Notes & quotes
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”Albert Einstein
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”Scott Adams
“The human spirit requires surprise, variety, and risk in order to enlarge itself. Imagination feeds on novelty. As imagination emaciates, options diminish; the fewer our options, the more bleak our prospects and greater our susceptibility to controls.”
Tom Robbins, author and journalist
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”Charles Mingus
“To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things… A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.”Steve Jobs, in Wired, 1996
“There are no rules in underground cinema, only edges. Technique is considered failed style.”
John Waters, independent filmmaker
“Money is made by beating competition, not by avoiding it.”
Eric Sink, author, The Business of Software
“Nearly all rich and powerful people are not notably talented, educated, charming, or good-looking. They become rich and powerful by wanting to be rich and powerful.”
Paul Arden, former Executive Creative Director, Saatchi & Saatchi
“Today’s consumers don’t ask themsleves as often, ‘What do I want to have that I don’t have already’; they are asking instead, ‘What do I want to experience that I have not experienced yet?”
James Ogilvey, market analyst
“While people do indeed learn alone, they are always enmeshed in society. Language, for example, is a social artifact, and as people learn their way into it, they are simultaneously inserting themselves into a variety of complex, interwoven social systems.”
John Seeley Brown, former head of Xerox PARC
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Hunter S. Thompson, journalist