Success Quote by Masaru Ibuka

Ibuka frames creativity less as a mystical gift than as a disciplined habit of disobedience: go where your instincts dont naturally send you. The line sounds gentle, but its actually an instruction to distrust the most common shortcut in modern work culture - the assumption that your past success, your expertise, your taste, are sufficient raw materials for the next idea. If you only iterate within what you know, you get polish, not surprise.

The wording matters. "Looking for the unexpected" is active, almost predatory: you dont wait for inspiration to strike, you build a practice of hunting anomalies, edge cases, weird user behavior, unfamiliar art, inconvenient data. Then comes the harder clause: "stepping outside your own experience". That is a warning against the narcissism of mastery. Experience can become a closed loop, a set of reflexes that quietly edits out anything that threatens your identity as the person who knows.

Coming from Masaru Ibuka, Sony co-founder, the context is postwar Japanese manufacturing trying to outgrow imitation. Sony's breakthroughs werent just better versions of existing products; they were bets on new categories and new listening habits. Ibuka is indirectly describing the corporate problem of complacency: organizations reward expertise, then wonder why they stop inventing. The subtext is managerial as much as personal - if you want creativity at scale, you have to design incentives and teams that make "outside experience" normal: cross-disciplinary collaboration, international exposure, contrarian prototypes, and permission to look foolish before you look right.