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October 16 - October 21, 2018
reaching out to someone because you admire their work, or are inspired by it. I’ve never met a person, no matter how well-known, who hasn’t been flattered by an authentic compliment. Professional love letters work.
be specific about what you’re asking for. Are you asking for a relationship? Are you asking for advice? Are you asking to follow up with them along the way, and occasionally reach out with a question?
asked this exact same thing? If you feel okay with it, then go ahead and do it. If you feel a little uncomfortable, then try to tweak it in a way that makes you feel okay about it.
but their side projects are really what they care about most. If you can identify what that thing is, you have a chance to connect at the heart of what they care about.
people whom you respect, people who you believe will have your interests in mind for the long haul, and also people across a wide enough range—so that you won’t have to go back to the well over and over again with just a few people. If you build your network in a smart way, you can build your entire career on the back of
most insights didn’t actually occur when the researchers were alone in the lab. In fact, the majority actually occurred during regularly scheduled lab meetings where individual researchers revealed their latest findings and shared their most difficult setbacks
spend a week vexed by a problem, and the solution would seem to present itself in just ten minutes of discussion with peers. Dunbar also found that the labs with more diverse teams of individuals—people with different areas of expertise who were working on very different types of projects—generated more creative insights and produced more significant research.
The Q score was a measurement of how diverse or homogenous the Broadway production teams from that year were. When Q is high, the teams are densely interconnected; more artists know each other and are working together on multiple projects. When Q is low, there isn’t as much familiarity
until a certain optimal point, when higher Q actually led to a decrease in the success measurements. So why did the success start dropping off
strangers forced to work together can have problems exchanging ideas, but best friends aren’t that good for creativity, either.
a kind of creative groupthink. Ultimately, Uzzi and Spiro found collaborations built from a combination of close connections and fresh perspectives enhance the creative potential of everyone involved.
the most successful creative projects are generated by teams that include a healthy mix of pre-existing connections, shared experiences, and totally new perspectives. If you’re looking to enhance your creative potential, then being on a team helps. But it’s not enough to be on any old team. You have to be on a team with the right blend of old and new collaborators.
Too much familiarity in your creative team can lead to stagnation, while too little can mean you’re constantly out of sync and spinning your wheels.
Realizing your full creative potential—and that of others—demands the skills of the Master Builder rather than the architect, the jazz impresario rather than the conductor. Not just dreaming up visions, but doing the work of execution; not just solo creation, but co-creation
don’t micro-manage or insist they do everything your way. If you really want to get the best out of them, leave plenty of gaps for them to fill with their creativity and initiative.
Nothing great has ever been achieved by sticking with the status quo. If you want to create something new and different, risk-taking needs to be part of your repertoire.
When we start to get scared, our brains send out signals to get the hell out of there. So how can we overcome our natural tendency to run away from risk?
Researchers are gathering a host of evidence showing that the more we fear failure, the less we succeed.
fears are not only counterproductive, they are overblown. It turns out that humans have a strong tendency to overestimate both the pain of failure and how negatively others perceive our mishaps.
We judge being a lottery winner (or paraplegic) by what it is to become one. We often overlook, however, what it is like to actually be one. Humans quickly adapt to new situations. Novelty wears off
impact bias. Whether it’s failing an exam, flunking an interview, or getting fired from a job, their studies have shown that people consistently overestimate the negative impact of such events.
When we think about taking a risk, we rarely consider how good we will be at reframing a disappointing outcome. In short, we underestimate our resilience. The second reason is focalism. When we contemplate failure from afar, according to Gilbert and Wilson, we tend to overemphasize the focal event (i.e., failure) and overlook all the other episodic details of daily life that help us move on and feel better.
spotlight effect. In their numerous experiments of embarrassing situations—such as flunking an intelligence test or having to wear a Barry Manilow T-shirt
We expect others to focus intently on our shortcomings, but we neglect to consider the influence of key peripheral factors, such as people’s positive memories of past interactions or how much others are absorbed in their own worlds.
Our psychological immune system kicks in and helps us make sense of our setback. Failure gives us valuable feedback that we use to address our regrettable actions and improve our situation in the future. Studies consistently show that when we look back on our lives the most common regrets are not the risks we took,
it is the things they did not do that generate the greatest despair.22 We are left with a paradox of inaction. On one hand we instinctively tend to stick with the default, or go with the herd. Researchers call it the status quo bias.
Caving to our fears of short-term regret is shortsighted. Ultimately, we serve ourselves better by fearing a failure to act more than fearing failure itself.
even big mistakes can turn out successfully in the end. Embracing risk is really just a function of adopting the right mind-set.
it’s easy to see the early-stage pitfalls you could encounter. Imagining the realization of the opportunity is much harder. But not making the attempt guarantees you won’t realize the ultimate benefits.
ASSERT YOUR AGENCY We are not powerless in the face of risk. After a decision has been made, we always have the ability to affect our situations to increase the probability of success.
BE PERSISTENT “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
All of our paths are riddled with small and enormous failures. The key is being able to see these experiences as experiments that yield valuable data and to learn what to do differently next time.
For most successful people, the bottom is lined with rubber as opposed to concrete. When they face a failure, they hit bottom, sink in, and then bounce back, tapping into the energy of the impact to propel them into another opportunity.
risk-taking is not binary—you aren’t a risk taker or not a risk taker. You’re likely comfortable taking some types of risks while finding other types uncomfortable. You might not even see the risks that are comfortable for you to take, discounting their riskiness, while you are likely to amplify the risk of things that make you anxious.
five primary types of risks: physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual. I often ask people to map their own risk profile.
require all my students to write a failure résumé. That is, to craft a résumé that summarizes all their biggest screw-ups—personal, professional, and academic. For every failure, each student must describe what he or she learned
an Uncertainty Curve. The beginning of a project is defined by maximum freedom, very little constraint, and high levels of uncertainty. Everything is possible; options, paths, ideas, variations, and directions are all on the table.
the speed at which you move along the curve can either kill your ability to create genius or fuel it. Move too slowly and there’s no output. The process becomes consumed by inertia and either suffers from paralysis or moves at a pace that’s so slow it all but ensures the endeavor is killed before it ever yields meaningful output.
moving too quickly can get you faster to output, but end up yielding something that’s far below what you’d have been capable of creating had you stayed in the process longer.
Those who are doggedly attached to the idea they began with may well execute on that idea. And do it well and fast. But along the way, they often miss so many unanticipated possibilities, options, alternatives, and paths
Most people are strongly wired to be intolerant of uncertainty. We experience it as pain, fear, anxiety, and doubt. When faced with the need to coexist or, horror of horrors, act in the face of great uncertainty, we recoil. The primal fear center in the brain,
One, simply understanding the psychology of the process allows you to be more mindful of the speed at which you move from freedom to constraint.
Nothing truly innovative, nothing that has advanced art, business, design, or humanity, was ever created in the face of genuine certainty or perfect information. Because the only way to be certain before you begin is if the thing you seek to do has already been done.
there is no universal formula that tells you how quickly to move along the uncertainty curve. It will differ from project to project and be strongly influenced by your unique resources and constraints, both internal and external.
clearly define those resources and constraints, cultivate the mind-set, workflow, environment, and lifestyle needed to fuel action, then act. And elevate learning as a core metric.
harnessing unexpected insights and placing bets all with an unknown outcome. In other words, success is more serendipitous and random than we think.
PLACE MANY BETS If it is difficult to predict just what exactly is going to be successful, it follows that you have to keep trying. The more times you try, the more likely that you will create successful designs, start-ups, or pieces of art.
Picasso could not predict with any certainty which of his pieces would become celebrated and which would be recycled. He was, in essence, placing a bet that a percentage of his work would take hold. It therefore follows that Picasso’s output gave him an incredible edge
leverage the statistical advantage of randomness by placing many bets. MAKE THE BETS SMALL If you should place many bets to increase your chances of success, then it also follows that you cannot afford to do so if those bets are large.
it is close to impossible to outline exactly what your next best move is. But you can explore it—by doing and trying. Just make sure you don’t go all in before you’ve figured out that it works.
