Today, one of my closest friends and mentors is getting a prestigious leadership award from the Leadership and Management Division of SLA. Jane Dysart is oe of the nost innovative people I know and she’s sustained innovation adeptness and an incredible network of mentees through and long and brilliant career as an international librarian, information innovation leader and conference guru. In her honour, I’ll post snippets of this blog post from Mitch Ditkoff:
100 Awesome Quotes on What It Really Takes To Innovate
http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2012/07/100_awesome_quo.shtml
“1. “I want to put a ding in the universe.” – Steve Jobs
2. “Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.” – Alfred North Whitehead
3. “Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.” – Jonas Salk
4. “If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.” – Charles Kettering
5. “Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” – Helen Keller
6. “If you can dream it, you can do it.” – Walt Disney (One of Jane’s favourite quotes)
9. “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” – Carl Jung
11. “If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.”
– Clarence Darrow
12. “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” – John Steinbeck
15. “There’s no good idea that cannot be improved on.” – Michael Eisner
16. “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” – Anais Nin
18. “The best vision is insight.” – Malcolm Forbes
19. “Genius is infinite painstaking.” – Michelangelo
22. “Swipe from the best, then adapt.” – Tom Peters
24. “You can expect no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.” – Carl Jung
27. “Sit, walk, or run, but don’t wobble.” – Zen proverb
29. “We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.” – John Culkin
30. “I will act as if what I do will make a difference.” – William James
31. “There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.” – Charles Baudelaire
33. “Remember, a dead fish can float down a stream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.” – W.C. Fields
36. “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” – Albert Einstein
37. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
41. “The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.” – Thomas Edison
47. “A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock pile when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.”– Antoine Saint-Exupery
48. “Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.” – Duke Ellington
49. “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” – Wayne Gretzky
50. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” – Shunryu Suzuki
51. “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” – General George Patton
59. “Systems die; instincts remain.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
60. “You will never find the time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.” – Charles Burton
63. “The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.” – Thomas Carlyle
64. “I failed my way to success.” – Thomas Edison
65. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
66. “The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” – Thomas Watson, (Founder of IBM)
67. “Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.” – Peter Drucker
68. “The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.” – Peter Drucker
70. “No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered.” – Winston Churchill
71. “Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives.” – Carlos Casteneda
73. “If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.” – Arthur Koestler
75. “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.” – Emile Chartier
78. “Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.” – Sam Walton
79. “The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
80. “Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction.” – Pablo Picasso
82. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
85. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Alan Kay
86. “If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it.” – Gordon MacKenzie
87. “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
89. “We have approximately 60,000 thoughts in a day. Unfortunately, 95% of them are thoughts we had the day before.” – Deepak Chopra
90. “Confusion is a word we have invented for an order that is not yet understood.” – Henry Miller
91. “I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. What is reality? Nothing but a collective hunch.” – Lily Tomlin
92. “Now that we have met with paradox we have some hope of making progress.” – Niels Bohr
95. “If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” – Alfred Noble
96. “I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.” – Steven Wright
97. “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs
98. “I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” – Henry Ford
99. “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca
100. “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage” (My favourite quote)
Congratulations Jane. (http://www.dysartjones.com)
Stephen
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Thank you Stephen! You told me you were writing something but I’m just now seeing it! Lovely words, thoughts and actions. Appreciate it my friend.