Toby Turner Quotes

The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch.

I was focused on building things from an early age. When I was about 3, our toilet broke, and my mother was ready to call the plumber. I told her I would fix it and asked her to get my Richard Scarry book 'How Things Work in Busytown.' Between the picture of a toilet and the text she read to me explaining how the parts worked, I fixed it.

Generally, when I wake up in the morning I set out a series of problems for myself and I write them down, and when I'm sleeping, my mind solves the problems. When I wake up in the morning, I have more clarity on the issue.

Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur like someone else is actually looking in the wrong direction. You don't look out for inspiration, you look in. You have to ask yourself how can I be better today, at solving the problem I am trying to solve for my company. I wouldn't encourage anyone to be like me. Just be like you.

A guilty conscience is the mother of invention.

In practical terms the South Pointing Chariot was a simple direction finder. It could have been made to point in any direction - north, south, east or west.

Hacking involves a different way of looking at problems that no one's thought of.

Phoney: Here's your problem Fone Bone! We're off the map! Get a bigger map!

Often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset. For example, many scientists when they found they couldn't do a problem finally began to study why not. They then turned it around the other way and said, "But of course, this is what it is" and got an important result.

I always have a sense of trembling, but so does a compass, after all.

Here's a simple experiment that you might want to try if there is absolutely nothing else going on in your life. All you need is a cork, a bar magnet, and a pail of water. Simply attach your magnet to your cork, then drop it into the water, and voilà (literally, "you have a compass")-you have a compass. How does it work? Simple. Notice that, no matter which way you turn the bucket, the cork always floats on top of the water (unless the magnet is too heavy). Using this scientific principle, early hardy mariners were able to tell at a glance whether they were sinking!

The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.

The most creative people have learned to tolerate the slight discomfort of indecision for much longer and so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.

No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.

Genius is intellect constructive.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair or triplet of essential images.

When the mind is un-agitated, when the mind is calm, that mind is most conducive to creative problem solving.

Everything comes to me while I'm sitting on the pot.

Don't criticise a hypothesis, come up with a better one.

By blaming others, we fail to find the real solutions to our problems and we do not carry out our own responsibilities.

Creativity, as I see it, is the process of putting your imagination to work. It's been defined rather simply as applied imagination. That's not a bad way to think about it.

Have you tried?" Tove countered, his eyes sparkling. "Well...no," I admitted. "Do it." "How?" He shrugged. "Figure it out." "You're really good at this training thing," I said with a sigh.

You always, I think, debate with yourself about whether or not you made the right decision. And you have to then give the person that you’re working for - in my instance, the president - your best judgment based on your understanding of the facts, but also the calculus you use to make a determination about what’s the best way to go forward.

If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.