I just finished a book called Making Things Happen. As a trick to help me internalize more of the material I’ve typed up my favorite passages to share here…The last one is my favorite because it rings so true for me.
Pg 9 “Even more powerful than the obstacles around us, however, are the obstacles within us.”
Pg 9 – “Whether you work alone or with a team, you will become mired in the challenge of staying productive, accountable, and in control. These journeys are physically and psychologically exhausting.”
MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN=(THE IDEA) +ORGANIZATION AND EXECUTION + FORCES OF COMMUNITY + LEADERSHIP CAPABILITY
“But as a wise sage once said - and what every small-business owner knows all too well – “total freedom means total responsibility.”
Capture “Action Steps” at all times – don’t leave them hidden within copious notes and don’t take copious notes. Focus in on what needs to get done next. Make sure that every action step is delegated to someone in charge of making sure it happens.
Keep references in a different place. References are documents, websites, facts, people that you might need to refer back to at a later time.
Backburner items are ideas that may be actionable but aren’t in the forseeable future. Creating a facility to house Beehive sports may be a good idea but I won’t be taking any action on it in the near future.
Make time to circle back to backburner items every once in a while
Create a table that lists projects according to the energy they should require. This isn’t a judgement of the time spent on each project but how much energy they should receive based on their importance.
Pg 70 – “Our energy and committment – and thus a willingness to tolerate the sometimes painful process of execution – are naturally high only when an idea is first concieved. The honeymoon period quickly fades as Action Steps pile up and compete with our other ongoings commitments. Our ideas become less interesting as we realize the implied responsibilities and sheer amount of work required to execute them.
The easiest and most seductive escape from the project plateau is themost dangerous one: a new idea. New ideas offer a quick return to the high energy and commitment zone, but they also cause us to lose focus. As the new star rises, our execution efforts for the original idea start to fall off…Although it is part of the creative’s essence to constantly generate new ideas, our addiction to new ideas is also what often cuts our journeys short.”
“Constant motion is the key to execution.”
Walt Disney had a great method of using three rooms to foster ideas and then rigorously assess them:
Room 1: In this room, rampant idea generation was allowed without any restraints. The true essence of brainstorming – unrestrained thinking and throwing around ideas without limits – was supported without any doubts expressed.
Room 2: The crazy ideas from Room 1 were aggregated and organized in Room 2, ultimately resulting in a storyboard chronicling events and general sketches of characters.
Room 3: Known as the “sweat box,” Room 3 was where the entire creative team would critically review the project without restraint. Given the fact that the ideas from individuals had already been combined in Room 2, the criticism in Room 3 was never directed at one person – just at elements of the project.
Pg 89 – “Rather than invite consideration of change at any time, many creative teams set up periodic meetings throughout the development process called “challenge meetings.” In challenge meetings, anyone is invited to ask and answer questions like “What doesn’t make sense with our current plan?”
Pg 91 – “Some teams, including the Behance team, have created “Done Wall” covered with old Action Steps…For us, the Done Walls is a piece of art that reminds us of the progress we have made thus far.”
Pg 115 – “Dreamers, Does and Incrementalist…[I'm an incrementalist]…
Pg 121 – From Chris Anderson (Wired Editor) “I don’t believe you can do anything by yourself,” Anderson explains. “Any project that’s run by a single person is basically destined to fail. It’s going to fail because it doesn’t scale. If one of my projects can’t attract a team, I pretty much figure that there’s something wrong with it.”
Pg 125 – “Start, Stop, Continue.” A method of quick feedback for teammates. one or two things in each bucket for each person on the team. Look for common threads and then have 1-1 meetings.
Pg 179 – “As you assemble teams around creative projects, probe candidates for their true interests – whatever they may be – and then measure the extent to which the candidate has pursued those interests. Ask for specific examples and seek to understand the lapses of time between interest and action. When you stumble across an Initiator – someone who has passion, generates ideas, and tends to take action – recognize your good fortune. Nothing will assist your ideas more than a team of people who possess real initiative.”
Pg 179 – “Look for complementary expertise. Build teams of “T” people, where the long horizontal line at the top of the letter represents an individual’s breadth of experience, while the tall vertical line represents a depth of experience in one area.”
Pg 185 – “A leader’s role is to keep people engaged in the debate and ruthlessly attack apathy.”
Pg 191 – “The more people who lie awake in bed thinking about your idea, the better.
Pg 194 – Leaders should always speak last at meetings. Always try and ask questions before making statements.
Pg 194 – “You don’t know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out.”
Pg 206 – When you fail ask yourself three questions and then move on…”What external conditions may explain the failure?…What internal factors may have compromised your judgement?…Are there any gems in the unintended outcome?”
Pg 213 – “E.L. Doctorow on what it’s like to write a novel…”It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Pg 217 – “The love you have for what you’re doing is actually the most important thing. Love is the only thing that’s going to pull you through and get you to finish…but there is also a paradoxical and interesting fact: The thing you actually end up making is going to be such a failure compared to the original feeling that you had, the original vision that you had. If you finish and you find out that it’s not a failure, it means that you didn’t try hard enough, because when you really fall in love with something, you idealize it, and you develop a vision of it that’s actually unattainable in reality. The feeling of it is so pure that you can’t make a real thing that has that feeling and so you’re inevitably going to be disappointed by it. And in some way, the depth of that disappointment is in direct correlation to how beautiful the vision was to begin with.”
