"I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt"
About this Quote
Morgan’s line reads like a field manual for thinking: don’t stop when the terrain gets familiar, push until the landscape starts repeating itself. “Cliches and stereotypes” aren’t framed as moral failures so much as reconnaissance markers. They’re the first bunkers you run into when you enter any idea - the prefabricated stories waiting to capture you before you’ve gathered real intelligence.
The intent is practical and slightly impatient. He’s telling students that originality isn’t a mystical gift; it’s an endurance test. Most people quit at the point where an idea becomes legible to others, which is exactly when it becomes legible as a cliche. Morgan’s method demands you keep going past that social checkpoint, past the phrases and assumptions that feel like “common sense” because they’ve been repeated into invisibility.
The subtext carries a soldier’s bias toward disciplined follow-through. “Pursue” has the energy of a patrol: you don’t glance and move on, you track. “Pay dirt” borrows the prospector’s payoff fantasy, but it’s also a blunt incentive structure - do the work, and something valuable eventually turns up. That value, implicitly, is complexity: the moment you can name the stereotype, you’re no longer trapped inside it.
Context matters: coming from a soldier, this isn’t workshop-room preciousness about finding your “voice.” It’s training against automatic thinking, the mental equivalent of friendly fire. He’s arguing that the real enemy of insight is not ignorance but premature certainty dressed up as familiar language.
The intent is practical and slightly impatient. He’s telling students that originality isn’t a mystical gift; it’s an endurance test. Most people quit at the point where an idea becomes legible to others, which is exactly when it becomes legible as a cliche. Morgan’s method demands you keep going past that social checkpoint, past the phrases and assumptions that feel like “common sense” because they’ve been repeated into invisibility.
The subtext carries a soldier’s bias toward disciplined follow-through. “Pursue” has the energy of a patrol: you don’t glance and move on, you track. “Pay dirt” borrows the prospector’s payoff fantasy, but it’s also a blunt incentive structure - do the work, and something valuable eventually turns up. That value, implicitly, is complexity: the moment you can name the stereotype, you’re no longer trapped inside it.
Context matters: coming from a soldier, this isn’t workshop-room preciousness about finding your “voice.” It’s training against automatic thinking, the mental equivalent of friendly fire. He’s arguing that the real enemy of insight is not ignorance but premature certainty dressed up as familiar language.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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