Life is so short. Why waste a single day of it doing something that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t try to do something big?
More than ever, the world needs good engineers. However, the pool of talent is shrinking not growing.
I think an education is not only important, it is the most important thing you can do with your life.
Education, actual learning – it is hard work. It’s very personal. Your parents don’t teach you anything. Your teachers don’t teach you anything. The government doesn’t teach you anything. You read it. You don’t understand it; you read it again. You break a pencil and read it again.
What really makes it an invention is that someone decides not to change the solution to a known problem, but to change the question.
Innovation needs to be nurtured throughout an organization. Management is doing things right, whereas leadership is doing the right things.
I’d rather lose my own money than someone else’s.
A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That’s how the patent office defines it. That’s an invention.
It’s not what you do – it’s what you are becoming.
Sometimes we crash and burn. It’s better to do it in private.
Americans thinking that America will continue to lead the world in innovation and quality of life without some quick and serious educational improvements are dangerously delusional.
People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any real substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am working on things that matter.
I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.
As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there’s a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.
I don’t work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.
If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.
Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That’s what technology can do.
In a free society, you get what you celebrate.
I started realizing that I wasn’t so dumb; rather, most people simply didn’t know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn’t care.