Chance Favors The Connected Mind.

Good Ideas May Not Want To Be Free, But They Do Want To Connect, Fuse, Recombine. They Want To Reinvent Themselves By Crossing Conceptual Borders. They Want To Complete Each Other As Much As They Want To Compete

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.

Who Is Giving The Orders To Ants? No One. They Are Self-organizing. Each Of Our Immune Systems Get Smarter Over The Years As Its Biochemical Parts Share Information, And It Responds With Individualized Defenses, But It Isn't Conscious And It Has No Memory. The Host Of That Party Didn't Decree That Everyone Would Gather In The Kitchen, But It Happened Anyway. Emergence Means We Sometimes Act In Concert For Better Or Worse.

Calculus, The Electrical Battery, The Telephone, The Steam Engine, The Radio - All These Groundbreaking Innovations Were Hit Upon By Multiple Inventors Working In Parallel With No Knowledge Of One Another.

It May Not Be Possible To 'win The Future,' In President Obama's Words, But If We're Going To Encourage More Innovation, It's Not Enough For Us To Just Dig In And Work Harder. We Also Need To Encourage Surprise And Serendipity. We Need To Play Each Other's Instruments.