The number-one driver of ‘inner work life’ is simply making progress on meaningful work.
Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile, author of The Progress Principle, at the 99% Conference.
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Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age.
Neal Stephenson argues that in business, as in science, cultivating a capacity for uncertainty and the unknown is essential to innovation.
The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.
Wisdom from Hugh McLeod and other great thinkers on how to find your purpose and do what you love.
More important than building a product, we are in the process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much more incredible, the total will be much more incredible than the sum of its parts, and the cumulative effort of approximately 20,000 decisions that we’re all gonna make over the next two years are gonna define what our company is. And one of the things that made Apple great was that, in the early days, it was built from the heart.
Steve Jobs in a rare PBS documentary circa 1986
What Facebook did for personal lives, we want to do for learning lives.
Lore founder and Explore publisher Joseph Cohen reflects on the rebranding of Coursekit and the broader mission.
Guy Kawasaki, one of the original Apple employees responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984, on 12 lessons he learned from Steve Jobs.
- “Experts” are clueless
- Customers cannot tell you want they need
- Biggest challenges beget the best work
- Design counts
- Use big graphics and big fonts “A rule of thumb for fonts: Find out who the oldest person is in the audience, divide his or her age by two.”
- Changing your mind is a form of intelligence
- “Value” ≠ “price”
- A players hire A+ players
- Real CEOs demo
- Real entrepreneurs ship
- Marketing = unique value
- Some things need to be believed to be seen
53. Reject Group Grope
Think about this: decisive, breakthrough creative decision-making is almost always made by one, two, possibly three minds working in unison, take it or leave it. Collective thinking usually leads to stalemate or worse. And the smarter the individuals in the group, the harder it is to nail the idea. Certainly in my experience as a mass communicator and cultural provocateur, I know this to be absolutely true: group thinking and decision-making results in group grope.
In this 53rd rule from his highly anticipated new book, Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!), legendary art director, original Mad Man, and professional grump George Lois echoes Apple co-founder Woz’s advice on working alone and Susan Cain’s insights on the detrimental effects working by committee has on creativity.
Like the hot stuff, cold-brewing involves mixing pulverized beans with water, but the latter process requires about twice as much ground coffee. Those grounds infuse filtered water for 12 to 24 hours, creating iced-coffee concentrate. That liquid is cut with water to taste, at a ratio of about one to one. Yet even after all this dilution, a cup of cold-brewed joe can include 62 cents worth of ground coffee. A hot cup might include 35 cents’ worth of beans.
So you know, the economics of why iced coffee costs more than the hot stuff.
Failure may not be an option in the mind of an entrepreneur, but it is all too frequent in reality. High-risk-taking entrepreneurs override such loss aversion, a phenomenon most of us succumb to—in which losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good—that we developed in our evolutionary environment of scarcity and uncertainty.
Fascinating Scientific American read on the double-edge sword of the optimism bias and how we opt out of overoptimism, citing Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s excellent Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Q: What’s the number-one quality one needs to have or choice one needs to make in translating a brilliant idea into successful entrepreneurship?
A: Be selfless. Do not think of yourself, your needs, your protection, your security. Think only of what would be a dream-come-true for your customers, and find a way to make that happen. Only after you design a perfect business from their perspective, should you adjust the numbers to make sure it’s sustainable. But focus entirely 100% on them, not yourself.
Derek Sivers on the secrets of entrepreneurship
Artist and writer Austin Kleon on 10 things he wishes he’d known starting out, which no one tells young creators.
Tim Harford, author of Adapt: Why Success Always Start with Failure, gathers insights on failure from thinkers like J.K. Rowling, Muhammad Yunus, Samuel Beckett, and more. Also see famous creators on the fear of failure and Steve Jobs’ succinct wisdom on the subject.
A visualization of California’s statewide citrus production volumes, part of Designing the Perfect Fruit – Sarah Rich’s fascinating Smithsonian Magazine story on how Cuties, the brand-name mandarins, set out to replace their horticultural name the way “Kleenex” once did “tissues.”
Nobody can tell you what’s best for you. Only you know.
Tina Roth Eisenberg, a.k.a. Swiss Miss, echoing Alain de Botton’s passionate case for reclaiming your own definition of success from society’s grip.
From The 99%’s collection of 25 bits of advice on making ideas happen. Also see 99% founder Scott Belsky’s advice on the same subject.
One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves.
What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
Philosopher Alain de Botton on finding purpose and success
