Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
I think there's value in experience and observations that link past to present.
From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island.
As leaders, we become whole when we see that our focused, singular commitment to making the numbers and the metrics cannot be effective on its own, but only when it is part of the whole picture - only when we see that it takes more than metrics to make up the whole.
Everything has been done. It's not possible to create something completely new, something that has never been seen before. It's only possible to make new combinations, establish new connections between things we usually take for granted.
Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight It's great. The problem is there's a million dots at the time.
A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights.
To generate creative ideas, it's important to start from an unusual place. But to explain those ideas, they have to be connected to something familiar.
Almost always, great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before.
Since being at Marvel, I've been watching everything over and over and over again, all the movies, and seeing how all the movies connect has been very satisfying for me.
As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.
Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.
People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots.
Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.
The biggest challenges are fixing the problems, to put all the puzzles together.
The Internet drives you to an immediate resolution of symptoms but may make it harder to get to the essence of the problem. It’s easier to know what people are saying, but the question is whether diplomats have time to connect that with its deeper historical context.
When I was a boy, I'd hide under the kitchen table and wind string around the chairs. I have a sense now that I am pulling on those threads. The more I pull, the more it comes unraveled.
Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it's 4 A.M.
What we're going to do is try to get TSA out of the human resources and personnel business and into the security business to connect the dots.
It's a wonderful feeling being a bridge to the past and unite generations.
Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.
At the breakfast table we are footnoting everything that we read. We don't recognise it as such but we encounter an article in the newspaper and then suddenly we recall that a friend had a certain comment on that particular story, a certain bit of news that we saw on the television applies to that and we immediately assemble an idea of a story.
You ask every conceivable question after Sept. 11 in terms of what more could have been done, what could have been done differently. My impression from working on these cases and investigations for almost nine years was that an awful lot of people were working over time to connect dots.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.
