Susan Cain Quotes

Meet regularly with your business team and brainstorm. Intricate business problems are mostly resolved at brainstorming sessions.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.

Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.

Intellectual work is an act of creation. It is as if the mental image that is studied over a period of time were to sprout appendages like an ameba—outgrowths that extend in all directions while avoiding one obstacle after another—before interdigitating with related ideas.

If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you're not trying to think about work.

Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.

People seem to think that they can't come up with ideas, and they're wrong. They can and they do, but they just think of it as daydreaming, or wasting time. Kids get told not to make things up, and in my case, nobody told me long enough, or it just didn't stick.

I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.

To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.

To have ideas is to gather flowers; to think is to weave them into garlands.

Ideas exist in the marketplace; they are thrown out for everyone to use.

A single idea - the sudden flash of a thought - may be worth a million dollars.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.

I'm basically the idea person. I'm not physically involved in the production. I don't have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.

There are definitely aspects of that kind of stuff. The whole team [of Legends of Tommorow] gets thrown together. They don't really know each other like that. They haven't worked together before.

The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

If we want a better original idea, we must generate our own before we screen others' suggestions.

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

Laughter lifts our spirits, surprises and sometime shocks our expectations, allows us to cross boundaries, reorders our priorities, and gives us access to ideas and associations we rarely ever thought to have.

I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America. I am just trying to get ideas, any kind of ideas that will help our company. Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.