It can happpen anywhere. On a bus, in the shower, in a queue to the checkout, in bed – you name it. Brilliant ideas tend to catch us off guard regardless of where we are or what we do. The thing is we need to decide if they’re trully brilliant or downright stupid and whether or not we should act on them.
Check out: How To Know If Your Dumb Idea Will Change The World
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Listen
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Glossary
- ubiquity – present, appearing, or found everywhere
- litter – make (a place or area) untidy with rubbish or a large number of objects left lying about
- crappy – of extremely poor quality
- entail – involve (something) as a necessary or inevitable part or consequence
- sleepover – a night spent by children or young people at a friend’s house
- dubious – not to be relied upon; suspect
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Think about it
Answer the questions below.
- What did Sam Schillace co-create in 2005? What happened to this thing later on?
- What did Schillace learn about creative, interesting ideas over time?
- How did Schillace get Writely going?
- What philosophy did Schillace bring to Box?
- What do the numbers 20% and 80% refer to?
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Practice makes perfect
Fill in the blank spaces with the verbs in brackets used in appropriate tenses.
“What I ________ (learn) over time is that creative, interesting ideas almost always look stupid at first,” says Schillace. “It’s really hard once one of these things emerges to think about what the world ________ (be) like before it emerged. Now it’s obvious, we’re in the world of the cloud, Box is a cloud collaboration company, this is valued, Google Docs is obviously a good idea and it’s hard to think about it not being a good idea.” At the time, though, the only real dynamic cloud-based application ________ (be) Gmail, and Office________ (kill) the competition space for productivity tools. “The road from Office was just completely littered with bodies,” says Schillace. “So we ________ (think) about doing this thing in a browser, with crappy tools that no one ________ (see, ever) before, in a competitive area that everyone died when they tried to compete with, why would you do that?”
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