Simplify, simplify. —H. D. THOREAU
One “simplify” would have sufficed. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, IN RESPONSE

Koshun Miyamoto once complimented his fencing teacher’s wife on the beauty of her gravel garden, a square of coarse-grained sand, set off by three stones from a nearby stream that conveyed a “powerful, evocative image of space and balance.” The fencing teacher’s wife protested that the garden wasn’t complete and wouldn’t be until she could “express the same feeling it has now using only one stone instead of three.”

Once you lose the discipline of functionality as a design guidepost, the imagination goes amok. Once you design a monster, it tends to look like one too.

There are two types of creativity: the creativity of making zero to one, and the creativity of making one to 1,000. —KAZUHIKO NISHI, THE “STEVE JOBS OF JAPAN”

It may take thirty years to come up with an invention, but within a few years or months there can be a thousand innovations spawned from that original idea. Innovation can be achieved much more quickly because you already start with an existing product idea or design.