On the Essential Usefulness of Gurus

I think it’s important to have people who inspire people to think.  But it’s really, really bad to have gurus who you look for the answer from because I think the key is, you want people to question authority for yourself. 

So to the extent that an Einstein gets people to want to open the black box to try and discover the next big thing, I think that’s great.  To the extent that you have somebody who says, this is the only way to design a product and everybody’s doing that, that’s a bad thing.  Because I think it’s really, really important to always be questioning authority. 

And so to me, that’s the sort of the two halves.  I think that it’s great to inspire new generations of thinkers; it’s terrible to create new authority.  

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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