Category: Notes

Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources.

– Ted Gioia, Music: A Subversive History

We have a lot of intellectual property and so forth, and that is important, but it’s people that create that intellectual property. It’s the culture that creates the innovation with the intellectual property.

– Tim Cook

Innovation requires commando units to move fast and break things. Optimization requires hierarchy and efficiency.

– Brian Arthur

One of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there.

– Steve Jobs

We are trying to solve a problem by looking for answers that resemble what we are accustomed to.

– Inside Orchard

Nothing is guaranteed. It’s full of surprises. The constant lesson of history is the dominant role played by surprise. Just when we are most comfortable with an environment and come to believe we finally understand it, the ground shifts under our feet. Surprise is the rule, not the exception.

– Peter Bernstein

There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Platforms of any type that have a data or informational advantage and network effect tend to vertically integrate. Vertical integration might be a necessary enabler of increasing network effects.

– Brad Slingerlend

The example of great scientists is the light which guides all workers in science, but we must guard against being blinded by it. There has been too much talk about the flash of discovery, and this has tended to obscure the fact that discoveries, however great, can only give effect to some intrinsic potentiality of the intellectual situation in which scientists find themselves.

– Michael Polanyi