Scott Berkun > Quotes

“People who truly have control over time always have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. A sense of priorities drives their use of time and it can shift away from the ordinary work that’s easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify. They protect their time from trivia and idiocy; these people are time rich. They provide themselves with a surplus of time. They might seem to idle, or relax more often than the rest, but that just might be a sign of their mastery, not their incompetence.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“The Greeks were so committed to ideas as supernatural forces that they created an entire group of goddesses (not one but nine) to represent creative power; the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with calls to them. These nine goddesses, or muses, were the recipients of prayers from writers, engineers, and musicians. Even the great minds of the time, like Socrates and Plato, built shrines and visited temples dedicated to their particular muse (or muses, for those who hedged their bets). Right now, under our very secular noses, we honor these beliefs in our language, as the etymology of words like museum ("place of the muses") and music ("art of the muses") come from the Greek heritage of ideas as superhuman forces.”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“The best lesson from the myths of Newton and Archimedes is to work passionately but to take breaks. Sitting under trees and relaxing in baths lets the mind wander and frees the subconscious to do work on our behalf. Freeman Dyson, a world-class physi- cist and author, agrees: “I think it’s very important to be idle...people who keep themselves busy all the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle.”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“Increasing creativeness doesn’t require anything more than increasing your observations: become more aware of possible combinations.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

“In a recent survey, innovative people — from inventors to scientists, writers to programmers — were asked what techniques they used. Over 70% believed they got their best ideas by exploring areas they were not experts in”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it's lack of clarity.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Self-motivated people thrive when granted independence.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Howard H. Aiken, a famous inventor, said, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”[”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“The love of new ideas is a myth: we prefer ideas only after others have tested them.”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“The most dangerous tradition we hold about work is that it must be serious and meaningless. We believe that we're paid money to compensate us for work not worthwhile on its own. People who are paid the most are often the most confused, for they know in their hearts how little meaning there is in what they do, for others and for themselves. While money provides status, status doesn't guarantee meaning. They're paid well because of how poorly work compensates their souls. Some people don't have souls, of course, but they're beyond the scope of this book. Among those with souls and high-paying but empty jobs, there's a denial of how what they seek is hard to get in the way they're trying to get it.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Nearly every major innovation of the 20th century took place without claims of epiphany.”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“The inability to scale is one of the stupidest arguments against a possibly great idea: greatness rarely scales, and that's part of what made it great in the first place.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“No technique, no matter how good, can turn stupid coworkers into smart ones. And no method can magically make employees trust each other or their boss if they have good reason not to.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“One way to think about epiphany is to imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle. When you put the last piece into place, is there anything special about that last piece or what you were wearing when you put it in? The only reason that last piece is significant is because of the other pieces you’d already put into place. If you jumbled up the pieces a second time, any one of them could turn out to be the last, magical piece. Epiphany works the same way: it’s not the apple or the magic moment that matters much, it’s the work before and after”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“Most people doubt online meetings can work, but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don't work either.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“in the scramble to survive, founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems. This mistake is common enough that Bob Sutton wrote a book, The No-Asshole Rule, to help executives recognize the damage these hires cause to culture.5 No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“the only reason anything good ships is because of the programmers. They are everything. They are not factory employees; they are craftspeople, craftspeople who are the fundamental creative engine of making software.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“In this age, being seen as an “expert” may have little bearing on the “expert’s” ability to do the thing she is supposedly an expert in.”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“Much of what bad managers do is assume their job is simply to find new things to jam and new places to jam them into, without ever believing they need to understand how the system—the system of people known as culture—works.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“What good is something that scales well if it sucks? Why is size the ultimate goal or even a goal at all?”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“We develop ulcers, high blood pressure, headaches, and other physical problems in part because our stress systems aren’t designed to handle the “dangers” of our brave new world: computer crashes, micromanaging bosses, 12-way conference calls, and long commutes in rush-hour traffic.”
― Scott Berkun, Confessions of a Public Speaker

“Making great things requires both intuition and logic, not a dominance of one over the other.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The mystery for why some people you know succeed or fail in life is how courageous they are in pulling people aside and how effective they are in those private conversations we never see.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“With no universal measure for meaning to compare with the seemingly solid accounting for income, we fall into the data trap. Our larger culture, and our pesky parents, push us toward decisions that seem to score well but are blind to the most important elements of healthy careers and meaningful lives.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Professional management was born from the desire to optimize and control, not to lead waves of change.”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“This is one big problem with working remotely: no one believes you have a job at all.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“Einstein said, “ Imagination is more important than knowledge,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find schools or corporations that invest in people with those priorities. The systems of education and professional life, similar by design, push the idea-finding habits of fun and play to the corners of our minds, training us out of our creativity.[117] We reward conformance of mind, not independent thought, in our systems — from school to college to the workplace to the home — yet we wonder why so few are willing to take creative risks.”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“Defensive management is blind to recognizing how obsessing about preventing bad things also prevents good things from happening or sometimes even prevents anything from happening at all.”
― Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

“The future never enters the present as a finished product, but that doesn’t stop people from expecting it to arrive that way.”
― Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation

“Anyone can criticize or accept praise, but initiating a positive exchange is a hallmark of a difference maker.”
― Scott Berkun, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds