{"author":"Steven Johnson","author_id":"Steven+Johnson","total_quotes":30,"quotes":[{"text":"Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["history","ideas","innovation","internet"],"id":11340,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"},{"text":"Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["ideas","innovation","insightful"],"id":18984,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"},{"text":"The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["ideas","innovation","life-long-learning","living-life","open-mindedness","opportunity"],"id":20077,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"},{"text":"When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["good-ideas","innovation","permission"],"id":46951,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"},{"text":"Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["cholera","epidemics","history"],"id":60164,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"},{"text":"That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["assumptions","conventional-wisdom","simplicity"],"id":66286,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"},{"text":"We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["good","focus","changes "],"id":73735,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"},{"text":"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.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["good","great","moments "],"id":107296,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"},{"text":"Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["failure","good-ideas","innovation"],"id":127813,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"},{"text":"Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.","author":"Steven Johnson","tags":["history","hobbies","innovation","self-improvement"],"id":136239,"author_id":"Steven+Johnson"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":30,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}