His contention was that Steve Jobs likes EVERYTHING when it’s first presented to him. It’s great! It could be world-changing!! Then Jobs waits to see what happens. The mirages fade away pretty quickly. No one ever remembers them or Jobs’s brief internal enthusiasm. The winning ideas keep getting stronger, and Jobs’s advocacy becomes ever more public.

Clever maneuver! It’s the opposite of most big-company development, where new ideas face tough criticism from the start and often are abandoned or shunted to a much slower, more cautious rollout. I’ll nose around at some point and see if others validate it.

Here’s an extra one to add to the collection. George Soros, the legendary hedge-fund investor, was famous earlier in his career for getting his best investment ideas by “looking out the window.” A lot of his success came from anticipating the ways that diverse factors would combine to create a new investment trend that other people didn’t see yet.

The doodling-like quality of staring out the window was a great way of detaching facts from their usual moorings and letting them come together in new and unexpected ways.

Personally, looking out the window never quite worked for me . . . but spending a long afternoon on hiking trails has often helped reshuffle the deck in a productive manner.