Innovative Thinking Quotes

Creativity is just connecting things.

You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

If you aren't making any mistakes, you aren't innovating. If you're making the same mistakes, you aren't learning.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.

For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about.

The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information - this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received--hatred. The great creators--the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors--stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

I've certainly had a number of failures along the way, depending on my own instincts and creativity, some fairly celebrated, at least during their time.

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.

Steve Jobs is considered an amazing genius and made billions of dollars. Sure, we overlook that he didn't pay his share of taxes and didn't believe in charity. But other than these occasional rumblings of dissent, he is pretty much held in high esteem.

I will be the leader of a company that ends up being worth billions of dollars, because I got the answers.

When you are failing, you are forced to be creative, to dig deep and think, night and day.

Elon Musk is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur, having come up with, or been at the founding team of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, PayPal, all different industries that seem to have nothing to do with each other.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.

The creative ability in this town to game a system is extraordinary.

I try to seek out and surround myself with people who just percolate fresh, original, and creative ideas.