Where good ideas come from

Great talk by Steven Johnson but what happened with Steve Dunbar's research is something I started believing few years ago (here for example)

How did the researchers cope with all this unexpected data? How did they deal with so much failure? Dunbar realized that the majority of people in the lab followed the same basic strategy. First, they would blame the method. The surprising finding was classified as a mere mistake; perhaps a machine malfunctioned or an enzyme had gone stale. "The scientists were trying to explain away what they didn't understand," Dunbar says. "It's as if they didn't want to believe it."

And the most important thing to overcome this flaw (even for great geniuses and smartest people) is:

"There is something unsettling about Ruef’s data. We think of entrepreneurs, after all, as individuals. If someone has a brilliant idea for a new company, we assume that they are inherently more creative than the rest of us. This is why we idolize people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey. It’s also why we invest in the meritocracy: We believe that we can identify talent in isolation. But Ruef’s analysis suggests that this focus on the singular misses the real story of entrepreneurship. Unless we take our social circle into account – that collection of weak ties and remote acquaintances who feed us unfamiliar facts - we’re not going to really understand the nature of achievement. Behind every successful entrepreneur is a vast network."

"Chance favors the connected mind." - beautifully said. We have lots of blind spots in our life which has the capacity to destroy us. It takes someone special and caring to show us our blind spots and guide us to the right path. If we have someone to do that for us, we should consider ourselves blessed and ask for no more. We need atleast two minds to connect to work against our flaws.