Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

The path to success isn't through my lizard brain, it's through high quality collaboration and making good stuff and understanding difficult situations fully enough to come up with good (or even great) solutions quickly.

Remarkable work often comes from making choices when everyone else feels as though there is no choice.

If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.

When I'm creatively solving problems, I'm in my sweet spot, and nothing can take me out of that joyful present.

Forget about finding your passion. Instead, focus on finding big problems.

All dreams reflect inborn creativity and ability to face and solve life's problems.

Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems.

Lateral thinking... is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practised and used. It is possible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics.

[Mathematics] unceasingly calls forth the faculties of observation and comparison; one of its principal weapons is induction: it has frequent recourse to trial and verification; and it affords a boundless scope for the exercise of the highest efforts of imagination and invention.

I like talking to engineers best. They built bridges, they're very precise, very disciplined, yet I find they have roving minds.

A tinkerer,” snapped Pasiphaë. “Even worse. I knew Daedalus. His inventions brought me nothing but trouble.” Leo blinked. “Daedalus…like, the Daedalus? Well, then, you should know all about us tinkerers. We’re more into fixing, building, occasionally sticking wads of oilcloth in the mouths of rude ladies—

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

When you are failing, you are forced to be creative, to dig deep and think, night and day.

When I was 5 or 6 years old, I never wanted toys; I wanted electrical parts so I could build things. And I was better at taking things apart and putting them back together, but I always had extra pieces left over, so I think it was an early warning that I was a better designer than an engineer.

To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.

You have to have the will not to jump at the first solution, because the really elegant solution might be right around the corner.

To be creative, a person has to internalize the entire system that makes creativity possible. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.

I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite? Don't follow a model that doesn't work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are.

Most people would rather change their circumstances to improve their lives when instead they need to change themselves to improve their circumstances. They put in just enough effort to distance themselves from their problems without ever trying to go after the root, which can often be found in themselves. Because they don't try to change the source of their problems, their problems keep coming back at them.

It is natural that we face obstacles in pursuit of our goals. But if we remain passive, making no effort to solve the problems we meet, conflicts will arise and hindrances will grow. Transforming these obstacles into opportunities is a challenge to our human ingenuity.

Seek people who seek solutions.

The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.