“We chase after features, so is simplicity overrated? No, customers just want simple decisions as much as simple products.

“When we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

To decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.

“A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting on orange juice and Ryvita biscuits. An unemployed man doesn’t.

“At 80 we’re aging at the average rate of only 1 1/4% per year. That’s a lot better than younger people.

“I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

“The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff on the path they tried.

“All of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—represents something like 100 million hours of human thought.

The U.S. spends 100 million hours every weekend just watching ads.

“The life of a microcelebrity resembles the fate of Sisyphus. After every tour I feel exhausted but empowered by the thought that a few people really care a lot about this music. Yet, a few months later all is quiet again and CD/download sales slow down again.

I don’t want to be a tadpole in a shrinking puddle. When the audience is this small, one consequence of specialization is extinction.