More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 13 - July 24, 2022
“It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.”
It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility. While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen.
Through our constant connectivity to each other, we have become increasingly reactive to what comes to us rather than being proactive about what matters most to us.
Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating. At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.
The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.
But it’s better to disappoint a few people over small things, than to surrender your dreams for an empty inbox. Otherwise you’re sacrificing your potential for the illusion of professionalism.
Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind engaged with your project. When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.
One of the painful ironies of work life is that the anxiety of procrastination often makes people even less likely to buckle down in the future.
it’s true that frequency doesn’t have to be a daily frequency; what’s most important is consistency.
“What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”
The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way.
He focuses for sixty to ninety minutes on the challenge he believes has the greatest likelihood of adding long-term value. “These
In a world filled with distraction, attention is our competitive advantage.
switching tasks sends us down a rabbit hole, pulling our attention away from our priority work for much longer than we anticipate.
we find it very difficult to let go of unfinished challenges.
think that e-mail and social networks are a great example of random reinforcement. Usually, when we pull the lever to check our e-mail, it’s not that interesting. But, from time to time, it’s exciting. And that excitement, which happens at random intervals, keeps us coming back to check our e-mail all the time.
one of the best ways to combat negative distractions is simply to embrace positive distractions. In short, we can fight bad distractions with good distractions.
Set a timer and race the clock to complete a task. Tie unrelated rewards to accomplishments—get a drink from the break room or log on to social media for three minutes after reaching a milestone. Write down every invading and negatively distracting thought and schedule a ten-minute review session later in the day to focus on these anxieties and lay them to rest.
self-control is not genetic or fixed, but rather a skill one can develop and improve with practice.8
the human mind is better suited for running sprints than marathons.
creative minds must learn to train their attention and marshal their creative energies under the most chaotic circumstances.
When you tune in to the moment, you begin to recognize the world around you and the true potential of your own mind.
I am consistently humbled and amazed by just how much creation and realization is the product of serendipity. Of course, these chance opportunities must be noticed and pursued for them to have any value. It makes you wonder how much we regularly miss. As we tune in to our devices during every moment of transition, we are letting the incredible potential of serendipity pass us by.
Listen to your gut as much as you listen to others.
Nothing should resonate more loudly than your own intuition.
Making Ideas Happen.
All of the most fulfilled people I know focus more on the quality of their connections than the quantity of them.
The idea is that one day a week, you need to get your mind in a different mode, you need to not work. Every week, your brain—and your soul—needs to be reset.
Screen apnea is the temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing while sitting in front of a screen, whether a computer, a mobile device, or a television.
Deep and regular breathing, also referred to as diaphragmatic breathing, helps to quiet the sympathetic nervous system and allows the parasympathetic nervous system—which governs our sense of hunger and satiety, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function—to become more dominant.
Our bodies are tuned to be impulsive and compulsive when we’re in fight-or-flight. We also become tuned to over-consume. In this state, we’re less aware of when we’re hungry and when we’re sated.
We’ve been sold on the false idea that working from home or, worse, on vacation to help a harried client is a good thing.
It also means learning how to put your inner critic on mute, banish perfectionist tendencies, and push through anxiety-inducing creative blocks.
greatest enemy of creativity is nothing more than standing still.
You can create what’s in your head rather than adapting what’s in your head to someone else’s expectations.
The most successful creative minds consistently lay the groundwork for ideas to germinate and evolve.
“Almost every dimension of cognition improves from thirty minutes of aerobic exercise, and creativity is no exception. The type of exercise doesn’t matter, and the boost lasts for at least two hours afterward.”
The idea is that you take a starting point that has nothing to do with the project itself.
You put the things that you really want do into your calendar.
An overemphasis on perfection can lead to enormous stress (think angry flare-ups or spontaneous tears). At best, it can make you hesitate to immerse yourself in a new project. At worst, this pattern can lead to you abandoning your creative pursuits because of the toll they take on you physically, mentally, and emotionally.
The next time you experience a creative block, resist the temptation to doubt yourself, or to put in more blind effort. Stop and ask yourself what kind of block you are experiencing.
Look out for the telltale signs that your tank is empty, and use them as a cue to take a break and let your unconscious take the strain.
website at 99u.com, our annual 99 Conference in New York City, our bestselling book Making Ideas Happen, and
