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“Genius is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent perspiration.” To make great ideas a reality, we must act, experiment, fail, adapt, and learn on a daily basis.
Basic economics tells us that if you want something rare and valuable, you need to offer something rare and valuable in return—and in the working world, what you have to offer are your skills.
we should begin by systematically developing rare and valuable skills. Once we’ve caught the attention of the marketplace, we can then use these skills as leverage to direct our career toward the general lifestyle traits (autonomy, flexibility, impact, growth, etc.) that resonate with us.
don’t follow your passion, cultivate it.
Finished ought to be an f-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, and grow more.
Keeping yourself in “permanent beta” makes you acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s more testing to do on yourself, and that you will continue to adapt and evolve.
the flip side of every opportunity is risk,
“The moment you move to protecting the status quo instead of disrupting the status quo, you put yourself at risk.”
Aside from lots of hard work, great creative careers are powered by an intersection of three factors: interest, skill, and opportunity. The same thinking applies to successful creative projects. The magic happens when you find the sweet spot where these three factors intersect.
If you want to stand out in this world, stepping out of your comfort zone—and cultivating new skills—is the place to start.
FOCUSING ON GETTING BETTER, RATHER THAN BEING GOOD
“Smart” praise kids were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence, and to perform less effectively as a result.
Be Good mind-set, where the focus is on proving that you already have a lot of ability and that you know exactly what you’re doing, and the Get Better mind-set, where the focus is on developing your ability and learning new skills. You
Countless studies have shown that nothing interferes with your performance quite like anxiety does—it is the creativity killer.
A Get Better mind-set, on the other hand, leads instead to self-comparison and a concern with making progress: How well am I doing today, compared with how I did yesterday, last month, or last year? Are my talents and abilities developing over time? Am I moving closer to becoming the creative professional I want to be?
Ericsson subsequently posited that four and a half hours is the natural human limit for the highest level of focus on a single task in any given day.
A ritualized approach to practice helps conserve our precious and finite reserves of energy.
The second mastery lesson from Ericsson’s violinists is that the best way to practice is in time-limited sprints, rather than for an unbounded number of hours.
The third key to mastery is perhaps the most counter-intuitive. It’s the importance of restoration.
With focus and consistency you can change your habits. By changing your habits, you reprogram the behaviors that control most of your life and ultimately determine your success.
It’s not about having perfect relationships. That’s a fantasy. It’s about laying foundations for resilient relationships from the very start.
At the heart of social contracting is spending time up front talking about the How—the relationship and how we’ll work together—rather than being seduced by the What, the excitement and urgency of the content, what needs to be sorted out and solved.
We live in a connection economy. If you can’t connect with people for them to understand what you have to offer, you’re working in a vacuum and you’re going to lose out.
Co-creation involves letting go of control, listening—really listening—to people around you, and delegating responsibility to them. Most of all, it means building trust:
Build on—and improvise with—others’ ideas and skill sets. If you let everyone shine in his or her area of expertise, your projects will thrive.
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” So said Thomas Edison.
There are five primary types of risks: physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual.
Uncertainty has given way to certainty.
All creators need to be able to live in the shade of the big questions long enough for truly revolutionary ideas and insights to emerge.
The world is random and unpredictable, which means that 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.
