Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeff Hawkins

Hawkins is doing a very inventor thing here: taking an abstract scientific claim and making it tactile by pointing at the nearest object that can’t argue back. “The plant in the lobby” is a deliberately unglamorous prop. It drags evolution out of textbook diagrams and into the corporate hallway, where our hierarchy instinctively ranks humans above décor. By collapsing that hierarchy in one sentence, he forces a cognitive glitch: you can accept evolution as a concept and still feel a little offended by the family resemblance to a ficus.

The hedges - “and, you know,” “the fact is,” “kind of” - matter. This isn’t a preacher’s certainty; it’s a builder’s candor. Hawkins is performing the mind at work, not delivering a polished thesis. That conversational looseness also smuggles in a provocation: if you “believe in evolution,” you don’t get to cherry-pick the comforting parts (human ingenuity, progress) while ignoring the unsettling one (continuity with everything alive). He frames it as belief, then quickly asserts “it’s true,” revealing a cultural fault line: in public life, evolution often gets treated as an identity marker rather than a description of reality.

Calling it “unbelievable” is the point, not a contradiction. Hawkins is naming the emotional lag between evidence and intuition. The subtext is epistemic humility: the world is stranger than our status narratives, and good thinking requires living with that strangeness long enough for it to become useful.