Idea Selection Quotes

I have lots of ideas. Trouble is, most of them suck.

How did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us - computers and cell phones and so on? There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered. And the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

Ideas come mostly bottoms-up. They come when you have a free flow of ideas and you have people able to combine multiple ideas into one concept... And you've got to have competition, too. You've got to say, 'We're going to have 10 different ideas, nine of them are going to fail, and the one that does the best is going to move forward.'

The 4th Concept is welcomed and encouraged. In the end, it's my hope and belief that the best ideas are what will be used in these detectors.

There's usually some process by which a potentially great idea gets prostituted into something lacklustre, or by which the wrong idea gets put forward.

If I had 10 ideas and people said yes to all of them, half of them could be crap. But, if I've got 10 ideas and we really only have the budget for one of them, then we have to pick the best one that is our most creative element.

From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.

Back when I was jamming with Axl and the guys they had boxes of cassettes with song ideas. How do you know which ones you like now when you have that many ideas.

At some point in the idea process, I simply wear myself down and force myself to choose. But here's the thing: Once I do choose, suddenly all the other possibilities wither and die, and thus I never have a backlog of well-formed ideas waiting for me when my latest book gets finished.

The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around.

My problem is never ideas. I've got more than I'll ever have time to write. It's all about how many I can get to, and which ones readers want to see the most.

When you become sufficiently expert in the state of the art, you stop picking ideas at random. You are thoughtful in how to select ideas and how to combine ideas. You are thoughtful about when you should be generating many ideas versus pruning down ideas.

Deciding which ideas to save and which ideas to discard is one of society's most important tasks.

When you're writing on someone else's show, you don't have to think as hard about nailing the perfect tone because you're kind of just like, 'Here's 20 ideas I thought of, and they can just pick the closest.'

You don't have to release everything you do. Some ideas need to just stay on the shelf.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

If I'm excited about it, I'm pretty sure an audience is going to enjoy it. If I'm bored with an idea, you can bet they're going to be asleep. So I try to only do things that I'm fairly excited about.

In life you must often choose between getting a job done or getting credit for it. In science, the most important thing is not the ideas you have but the decision which ones you choose to pursue. If you have an idea and are not doing anything with it, why spoil someone else's fun by publishing it?

The problem is when you get forced to use ideas that aren't good. When I can filter the ideas and use the best of them, I am happy to collaborate.