Chance Favors The Connected Mind.

This Is How Great Intellectual Breakthroughs Usually Happen In Practice. It Is Rarely The Isolated Genius Having A Eureka Moment Alone In The Lab. Nor Is It Merely A Question Of Building On Precedent, Of Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants, In Newton's Famous Phrase. Great Breakthroughs Are Closer To What Happens In A Flood Plain: A Dozen Separate Tributaries Converge, And The Rising Waters Lift The Genius High Enough That He Or She Can See Around The Conceptual Obstructions Of The Age.

Most Of The Time, Criticism That Takes Pop Culture Seriously Involves Performing Some Kind Of Symbolic Analysis, Decoding The Work To Demonstrate The Way It Represents Some Other Aspect Of Society.

Keeping A Slow Hunch Alive Poses Challenges On Multiple Scales. For Starters, You Have To Preserve The Hunch In Your Own Memory, In The Dense Network Of Your Neurons. Most Slow Hunches Pass In And Out Of Our Memory Too Quickly, Precisely Because They Possess A Certain Murkiness. You Get A Feeling That There's An Interesting Avenue To Explore, A Problem That Might Lead You To A Solution, But Then You Get Distracted By More Pressing Matters And The Hunch Disappears. So Part Of The Secret Of Hunch Cultivation Is Simple: Write Everything Down.

What You End Up Seeing When You Look At History Is That People Who Have Been Good At Pushing The Boundaries Of Possibility, And Exploring Those Frontiers Of Good Ideas And Innovations, Have Rarely Done It In Moments Of Great Inspiration. They Don't Just Have A Brilliant Breakthrough Idea Out Of Nowhere And Leap Ahead Of Everyone Else.

The Adjacent Possible Is A Kind Of Shadow Future, Hovering On The Edges Of The Present State Of Things, A Map Of All The Ways In Which The Present Can Reinvent Itself.