Kevin Ashton Quotes

You couldn't sit in a room and wait for your muse to come and tickle you. Monday morning came, there was a dress rehearsal Thursday, you had to get that thing written. And it was grueling, but you learned to write.

His rap was fluid, on time, and in tune. He ad-libbed - or "freestyled" - using a range of poetic tricks, from rhyme and repetition to assonance and alliteration:

author" meant "father," from the Latin word for "master," auctor. Auctor-ship implied authority, something that, in most of the world, had been the divine right of kings and religious leaders since Gilgamesh ruled Uruk four thousand years earlier. It was not to be shared with mere mortals. An "inventor," from invenire, "find," was a discoverer, not a creator, until the 1550s. "Credit," from credo, "trust," did not mean "acknowledgment" until the late sixteenth century.

Creation is not a moment of inspiration but a lifetime of endurance. The drawers of the world are full of things begun. Unfinished sketches, pieces of invention, incomplete product ideas, notebooks with half-formulated hypotheses, abandoned patents, partial manuscripts. Creating is more monotony than adventure. It is early mornings and late nights: long hours doing work that will likely fail or be deleted or erased - a process without progress that must be repeated daily for years. Beginning is hard, but continuing is harder. Those who seek a glamorous life should not pursue art, science, innovation, invention, or anything else that needs new. Creation is a long journey where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don't do is quit. The

But "no" is the button that keeps us on.

The most creative organizations prioritize rituals of doing; the least creative organizations prioritize rituals of saying,

If your idea succeeds, everybody says you're persistent. If it doesn't succeed, you're stubborn.

New tools make new societies.

The art of new, and perhaps the art of happiness, is not absolute victory for either new or old but balance between them. Birds do not defy gravity or let it bind them to the ground. They use it to fly.

Saying no", argues the author Kevin Ashton, "has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know.

Creating is to humans as flying is to birds. It is our nature, our spirit.

A creative organization does not resent conflicts over concepts; it resolves them.

Creating is an ordinary act, creation its extraordinary outcome.

Minds do not leap. Observation, evaluation, and iteration, not sudden shifts of perception, solve problems and lead us to creation.

But Sales + Customers = Nothing Broken is a formula for corporate cyanide.

Saying "no" has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined ...

A species that survives by creating must not limit who can create. More creators means more creations. Equality brings justice to some and wealth to all.

Having ideas is not the same thing as being creative. Creation is execution, not inspiration.

Intellectually secure people do not need to show anyone how smart they are. They are empirical and seek truth. Intellectually insecure people need to show everyone how smart they are. They are egotistical and seek triumph.

they realized that all the published data was wrong - "little better than guesswork" - they had also discovered what knowledge was needed to design wings that would fly.

societies revere creation in public and then reject it in private, creators are surprised and wonder what they did wrong.

There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

Creation demands belief beyond reason.

how to achieve a reasonable synthesis between the forces that drive a person to seek individual expression and those that drive him to comply with the wishes of others.

intrinsic motivation is the only motivation. Inspirational lightning bolts are external - they come from without and are beyond our control.

The business students who build a ten-inch tower would have built a twenty-seven-inch tower when they were in kindergarten. Where did those extra seventeen inches go? What happened to the students in the intervening years? The business students, like most of the rest of us, lost a lot of their capacity to cooperate.

The secret of Steve was that he was never satisfied. He devoted his life to asking, "Why doesn't it work?" and "What should I change to make it work?

Make an enemy of certainty and befriend doubt. When you can change your mind, you can change anything.