What Tim Urban thinks about innovation
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Tim Urban did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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6 dated positions, 2015 to 2024, in their own words. Our reading of what Tim Urban has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsIf you zoom out on a story of technology, you usually see a big exponential curve. But if you look at the curve up close, you see that it's wavy, made of S-curves.
↗All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 8 years earlier
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Our readingA person who works from a recipe, even an innovative one, starts from something that already exists.
Their wordsBut what all of these cooks have in common is their starting point is something that already exists. Even the innovative cook is still making an iteration of a burger, a pizza, and a cake.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 5th of 11 in this piece
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Their wordsFor cooks, even the more innovative kind, there’s almost always a ceiling on the size of the splash they can make in the world, unless there’s some serious luck involved. Chefs aren’t guaranteed to do anything good, but when there’s a little talent and a lot of persistence, they’re almost certain to make a splash.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 7th of 11 in this piece
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Their wordsConventional wisdom is slow to move, and there’s significant lag time between when something becomes reality and when conventional wisdom is revised to reflect that reality. And by the time it does, reality has moved on to something else. But chefs don’t pay attention to that, reasoning instead using their eyes and ears and experience. By ignoring conventional wisdom in favor of simply looking at the present for what it really is and staying up-to-date with the facts of the world as they change in real-time—in spite of what conventional wisdom has to say—the chef can act on information the rest of us haven’t been given permission to act on yet.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 8th of 11 in this piece
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Their wordsBeing a gamechanger is just having little enough respect for the game that you realize there’s no good reason not to change the rules.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 10th of 11 in this piece
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Their wordsConventional wisdom worships the status quo and always assumes that everything is the way it is for a good reason—and history is one long record of status quo dogma being proven wrong again and again, every time some chef comes around and changes things.
↗The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Saucewaitbutwhy.com 11th of 11 in this piece