I just finished reading the book "Making Ideas Happen" by Scott Belsky. I describe it as a "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" for creative people. MIH is broken into 3 sections:
- Organization and Execution - avoid getting bored, persevere, and prioritize.
- Forces of Community - tell people what you're going to do, and find collaborators.
- Leadership Capability - share your ideas, be flexible on how work is done.
The big lessons:
- When making notes, working on tasks, organize your thoughts into: action steps, reference, and back burner. You'll probably never use reference, you need a system for coming back to back burners, but the key is to always think about how to move forward. I've been doing this for the last few days. Usually these type of books don't stick, but the action step principle has changed my passivity in meetings and priorities.
- Recognize the tendency of the project plateau. It's easy to come up with ideas, difficult to do them - don't get distracted with new ideas.
- Create a Support Circle - set up a group, 10-15 people, who share common goals/ interests to support each other in meeting your goal.
- 3 types of people: 1. Dreamers - come up with ideas quickly, suck at execution. 2. Doers - focus on execution. 3. Incrementalists - can iterate between doing and dreaming. The key lesson though is that many dreamers consciously 'hire' doers as partners.
- Hire initiators (people that will voluntarily pick up and run with a project). I saw a survey for Google's recruiting that asked, "have you ever turned a profit at your own non-tech business" "won a world record" "started a non profit" - clearly they're looking for this too.
- Cynics vs skeptics - cynics are unmovable.
- In a project, identify the "sacred" aspects and comprise on everything else.
Good quotes:
- Justice prevails over time in any good organization, but justice does not prevail at any given point in time.
- Make yourself become who you are - Friedrich Nietzsche
- All I want to be is someone who creates truly meaningful things.
