p.42 Chess is in many ways the quintessential left-brained activity. It leaves relatively
little room for emotion - and depends heavily on memory, rational thinking, and brute calculation, two things at which computers
excel. Kasparov says that when he looks at the board, he can examine between one and three moves per second.
p.52 At the Yale School of Medicine, students are honing their powers of observation at the Yale Center
for British Art, because students who study paintings excel at noticing subtle details about a patient's condition.
p.89 Buy a small notebook and begin carrying it with you wherever you go. When you see
a great design, make note of it... Do the same for flawed design... Be sure to include the design of experiences as well
p.90 Channel Your Annoyance.
- Choose a household item that annoys you in some way.
- Go by yourself to a caf� with pen and paper, but without a book and without a newspaper, and, for
the duration of your cup of coffee, think about improving the poorly designed item.
- Send the idea/sketch as it is to the manufacturer of your annoying household item.
You never know what might come of it.
p.130 Symphony, as I call this aptitude, is the ability to put together the pieces.
It is the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze; to see relationships between seemingly unrelated
fields; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; to invent something new by combining
elements nobody else thought to pair.
p.137 "The key to success is to risk thinking unconventional thoughts. Convention is the
enemy of progress. As long as you've got slightly more perception than the average wrapped loaf, you could invent something."
- Trevor Baylis, inventor
p.138 Our ability to activate this right hemisphere capacity has become more urgent as
we transition out of the Information Age.
p.143 The capacity to see the big picture is perhaps most important as an antidote to the
variety of psychic woes brought forth by... our times... Many of us are crunched for time, deluged by information, and paralyzed
by the weight of too many choices. The best prescription for these modern maladies may be to approach one's
life in a contextual, big-picture fashion - to distinguish between what really matters and what merely annoys.
p.151 A great way to expand your capacity for Symphony is to learn how to draw... drawing
is about seeing relationships - and then integrating those relationships into a whole... For those of you with more
curiosity than patience, consider playing around with a five-line self-portrait - that is, drawing your self-portrait
using only five lines.
p.227 The bestselling business book of the last decade has been a thin little volume with a strange title.
Who Moved My Cheese? is a business fable that has sold millions of copies around the world. The book tells the tale
of Hem and Haw, two mouselike critters who live in a maze and love cheese. One day, after years of finding their cheese in
the same place, Hem and Haw awaken to find their precious cheddar gone. Somebody, yes, has moved their cheese... Haw convinces
Hem that they should take action to solve their problem rather than wait for the solution magically to appear... The moral
of the story is that change is inevitable, and when it happens, the wisest response is not to wail or whine but to
suck it up and deal with it.
p.287 in the conceptual age... commingling work and play has become both more common and more necessary.
