Originals | Hidden Brain : NPR

In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam investigates who comes up with great ideas, how, and what we can do to have more of them.... They often procrastinate, and that's how they incubate ideas.... Their parents focus more on values than rules... One of the risks is, you know, you have everybody marching in a different direction...They feel the same fears and doubts that the rest of us do. They just manage them differently. They hate taking risks. And they have lots of bad ideas, and that's how they get to the good ones....
originals are not the people with the deepest expertise. They're people with the broadest experience... really good at questioning the status quo... is a hallmark of being an original...
when they have an opportunity to dive head-first into something, take a big risk, they actually hedge their bets and hesitate.... the fear of failing gets overtaken by the fear of failing to try... shift from worrying about... making a fool of yourself to regretting never taking a chance.... in the long run our biggest regrets are our inactions - the chances we didn't take...
they are drafted by other people... what makes them so effective ... they've spent months or years stewing on these ideas. And they've hatched by the time that somebody pulls them into the spotlight...
originality is brewing in all sorts of unexpected places... who are the people that, you know, are in a position to bring really new ideas into this organization. And why aren't we hearing from them? ... there's zero correlation between who's the best talker and who has the best ideas... what distinguishes the great from the ordinary is ... the great simply have many more ideas than the ordinary... failed the most because they're the ones who tried the most....
a lot of us fall in love with our first ideas, and those are the most conventional... you have to weed out the familiar in order to get to the unusual. But a lot of people never get to those later ideas... it's just really hard to judge your own ideas.