(highlight:: You always find these people where you’re like, “Oh, I thought this was a Steve Jobs idea.” No, no. It’s an [Sony founder] Akio Morita idea, or an Edwin Land idea.
Watch the presentations that Steve Jobs gives where he says, “We’re building at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.” Edwin Land said those exact words!
You’re never going to find anybody who gets to the top of the profession without studying the people that came before them and learning from them and admiring them.)
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- [note::"Everything is a remix" - almost every thought you've had has been thought of by someone else in one form or another. As such, there are very few truly original ideas. Most ideas deemed "original" are just recycled and combined versions of ideas that came before.
This is basically what the show "Connections" with James Burke was all about.]

(highlight:: The question is: Did George Wheelwright know that he would influence Edwin Land, who would then influence Steve Jobs, who would then design a phone that 2.5 billion people would use?
Did Michael Faraday, who died in 1867, know that his ideas would directly influence the light bulb, which effectively led to the creation of everything from the modern power grid to nightlife?
Did Ben Graham know that his 1950s finance class would lead to 45,000 trekking to Omaha every year to hear his student speak?
Of course not. It’s so hard to know what an idea, or an invention, or a philosophy, will influence, and what a person who’s influenced by it will go on to create.)
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- [note::This is the real tragedy of human progress. We often research, collaborate, and innovate without truly knowing how our work will influence the work that comes after us.
And what's sometimes the case is that the most grueling, obscure, unsexy work is a prerequisite for the most transformative innovations.]

(highlight:: Ideas compound.
Inventions compound.
Education compounds.
A trivial thing can grow into a massive thing, and faster than most people realize.)
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It’s ideas combining, joining, and merging, that create the modern world.
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- [note::What are the best mechanisms/strategies to facilitate "idea sex"? Are there concepts in collaborology related to this question?]

(highlight:: Ridley once explained this further:
I’m not interested in the debate about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s than other groups. It’s completely irrelevant. What’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they’re cooperating, not how clever the individuals are.)
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- [note::Love this quote - is this really true though? Places like Bell Labs come to mind (i.e. put smart people in the same room and see what happens).
I think EA could do a better job cultivating this kind of mindset. Our ingenuity arises from our collective, not individual intelligence.]

Technological progress is easy to underestimate because it’s so counterintuitive to see how, for example, the philosophies of a guy who invented Polaroid film would go on to inspire the iPhone. Or how an 18th-century physicist would write a notebook that would set the foundations for a modern electrical system.
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