Steven Johnson People Quotations

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

What's encouraging is that the early new platforms - Kindle and iPad - are clearly leading to people buying more books. The data is in on that.

Some of these folks were in terrible straits. People were put in severe financial jeopardy as a result of incurring incredibly high health care expenses.

Those groups have done a lot of good work, but there is room for a group like ours to step in and literally walk people through what's available to them, and make sure they are treated fairly.

People argue that heavy trucks require longer braking distances for any given speed, and lower truck speeds help equalize the stopping distance. On the other hand, opponents of lower truck speed limits have suggested that the differential speeds increase speed variance and therefore have a negative impact on highway safety. Our research demonstrates that it is likely that both of these arguments are correct.

The break was really good for me and the team. A lot of people used the time to heal up their injuries.

Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.

Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.

How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.