Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency … The outsized discoveries – the ‘non-linear’ ones – are highly likely to require wandering.*
Jeff Bezos

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.**
Jeanette Winterson

It worked last time,
It’s all we have,
It’s what’s expected of us,
It worked in these other places,
What will others think if we don’t do it this way?
We haven’t got time to come up with anything else,
That’s not how we do things here,
We can’t be seen to fail,
Leave it to those in charge,
It’s not in the textbook,
It’s not in the instruction manual,
Someone else will know what to do,
We have to sit down and focus … really focus,
It’s still not working.

Time to bring the power of imagination to the
pressure of reality,^
The kind of imagination fuelled by wandering,
And the more involved, the better –
And, yes, there’s risk^

We use our imagination not to escape from reality but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between and an appreciation of the real.^^

*Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas;
**James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: The simple path to wealth, how time works, and things that hold talented people back;
^Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel;
^^Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good.