Michael Stuhlbarg Quotes

The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.

Every time you go for more competition, some people don’t like it, but that’s the way it is. We believe it is better for the people.

My imagination ran 24/7, and to me, every problem was a challenge to solve and new product to create. It wasn't until I started teaching that I realized that not everyone's head worked the same way.

I like confusing people and challenging myself.

The system will always be defended by those countless people who have enough intellect to defend but not quite enough to innovate.

Having my brain doing different work is helping me a lot in terms of retro-feeding from the other experiences. It makes me feel inspired, looking forward to the projects and wanting to work harder.

I just like to stay creative. Anything that can keep my mind going.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

Breakthroughs happen when the insight comes that I can do something right now to improve things. I am constantly looking to do something to provide people with strategies to create those immediate breakthroughs. That's my mission.

They enjoy thinking. They enjoy being creative. They enjoy having ideas. Most people do not enjoy thinking at all.

We've had customers from the beginning. The reason people use Dropbox is because they really love it. We think more about who is going to be competing with what we are going to be doing, not with where we started.

My advice to young people in the wrestling business would be to repeat such questions to yourself as: "How am I standing out? How am I getting recognized? How am I getting over?" And if you don't have definitive answers for doing those things, you are doing it wrong. It is, essentially, on them. There is no right way to do it, and that's one of the great things about this business because you can be creative. People who say they have it figured out are wrong.

To understand a new idea, break an old habit.

It's always great when you get a lot of people pushing themselves to do better, be better, invent better, better serve, better lead customers in new directions.

Creativity is people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it.

The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.

The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first.

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.

You know I'm finished with the old chess because it's all just a lot of book and memorization you know.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless.

Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.

Moment to moment, I'm very much just feeling and trying to synthesize what I'm taking in so it can come out musically. I'll continue to do that. I'm also someone who really likes to push themselves into new situations with new people and try to learn from them. I will be very happy to continue doing that, if people let me.

Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams - day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing - are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it.