6 powerful ideas that I took away from this:<p>1. Live in the future: If you live in the present your ideas are going to derived from the present, and therefore will be incremental. Paul graham points to a similar idea in his essay here <a href="http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html</a><p>2. Learn the rules and break them like pro: An important idea that says learn deeply about a field (industry or language or medium - whatever) before you go about breaking its rules. This is something that should be discussed more. On one hand, this implies that rules need to be broken carefully by understanding something very well. On the other hand, a certain "naivete" also has been proven to be successful (As he himself says in another portion of this talk). Requires more thinking...
I have to say that I have worked with two geniuses who changed industries (caused a "Disruption"), but while they were "outsiders" they understood the industry they were changing very deeply, and could point to very specific flaws in them (legacy rules) that were ready to be broken.<p>3. Scientists and engineers working together: I love this specific idea. He points to the Manhattan project and the Radar project as successful examples (and ofcourse, Xerox PARC itself). I also understand why OpenAI is organized the way it is -- they must have taken inspiration from Alan's ideas.<p>4. Progress is the only important thing: This is very similar to YC's idea of have a metric and grow it by X% week over week. One of the big things (IMHO) that YC cracked was to find way to fund hard tech problems, using this very specific idea that worked very well in software. Break a big problem into small parts and show progress on it every week/month/quarter etc. It is a simple and elegant way to think (and work).<p>5. Advance something very important: This idea is dedicating your life to an important goal / problem. This idea stirred me the most (for personal reasons). This especially rings true for me, esp when I meet someon who found "overnight success" after toiling aways at something for 10-15 years. This idea requires a lot of reflection. Alan says: "Fix big human problems"<p>6. Argue for clarity, not to win: An amazingly simple yet powerful message. So much of our interactions would be better if we (if I) did more of this.<p>3 Sidenotes:<p>a) I wish he had answered the question about "What caused the regression?" that someone asks (I think Sam) after watching a demo of an early "iPad" from the 1960s. It is really important to understand this. Elon Musk often says that tech advancements don't just happen automatically, some group of smart people need to work together to make it happen. I think something happens that governments, VCs, technologists stop working on advancing tech in some areas. Some of it is explained by lack of a "great adversary" (WW II, Cold War etc), but still it would be great to understand this very deeply. Thiel's famous book also talks about regression in tech, without fully explaining it. It is an important observation, that merits a deep discussion. I would be curious to hear what Alan says. Maybe @Sama can fill in (?)]<p>b) Special mentions to two ideas, not because of the ideas, but because how he puts them. a) "Fund people not projects" (basically how early stage funding works) - but Alan says, these are "artists are people who do their art because they must". And b) While talking about "build your own tools if you have the chops" he says "...Otherwise you are working the past on some vendor's bad idea of what computing is about". I love how he puts these thoughts across.<p>c) I recommend the video @_pius links to in the comments: it is called "the power of simplicity". One of the great Alan Kay talks.