Nearly every major breakthrough innovation has been preceded by a string of failed or misguided executions.
Everyone we regard as brilliant has endured an enormous amount of failure.
Innovation comes ultimately from a diversity of perspectives. So when you combine ideas from different industries or different cultures, that’s when you have the best sense of developing groundbreaking ideas.
The best ideas emerge when very different perspectives meet.
When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary ideas.
Groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas.
Leonardo da Vinci, the defining Renaissance man and perhaps the greatest intersectionalist of all times, believed that in order to fully understand something one needed to view it from at least three different perspectives.15.
Innovations must not only be valuable, they must also be put to use by others in society.
Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, change the world in leaps along new directions.
It was not even necessary for people to know how to sing to be considered rock musicians. Bob Dylan had no clue, but that did not stop him from becoming one of the greatest artists ever.