We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. - David Epstein

Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands — conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.

The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose.

We tend to think innovation means chasing the newest technology.

At Nintendo, Gunpei Yokoi saw something different. Instead of competing at the frontier, he combined older, reliable tech in new ways.

The Game Boy was outdated on paper, but it focused on what people actually cared about.

Sometimes the advantage isn’t new technology. It’s seeing new possibilities in what already exists.