Johnseelybrown

“In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that “something within him” discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him—they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“Here’s my trick: I replace “What if I can’t?” with “What if I don’t?” and I get the push that I need to jump and see what happens. What if I don’t face this fear? How will I feel? Will I be satisfied? I needed to reframe problems as an opportunities to do something great. My family is full of”
― Mona Patel, Reframe: Shift the Way You Think, Work, and Innovate

“Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it.”
― Rollo May, The Cry for Myth

“Turning the “dumb mob” into the ”smart mob” is one of the key challenges of good governance in the age of social media. Bringing deliberative processes to cyberspace, augmenting the ability of ad hoc groups to gather information, analyze it, organize proposals and arguments, model outcomes, compare alternative approaches, and negotiate hybrid “positive sum” solutions –- all of these together might help forge the smart mob (millions of them) out of the dumb mobs that we’ve known until now.”
― Nicolas Berggruen, Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East