Ideation Quotes

“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.”

“The proposition that primitive dream imagery might reproduce, albeit imperfectly, the experience of one's ancestors, including their terrors, was rather too existentially charged for post-modern sensitivities, for which the meaningless hypothesis of memory de-junking was much more appealing. Even worse, the notion that one's own ideation, one's own monsters, or indeed oneself as a monster, might be transmitted forward to future generations threatened deeply assumptions about the privacy of the mind and an individual's discretionary power of inviolable concealment over unedifying thoughts.”

“Stable husbanding of the land requires community-wide language and norms for resolving interpersonal conflict, facilitating barter and trade, determining shares of work and output and maintaining organizational hierarchies. Although such social functions are the requisites of community life everywhere, the ways of performing them evolve differently from place to place. Each society develops its practices and sets of myths, symbols and rational justifications, which usually are held to be superior to those of other societies........And just as material reasons for self-sufficiency can turn communities towards economic imperialism, so the ideational justifications for autonomy can turn them into presumptuous civilizers of other peoples.”

“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people… Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue”

“If gods are transcendent ideas, then the idea of a god IS a god.”

“People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you’ll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That’s the way the government does things. They do something really big that’s really bad, and they think, Well, we’ll make it better, and then it never gets better”.Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013”

“There is a strange idea abroad, held by all monetary cranks, that credit is something a banker gives to a man. Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has. He has it, perhaps, because he already has marketable assets of a greater cash value than the loan for which he is asking. Or he has it because his character and past record have earned it. He brings it into the bank with him. That is why the banker makes him the loan. The banker is not giving something for nothing.”

“My best ideas come in the shower, where I’m showered with water, but also ideas.”

“Creativity & innovation is to events, what the heart & soul is to the living”

“Business ideas are like those flying dragons in Avatar. First you have to find one, let it choose you, then be brave enough to ride it.”