something you're not obsessed with.”

Rebecca Solnit - “underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.” https://t.co/hfVXl0yIp2

Combinatorial innovation is a cultural process for invention by which existing ideas are combined in novel ways to create new ideas. The resulting output is fed back into the process to generate more new ideas, ad infinitum. As more ideas are explored, more possibilities present themselves.

in order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.

One form of originality is creation. Another form is synthesis.

People often focus so much on creating new ideas that they overlook the value of synthesizing ideas from different sources.

Innovation usually mean connecting previously unconnected concepts.

Research as leisure activity is directed by passions and instincts . It’s fundamentally very personal: What are you interested in now ? It’s fine, and maybe even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. And if one topic leads you to another topic that seems totally unrelated, that’s something to get excited about—no... See more

The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play . It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on idea... See more

the best content on the internet is created by people who have turned research into their leisure activity.