Innovation

Anybody can toss their hat in the air. But few have dared to make it actually fly.

While doing new things is difficult, it is far from impossible.

You're about to embark on careers that will take many of you to companies not yet founded, using devices not yet developed, based on ideas not yet conceived. That is how fast things are moving.

The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

If you're starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly and you want to always avoid competition. Competition is for losers.

All happy companies are different because they're doing something very unique. All unhappy companies are alike because they failed to escape the essential sameness that is competition.

Start with a really small market and take over that whole market, and then over time find ways to expand that market in concentric circles.

Focus on signal over noise. A lot of companies get confused — they spend money on things that don't actually make the product better.

Don't just follow the trends. Think in terms of the physics approach of first principles — rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

If our optimism doesn't address the problems that affect so many of our fellow human beings, then our optimism needs more empathy. If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the poverty and the disease and the poor schools — and we will surprise the pessimists.

Everything you know could already be wrong.