Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
It is an act of faith to declare the world (academia?) is good, because the evidence is ambivalent. Am I going to act as if it is good? What will happen if I did? The answer is, the more you act out of the proposition that it is good, the better it gets.
It's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea," then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make... Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want.
We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, 'The best is the enemy of the good.'