Friday, May 05, 2006

Courage and Creativity

“We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no man’s land, to push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us. This is what the existentialists call the anxiety of nothingness. To live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent and which few people realize.”

__ Rollo May, The Courage to Create

Note: you can add to this the courage it takes to ask for funding for projects that explore this "no man's land." According to Jeff Hawkins, it's very hard to get funding for the type of projects in science that have previously not been funded (if that makes any sense). The irony here is that breakthroughs usually happen in this "unknown" area.

You can listen to Hawkins' podcast over at iTunes.

Hawkins is the founder of Palm Computing and director of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute.

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