Idea Filtering Quotes

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

It's important to be the gatekeeper against dangerous ideas.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

I don't let myself get carried away by my own ideas - I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day.

It took me a long time to understand the relationship between ideas and between objective facts. But after I clearly understood this relationship, I didn't fool around with other wild ideas. That is one of the main reasons why I just make my scheme as simple as possible.

I have multiple ideas per day, all the time. The vast majority of these are completely idiotic. Usually, I just sit on the idea for several months. And if I have not decided that it's idiotic, then it's... might be a good idea.

You have to have a lot of ideas. First, if you want to make discoveries, it's a good thing to have good ideas. And second, you have to have a sort of sixth sense-the result of judgment and experience-which ideas are worth following up. I seem to have the first thing, a lot of ideas, and I also seem to have good judgment as to which are the bad ideas that I should just ignore, and the good ones, that I'd better follow up.

Sometimes I just need somebody to tell me a bunch of ideas I don't like, so that I can figure out what it is I actually want.

The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

We get a lot of emails, a lot of suggestions on the kinds of ideas and things that people would like to do. There's a lot of good ones, but a lot of them are something that the franchise couldn't or wouldn't endorse, just as being not consistent with what the NBA would want or, probably, what we would even want, too.

The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around.

Ideas, as the raw material from which knowledge is produced, exist in superabundance, but that makes the production of knowledge more difficult rather than easier. Many ideas- probably most- will have to be discarded somewhere in the process of producing authenticated knowledge. Authentication is as important as the raw information itself, and the manner and speed of the authentication process can be crucial.

I write all year long, and at the end of the year I pull these forty or fifty things out and say, 'Which of these things do I want to record?'

The problem is when you get forced to use ideas that aren't good. When I can filter the ideas and use the best of them, I am happy to collaborate.

For years and hundreds of thousands of miles, I drove with one knee, with the eight-track and the light dome on in the car, and a yellow pad, just writing down random ideas. I had notebooks and notebooks. The next morning, I'd go, 'Whoa, what was I thinking?' But there'd be one or two ideas that weren't that bad.