Seth Godin (July 10, 1960) is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. Author of business books, popular speaker. In addition, Seth runs a well-known marketing blog. His first work, which gained great popularity, was a book on Permission Marketing.
Author of many books (translated into Russian were "Purple Cow", "Irreplaceable", "Gift in addition. Another brilliant marketing idea", "Confidential marketing. How to make a friend out of a stranger and turn him into a buyer", "All marketers are liars Talent to create stories that this incredulous world is waiting for", "Idea virus? Epidemic! Make customers work for your sales", "The Pit. How to learn to get out and become a winner."
Seth received his marketing education from Stanford Business School. From 1983 to 1986 he was Brand Manager at Spinnaker Software, where he led the development team for the first generation of multimedia products.
Godin then created YoYoDyne, an online interactive marketing company. The company was later sold to search giant Yahoo!, where Seth took over as vice president of marketing. He subsequently left Yahoo! (remaining nonetheless her external adviser) and launched the Internet startup Squidoo.
Books (11)
Bootstrapper's bible
Who is a bootstrapper? How to start a business from scratch and make it efficient? What is a business model? What is the advantage of small companies over the giants of the industry and why great ideas can destroy you?
Seth Godin answers these and other questions in a manner peculiar only to him - with a fair amount of humor, so easily and unobtrusively that even people who are far from business in any of its manifestations do not remain indifferent and eagerly absorb the postulates of bootstrapping. The laws of marketing, the observance and violation of which, paradoxically, does not always lead to success or failure, are perceived easily and vividly, because their action is illustrated by real examples from success and failure stories of famous and not so famous people.
Indispensable
There are people who keep, if not the world, then at least the organization where they work.
They always do more than what is prescribed - this is their gift to others. They give uniqueness to everything they undertake - this is their way of expressing themselves. They know how to attract people with their charm - this is the result of their human orientation. They are sincere in their altruism and inimitable in their work. They are irreplaceable. Employers are really hunting for such people, because they are more effective than hundreds of mediocre workers. They don’t save on Irreplaceables: without them, companies cannot survive.
This book is about how to find and keep the Irreplaceables in the company. And how to become irreplaceable.
Stop stealing dreams
This is not a book in the usual sense, it is, as Seth Godin himself writes, a manifesto, an expression of his opinion, or maybe a cry from the soul and mind.
Seth tells the story of the formation of mass education in America, talks about its development and, of course, that it is outdated.
Much is said about choice: to choose yourself and your own path, and not wait to be chosen; to be dumb, or to learn by yourself throughout your life; to be like everyone else, or not to betray your dreams, to take responsibility and be different from others.
Try it - it will work!
When was the last time you did something for the first time?
When was the last time you started something really new? New business? New project? If you have been doing this for a long time, if you are stopped by the fear of failure, or if you do not understand how to approach this, then “Try it - it will work!” is a book for you. Often, not daring to take the first step, we forget that all good companies, ideas and products are created by those who constantly experiment and go beyond the “comfort zone”.
The implementation of any project is always fraught with risks, but if you are doing something that you have a soul for, you should not be afraid of failure. Sooner or later you will definitely succeed.
Lessons from Icarus
In The Lessons of Icarus, everything is based on one simple statement: our path is to be a human with capital letter, create and soar much higher than we were taught.
We have created a world where you can fly higher than ever before, and our tragedy is that we have been deceived into believing that we should fly as low as possible.
Seth Godin
TRY IT - GET IT!
When was the last time you did something for the first time?
Initiator
Annie Downes is based in Nashville with the Mocha Club, a charity that works with touring musicians to raise money for the developing world.
Last year, Annie called her boss and said something she had never said before: “I have an idea and tomorrow I will start working on it. It won't take long and won't require a lot of money, and I think I can do it."
With those two sentences, Annie changed her life. As well as your organization and the people for whom it works.
Perhaps you want to know what the idea was? You might even be wondering how Annie managed to pull it off?
The change was in the mood. The change was that, for the first time in her career, Annie didn't wait for instructions, didn't do things on someone else's list or current tasks. She did not wait for someone to offer her to take the initiative, but simply took it into her own hands. Annie crossed the Rubicon that day. She became a person who started something important, someone who took the initiative, someone who is ready for failures along the way, if only it will help him change for the better.
Imagine a world where there are no middlemen, no publishers, no bosses, no HR, no housewives, and no one telling you you can't do something.
What would you do if you lived in such a world?
There is a factory in China that can make the same devices as your company, but ten times cheaper. The restaurant across the street smartly steals your menu and wine list, but asks for 20% less for the same food and drinks as you.
The last travel agent disappeared from the market. Magazine publishers have ceded all their growth potential to bloggers. Wikipedia didn't have to work hard to take the reins from the Encyclopædia Britannica; The project participants showed up and did all the work. The staff of the Encyclopædia Britannica could only sit and watch what was happening.
The role of intermediaries, opinion leaders and investors is now less important than ever. Last year, 67 Internet startups were launched in San Francisco and New York for money, which could finance only a third of the projects in Silicon Valley.
But if money, accessibility, and organizational power are not the backbone of an economy, what is it that drives it?
Initiative.
Start a project, draw attention to it, take a risk. Not just "I'll start thinking about it" or "we'll meet about it" or even "I applied
for a patent...
No, start for real.
Cross the line beyond which there is no turning back.
Start.
Make up your mind.
Commit.
Seventh imperative
III The first imperative: know the market, know the possibilities, know yourself.
III Second imperative: be educated to understand what is going on around you.
III The third imperative: have connections so that your endeavors are credible.
III The fourth imperative is to be consistent so that the system knows what to expect.
Ø Fifth imperative: build assets so you have something to sell.
Ø Sixth imperative: be productive so that you are well-appreciated.
But you can do everything on this list and still crash. It's not enough just to work.
It is not enough just to produce. It's not enough to just sell. It used to be enough, but not now.
The world is changing too fast. If you do not have the spirit of initiative, you have no choice but to simply react to what is happening. Without the ability to inspire and experiment, you are doomed to go with the flow until you are nudged in the right direction.
I can find thousands of books and a million references to the first six imperatives. They hit you countless times at school, in graduate school, and at work. Many leaders will gladly remind you of them. But when the time of the seventh imperative comes, it seems that you are on your own.
The seventh imperative is intimidating and therefore easy to miss or ignore. The seventh imperative means that you need to have enough courage, firmness and passion to take the helm yourself.
Ability to start
The difference between a strong person and a weak person is as simple as the difference between effective, growing organizations and those that stagnate and die.
The winners turned the initiative into a passion and a life practice. Check it out, make a list of people and organizations you admire. I foresee that the seventh imperative distinguishes them all.
It turns out that the task is not to improve your ability to understand when to start and when to wait. The challenge is to make starting a habit a habit.
Craig Venter and Dr. Frankenstein
The man who deciphered the human genome found a way to use a computer to completely recreate the genetic code of an organism. This scientist and his team can play with genes almost as easily as you can edit an essay in Word.
But still.
But still, once a chain of genetic code has been generated and turned into organic material in a Petri dish, it just continues to lie there. She is not alive yet.
There is not enough driving force - the spark of life. Venter needs to add some more organic tissue, something alive, to transform the project into something more than just an inert mass of genes.
Surprisingly, this is exactly what you have. No, do not buy a Petri dish and a set of organic materials. No, your opportunity is wider - to look around and see that there are many opportunities, opportunities and entire organizations that you can breathe into. new life once you are motivated enough and courageous enough to give them the new boost they need.
buzzer box
When my nephew was born, my uncle (who got his PhD from MIT) made a buzzer box for him. It was a heavy metal device with a thick black wire connected to an outlet in the wall. The box looked more like an item needed in a nuclear power plant than a boy's toy, but that didn't stop his uncle from tossing it into the crib.
There were two switches mounted in the box, some light bulbs and a few more control levers. Flip the switch and the light will come on. Switch two and the buzzer will ring. Of course, a terrible thing, unless you are a child.
The kid sees a box with a buzzer and starts poking it with his finger. If I click on that, something else will happen!
Mathematicians call this a function. Set one variable - you will get the result. Challenge and response. Life is a box with a buzzer. Experiment!
Elements of production
Here's what it takes to produce something:
people who will work on it; the place where the organization will be located; raw materials;
distribution;
marketing.
But all these activities will be useless if the least conscious (but most essential) element is missing. If no one says "go!", the project will wither away. If no one insists, does not push, does not create, does not cajole, does not start, then there is nothing, everything is useless.
My thesis: all other items are now cheaper and easier to get than ever. That is why critical importance is attached to the driving force.
We have built the largest economic machine in history. All tools are available and are now cheaper than ever. The market is waiting, capital is waiting, factories are waiting, and yes, stores are waiting too.
They're waiting for someone to say, "Let's go!"
Walking in circles
Dr. Jan Souman of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics has studied what happens to us when we have no maps, no compass, and no way to mark landmarks. This is not a metaphor - he really studied what happens to people who are lost in the forest or wandering in the Sahara, where the North Star or the Sun is not visible, so that they can determine where to go.
It turns out that in this case we go in circles. Even when we try our best to walk straight in order to get out of the forest or the desert, we end up in the same place where we started. Our instincts are not enough. As Dr. Souman says, "Don't trust your feelings, as you may think you're walking in a straight line, but you really aren't."
Man is so arranged that he needs a map. If you are brave enough to draw it, people will follow you.
Who says yes?
This is a question I often ask people in organizations. It is interesting to listen to how they describe their functions, their work, their tasks. Some downplay their own role (“I sort reports on Thursdays”), while others, on the contrary, exalt it (“I am responsible for corporate culture”).
Almost no one says: "I launch projects."
It's amazing if you think about it. If no one is launching projects, where can innovation come from? No, not just an idea - there are plenty of ideas, namely the beginning of something new. If the only thing we lack is the spark of life, the driving force, how can we not notice it?
Where is the VP of Project Launch? How many times do you have to overcome "no" before you get "yes"? Obviously, in the organization there is always a person responsible for production, sales or finance. But who is responsible for "yes"?
Experiment!
How do programmers learn craft? Is there a step-by-step guide to ensure you master your work?
All great programmers learned the same way. They experimented. We wrote some kind of program for a computer and looked at what would happen. Then they changed it and watched what he would do in response. The programmers repeated the process over and over again until they understood how this "black box" works.
A computer, or a market, or a customer, or your boss can act as such an object. This is a puzzle that can only be solved in one way - by experiment.
What will happen if you do this? What happens if you do that? The Buzzer Box slowly reveals its secrets, and as you experiment more and more, you not only get smarter, but you start to benefit more and more from your knowledge. It does not necessarily mean equity or even control. Benefit is based on understanding and your power to do something.
Doug Rushkoff and Mark Frauenfelder have written about a new trend: we are ready to cede control of our lives to organizations and objects. As soon as we voluntarily and blindly accept what is given to us, we lose power. It is only by influencing, testing, changing and understanding that we can truly own something and really influence something.
Where can you start?
The biggest entrepreneurs are praised every day. We hear their names - they are people (too often - men) who started a new business, founded a company, made a revolution. You can only be happy for them. But you don't have to be Howard Schultz to be an initiator.
People have come to the false conclusion that if they are not ready to start an independent and risky venture that will change the world, they are better off not starting anything at all. For some reason, we forced ourselves to believe the delusion that a self-respecting project must have a name, a building, and a ticker symbol.
In fact, people within organizations have excellent opportunities to start something. Every third person in a team of four customer service employees is capable of this. The secretary at the reception is capable of this. The assistant master is capable of this.
The spark I'm talking about is almost as easy to describe as it is easy to miss.
Have you seen a woman who has difficulty holding a tray in the hospital cafeteria? You can stand up, go to her and help. It's not your job, you may not even get any thanks for it, but you can still do it.
Is there a better way to answer a phone call from an angry customer? You can try this method and then teach it to others.
Does the door hinge creak and annoy everyone in the room? You can bring some lube and get people out of that squeak.
But if it's so obvious, why isn't anyone doing it?
When can you start?
Right now, without delay. And short too.
Types of capital
What can you invest? What can your company invest in?
Ш Financial capital - money in the bank that can be put into work on a project or investment.
• Link Capital - people you know, links you can acquire, retailers and systems you can connect to.
Ш Intellectual capital - brains. Systems software. Access to people who have the ability to penetrate the essence of things.
Ш Physical capital - plant and equipment, tools and transport.
Ш The capital of respect is your reputation.
Ш "Initiative" capital - the desire to move forward. The ability and willpower to say yes.
Think about how reputation, connections, and access to capital corrupt us. Most screenwriters would rather have their film produced by a major film studio than by an independent director. At General Motors, the stack of resumes from automotive designers is much thicker than at Aptera. The market responds to the power that comes with capital.
My favorite type of capital is, of course, the last one on this list. It turns out that this is the most important capital in our new economy.
double doubling
AT small village like the one in which our ancestors used to live, innovation allows you to win the competition for a long time. The market is weakly saturated, the rest of the organizations are paralyzed by fear, and you can safely use your advantage for months or even years. A business needs to double its growth rate, or double its market share, or double its innovation, to thrive for a generation.
In the "world of Google" the number of direct and potential competitors is incalculable - in fact, it is infinite. In a world where news travels instantly and everyone can benefit from the latest advances in modern science, the half-life of an idea or innovation is short and getting shorter.
Doubling is not enough. To innovate and then reap the rewards cannot be a long-term strategy. The only way to defend against competitors is to double and then double again. Create innovation on the way to new innovations, start again on the way to new beginnings.
But we don't need the quickness that Lucille Ball demonstrates, stuffing chocolate truffles into boxes, or into her mouth, or into her pocket, as fast as she can to cope with the flow of chocolates on the conveyor line. No, it takes the speed that comes from accelerating cycles, it takes an intense focus on change, an obsession with changing the status quo just to see what happens.
We end up without a purpose if we don't care enough about what we're doing, or if we try to hide and limit our contributions. I'm agitating for the exact opposite of aimlessness, if I can put it that way.
Is it true that change involves risk?
Change is a flow. We can measure the flow of heat or the speed of molecules. Everything around is constantly in motion.
Risk involves both gain and loss. We bet on something and may or may not receive a reward for it.
When you drop an ice cube into a cup of hot tea, there is no risk. Heat is transferred from water to ice, there is a change... movement.
For some, risk is bad because it implies the possibility of failure. It may only be temporary, but it doesn't really matter if the very thought of failure makes you give up. Therefore, for some, the risk is equal to the defeat (take a risk, and sooner or later you will fail). We avoid risk because we have been taught to avoid defeat. I define anxiety as a premature sense of failure... and if you experience it when you start a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.
In addition, over time, people began to confuse risk with change. We have come to the conclusion that if things change and there is movement, then of course there is risk.
Those who fear him have begun to fear movement of any kind. People act as if changes in their behavior, attitudes, or anything else that is unpredictable puts us at risk, which, in turn, leads to defeat. Thus, those who are afraid of risk try to shy away from conflict situations to avoid any movement.
Such people make two mistakes. Firstly, they assume that risk is bad, and secondly, they confuse risk and change and come to the conclusion that movement is also bad.
It's not surprising to me that many of these people are stuck. Stuck on their status quo, on protecting their own position in the market, on the level of education that they have, and on their unwillingness to get the best. They are stuck because they are afraid to watch something new on TV, afraid to read something new on their Kindle, afraid to ask the “hard” question.
All this would not matter if it were not for one "but": now the whole world is in the process of change. If your project is not moving forward, then in relation to the rest of the world, it is actually moving backward. Like a stone in a river, you can stand still, but given the movement around you, collisions are inevitable.
For someone who prefers no movement, the irony of the situation is that there is much less turbulence around a stick flowing along the same river. Around it, something is moving, changing, but compared to what is happening with the river, the situation is quite calm.
The economy needs change. Change is not associated with risk. Change is the environment in which we live. Fortunately, change is also what we were born for.
Road of failures
“It will end in tears,” my mother warned when she discovered a situation between me and my sisters that was clearly related to bad behavior.
This is how some think about a career built on initiative.
Most things break sooner or later. Most ideas fail. Most initiatives end in failure. And if you are one of those who are behind them, if you are the one who all the time starts some business that ends in failure, then it seems that you are doomed.
Like it or not, our society loves to dance on the bones of losers. (Unlike victory dances. They look like bluster. But gloating while dancing on the bones is just right.) Watch a football game, or listen to an analysis of a political campaign, or read a list of failed business projects in a magazine - it's very easy to point fingers, find someone to blame, joyfully criticize what went wrong.
I have to sell you an idea why avoiding defeat is counterproductive.
First, let's compile a list of people who have made their careers by starting something (and therefore often failing): Harlan Ellison, Steve Carell, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Wright, Mark Cuban, Mehmet Oz, George Orwell, Michael Bloomberg , Nan Talese, Gloria Steinem, etc. In fact, I didn't have to do any research at all to make this list. I just wrote the names of famous, respected and successful people.
Oprah had failed shows, unsuccessful projects, failed predictions. She starts something new every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and has a long, long list of things that didn't work out. However, because the market (and our society) highly respects the work that Oprah has done and excelled at, this list is not followed. Mehmet Oz was losing patients, Mark Cuban was supporting failed businesses. The more you do, the more you lose.
Second, let's think about what type of failure in question. We're not talking about being disrespectful, not about cutting corners that shouldn't have been taken, not about the hack work of someone who doesn't care. No, we are talking about the failures of people with good intentions, people who are looking for clients, who want to please them and change the world for the better.
I'm not suggesting that you make a mistake while working at a nuclear power plant, or frantically jump from one task to another instead of preparing for the upcoming SAT test. Hard work is necessary in any case. The kind of initiative I'm talking about is challenging because it's important, intimidating, and new.
If you take the path of initiative and follow it, while others worry about "quality" and "predictability", sooner or later you will reach the goal. The crowd won't stop worrying as it loves to do so. Ignore it because you will create change and use new leverage to do more and more work that is very important.
Epidemic
There are so many people around who are paralyzed by uncertainty and are paralyzed by the very thought of presenting their achievements to the public that you might think that this fear is innate.
And there is.
Scientists can pinpoint exactly where your "lizard brain" is located. This is a part of the brain of a prehistoric person, the same as that of a lizard or a deer. Filled with fear, focused on reproduction.
Stephen Pressfield calls the lizard brain "resistance". It is it that tells you something when you read these lines, it is it that forces you to compromise, not to create problems, to avoid sudden movements. For many of us, the "resistance" is constantly talking, often sabotaging our best opportunities and destroying our best chances to make a difference. Good work. If you assign your internal resistance some name, it will help you befriend him, and befriend him and ignore him.
The first rule of doing work that matters
Get to work on a regular basis.
Creating art is difficult. Selling is difficult. Writing is difficult. Changing the world is difficult.
When you are doing hard work, when you are rejected, when you fail, when you achieve something, this is the wrong time to make ad hoc decisions about whether to take a nap, take a midweek day off, or take a coffee break.
Zig Zaglar taught me this 20 years ago. Before you begin, make a plan. Don't let setbacks, or delays, or anxiety push you to say to yourself, "Hey, maybe I should check email or maybe take a nap? If this happens, your "lizard brain" will soon learn to use such a trick to shirk work again and again.
In the first five years of my independent business, when the struggle seemed to never end, I never missed a day of work, never took a nap. (I also made it a rule to finish things at a certain time and not work weekends. The rule works both ways.)
In short: always come to work.
Naps.google.com
What makes Google's last five years different from almost any other successful new venture? Compare it to eBay, Yahoo!, Netscape or About.com.
It's simple: After the initial commercial innovations were successful, Google completely ignored Wall Street. Instead of focusing exclusively on maximizing profits from a single invention, the portal continues to invest (some people think that this investment is excessive: they are wrong) in new tools, new projects, new ways of interconnecting and interacting people.
Most initiatives end in failure. And that's okay. At least none of them Google “overslept”.
Your ego and your project
At some point, the word "ego" acquired a negative connotation. This is not true.
When a project is carried out on our behalf, our ego drives us to raise the bar and perform even better. The ego forces us to seek approval, change the world to push the boundaries of what is possible. If the ego were not the key driver, fruitful creative work would be anonymous, but it is not.
Just tell him that the best way to get things off the ground is to let others take credit for him. The real payoff for you (and your ego) is to see things get done, not to be recognized.
Quality reimagined
Previously, quality was defined as "satisfactory". Your products or services had to meet certain criteria in order to be considered.
And then there was a revolution in quality and the market began to characterize quality as "the absence of flaws."
Almost everything on the market, from cars to iPads to insurance policies, works exactly as advertised. You turn the key or open the box and everything works. Everytime.
Things work so well that a dead battery, a car failure, or a typo in a book are shocking.
Most of your competitors are defect-free too, which means that quality is no longer a top priority. We demand it, but we don't have to look for it. If both you and the competitor are doing a good job, and both of you offer only this, then you offer a mass product, and I, perhaps, will choose whichever is cheaper.
We have virtually no choice but to go beyond quality and strive for something outstanding, connected to the common threads and at the same time new.
And everything outstanding, as you already understood, requires initiative.
Brainwashing Specialist
Businesses need workers who follow instructions. The casino needs dealers who clearly follow the instructions. NASA needs astronauts who don't negotiate orders during a flight. Mines need miners who will constantly, day in and day out, follow all the rules.
Meanwhile, business owners faced a choice. They could trust the workers to draw conclusions, solve problems, look for improvements, or they could direct their efforts to the complete destruction of individual initiative and gain an advantage by fully complying with standards.
You guessed it - the majority chose the latter option.
Now his shortcomings are becoming apparent. Businesses are finding that production has stalled due to a lack of not only innovation but also improvement. Detroit's auto plants were stifled long enough for the union to finally say, "All right, we'll do the bare minimum of duty." The conductors of symphony orchestras reprimanded the innovative musicians so often that they finally said: “OK, we will play strictly according to the notes.” And the mass market has rewarded mediocre producers so many times that they have decided to turn to tasteless food.
Problem: You can't make something tasteless even more tasteless. It is impossible to develop by increasing predictability and ordinariness. Your products may be reliable, standard, and cheap, but if the market needs something better, you'll have to catch up.
Why are these products and services of average quality?
We love to look for flaws in the system. We like to get mad at hotels, government agencies, and airlines that are just awful. Idiots!
But we almost never look at mediocre products and wonder why they can't be great. Services or products of average quality perform their functions, but set the bar so low that it is simply too lazy to walk to the store opposite to buy them. All goods of medium quality are absolutely the same and monotonous.
Why can't every dish in a restaurant be called an excellent combination of price and quality? Why isn't every tax dollar being spent with the zeal and focus it could be? We seem to be willing to accept average quality as long as the product, service, or organization is not completely degraded.
Finding a group of people who can fix what is already broken is not a problem. But your advantage (and difficult task) will be to throw all your energy and willpower into the fight against mediocrity.
If in doubt...
Look for fear. The root of doubt is almost always in it.
Where did the curiosity go?
If you go to the Penguin Magic website, you will see a lot of videos of amazing magic tricks - there are mind reading, and bending metal, and tying shoelaces. In these video clips, magicians perform on the streets for passers-by. A good number causes enthusiastic exclamations. The audience cannot believe what they see. It's a miracle! Some damn thing! And then the curiosity begins.
"How did you do that?"
From time to time I also show tricks or some technique but they don't ask me how I do it. People are so immersed in work that they don't want to know how things are going; they are ready to take it on faith that perhaps the laws of nature do not work as they expected, but what do they care?
Initiative is similar to creativity in that both require curiosity. Not the search for the “right” answer, but the insatiable desire to understand how something is done and how it can be improved.
The difference is that creative person satisfied that he knew how to do it. And the initiator will not rest until he learns to do something himself.
Choose me! Choose me!
The relentless brainwashing of a weakening industrial economy has created a misunderstanding that is costing many dearly. Creative personalities or people who have an opinion think they should wait to be chosen.
For example, writers wait to be approached by an agent and then by a publisher. Then they worry about being picked up by bookstores so that they can reach readers who will finally read the books they have written. And if you have already been chosen to participate in the Oprah Winfrey show, then everything will work out by itself.
Entrepreneurs often wait to be selected by a venture capitalist or investor. They need to be selected so that they get confirmation of the need for their business and begin the real work of organizing a business.
Employees wait to be offered a promotion or chair or speaker at a meeting.
The slogan "Choose me, choose me!" serves as a recognition of the power of the system and transfers responsibility and initiative to someone else. Not even like that: the phrase "Choose me, choose me!" shifts the blame from you to someone else.
If you are not chosen, they are to blame, not you.
If you were chosen - well, it was they who said that you were good for something, right? So you are no longer responsible for your mistakes.
Rise up against the tyranny of someone else's choice. Choose yourself.
Host and organizer
My friend Jessica wants to be a conference organizer. If you hire her, she will think over the smallest detail of your event. Give her a list of participants, determine the venue and program of the conference - and everything will go without a hitch without a hitch.
The disadvantage of this plan is that it leaves the choice up to the event organizer. If Jessica is chosen often, she is lucky. If she can negotiate a fair pay, she's lucky. But she must bow to the organizer and beg him.
But in the hands of the organizer all the trump cards. He initiates the conference. And although he and the organizer have very similar professional skills, it is the organizer who hires the organizer. He makes a choice rather than waiting to be chosen.
Entrepreneurship is easy a special case
It is very easy to conclude that someone who initiates something and is ready to change the status quo automatically becomes an entrepreneur and these functions are the prerogative of the leader. We convince ourselves that since we have handed over the reins to the boss or the owner of the firm, they should be experimenting, not us.
In reality, when entrepreneurs take the initiative, they do something fundamentally different: they use funds (often not their own) to build a profitable business that goes far beyond the scope of one person. The goal of an entrepreneur is to create something that can grow and prosper. And this is a great prospect that requires great determination and initiative.
Entrepreneurship is a special case, not because it requires initiative (everyone needs it now), but because it involves the use of money, human resources and assets to create a new, larger enterprise.
However, one should not make the erroneous conclusion that all the rest are just cogs in the mechanism. Smart entrepreneurs understand that a thriving organization doesn't need just one creative employee with the ability to innovate.
Nonprofits and even government organizations have found that the best way to thrive in an ever-changing world is to change themselves, and that only happens if they are willing to experiment and see what happens.
Season ticket
Ski resorts will gladly sell you a yearly ski pass for about the price of a seven-day lift pass. People who have used this opportunity and bought a ticket have found that it is easier (and cheaper) to make a decision once than to make it over and over again all season long.
Initiation is also something like that. Instead of taking the initiative on a case-by-case basis, worrying, getting permission and persuading every time, why not get a “season ticket”? Why not convince your boss or colleagues that you are the initiator? It's your job. You are a beginner. Ask once, do it all the time.
There are no free lunches
Of course, the life of the initiator is complicated by the fact that he can make mistakes. You will make the wrong choice, you will lose time, you will be blamed.
This is why initiative is so valuable.
Most people try to avoid difficult tasks. They are too uptight, too scared; they hold back, they will be glad if the blow falls on someone else.
Initiative is rare.
And therefore valuable.
Digging trenches is a common occurrence. It is easy to find manual laborers for minimal pay, which is why it is minimal.
And find smart people ready to start useful projects is incredibly difficult. Because sometimes what you start doesn't work. And the fact that what you suggested does not always work should give you confidence, because it means that you are doing something that scares others.
Get out, coward
One way to start the work day is to set up your team members. Walk around the circle and give employees the opportunity to break the news and share ideas. This is a useful exercise, it helps people to speak up and gives them momentum to move forward.
Another way - probably more effective - is to ask each employee to talk about what he is afraid of. There are two kinds of fear. Fear of what will not work, and fear of what will work.
What are you, a coward?
Yes, we are all cowards. We fear. "Lizard" clung to us thoroughly.
So tell me: are you afraid of what can destroy, dissuade, knock you down? Or are you afraid of what might work, change everything, and uncover entirely new things to fear?
"Lizard" does not understand the benefits of experimentation
The formula is simple: when the cost of experimenting (CVE) is less than the cost of doing nothing (0), you should experiment!
If you own a gigantic steel plant worth billions of dollars, I think it would be unwise to shut it down for a month to try new, untested technology.
However, when you're writing a script, the cost of using some kind of innovation is far less tangible than the cost of boring standards. Although this practice sometimes miraculously leads to the sale of the manufactured product, as a rule, it almost always ends in failure. The cost of a mistake is less than the cost of inaction.
This statement applies to almost all innovations in sales, marketing, recruitment, software, or management. The same is true for any interaction you have with a supplier, customer, or colleague. And this is what many of us should be guided by most of the time, except for a short period when we run a steel mill.
The economy, the development of which is associated with the emergence of new ideas, requires us to show initiative. However, we resist because our “lizard brain”, which lives in perpetual fear, constantly exaggerates the cost of a mistake.
"Polish" it!
Every few minutes his cell phone rings.
Apparently my friend set it up to beep whenever a Twitter user sends a message. Such a setting makes it possible to read it and give an answer, which probably makes my friend an extremely useful person. He hopes that polishing the relationship will serve as something of a tool for creating business connections, helping him to better integrate into the life and possibly business of Twitter users.
Oh, this "polishing"!
Stand at a busy city intersection and you will see how it happens. Dozens of seemingly busy people polish their relationships by looking around.
The problem is the asymptotic 1 process. If you “polish” twice as long, the result will not be twice as good. If you "polish" ten times longer - the result will definitely not be ten times better. Whether you polish a piece of furniture or an idea, the benefits quickly fade. "Polishing" does nothing.
I wonder what would happen if, instead of rushing to Twitter, my friend used his cell phone signal to do something original, provocative, important? What if the signal reminded him not to "polish", but to create?
Semmelweis imperative
Successful experimentation also requires tact, because your actions should really change something, and not cause people to be rejected, angry or afraid.
In psychology, a steady state reached after no further changes in behavior are detected. - Approx. ed.
In the middle of the XIX century. Ignaz Semmelweis was a practicing physician in Hungary. He suggested that poor hygiene, especially the fact that obstetricians do not wash their hands often enough, often causes puerperal fever and death among women in childbirth. Despite the fact that the doctor devoted his whole life to spreading this idea, he died a failure, an unpopular and unaccomplished person.
In a book published in 1861, Semmelweis wrote: “In most classrooms at medical faculties, lectures continue to be heard on the epidemic of puerperal fever and on the refutation of my theories ... In 1854, in Vienna, where my hypothesis was born, 400 women died of puerperal fever” .
Why? If the results of such a simple intervention proposed by Semmelweis were so impressive, why were doctors and the medical community so stubbornly rejecting his ideas?
For two reasons. First, he never made any effort to explain his hypothesis with the help of science. And without answering the question "why?" and without appropriate explanations, it was difficult for his ideas to gain momentum for subsequent dissemination.
Second, as Atul Gawande reported in his book Better, Semmelweis was an idiot. Carried away by his ideas, he never once thought of convincing anyone that he was right, or even of being patient. Semmelweis wrote to one doctor: “You, Herr Professor, yourself took part in this bloody massacre,” and to another: “... I declare before God and before the world that you are a murderer.”
Experiment, but in a smart way. Once having formulated his point of view, Semmelweis for some reason did not promote it, stopped working to change the world. Instead of insisting on what works, he stepped back and didn't do what he could have done.
Welcome to the world of projects
You have lived in the world of projects for so long that you probably forgot that there was a time when they were not always given such importance.
The Ford Motor Company changed the world with a project that lasted longer than most of its employees. The Ford Model T has been in production for 19 years. More than 15 million vehicles have been sold. There were different people involved in launching this model and taking it off the assembly line. Naturally, the project was to launch the car into production, but the main task of Ford Motor was to establish serial production of this particular model in different countries in order to make a profit again and again every time. The launch project was seen as a necessary evil, but series production was Ford's business.
Think about the organizations you've come across, purchased from, or worked for. Most of them (if they lasted more than 10-20 years) are based on the same assembly line as in Ford, with the possibility of scaling up production. The System is the System; respect her!
Now think about new organizations, those that are growing and. Gain influence. Think Apple, Google, director James Cameron's group, Ideo, Pixar and Electronic Arts. These are organizations built around projects. Each of these companies is 3 groups of enthusiasts launching projects.
No projects - no organization. Sitting on the beach is not an option because projects don't last forever. The people remain, the spirit remains, but projects must be updated after the launch of one project and before the start of the next useful work no.
As organizations began to build their activities around projects, they made a frightening discovery: Starting a project is harder than it looks.
Inventing, choosing, implementing or discarding ideas, shaping, predicting and forecasting the future of a project is all very difficult. And it all starts with the initiator, with one person who moves the matter forward.
The Ford system is dead. Long live the Ford system!
Henry Ford discovered that productivity is the secret to market success. It is worth establishing an efficient production of cars - and you can sell them much cheaper. Cars at a moderate price are much easier to sell than expensive ones of the same quality.
And Ford created a perfect factory production system based on subordination, interchangeable parts and interchangeable people.
There is no room for growth in such a system. Manufacturing has been outsourced (not just for cars, but for many other products), but even with low-cost factories around the world, organizations are finding it impossible to cut prices forever.
Thus, the new system currently used by Ford Motor and a huge number of other companies involves the use of a developed stable, productive commercial platform for the production of products and as a basis for new projects. New system consumes neither oil, nor electricity, nor the resources of assembly lines; it is based on innovation. You can call it the design line.
The old system cannot work without the new one, which, in turn, depends on unpredictable people whose ideas do not come on schedule.
What happened to Perfection?
When Tom Peters decided to dedicate his life to spreading the message of his book In Search of Excellence, everything changed. He has spent over 25 years, traveled millions of miles and delivered thousands of speeches.
And when Peter comes on stage, I see disappointment in his eyes. Millions of people have adopted the way of thinking described in his work, but there are still too many who expect precise instructions from him. They don't understand that Perfection isn't about working harder on someone else's orders. It is about taking the initiative and doing the work that you thought was worthwhile.
Stop waiting for the card to be given to you. Those who make routes are valued, not those who follow them.
Business development
Many companies have business development departments. Its employees are neither marketing nor sales - they are responsible for new deals, partnerships and revolutionary ideas. It is the business development team who come up with a new toy for McDonald's children's sets or a new way to arrange goods on the shelves at a Starbucks coffee shop.
The business development department does not have a definite program of action, and its employees do not have a well-established way of deciding what to do next. He is responsible for innovation. Such departments are needed by most organizations, but in reality they exist in only a few of them. Often companies that have business development departments use them with stunning inefficiency because none of the employees have the mindset to initiate. Everyone is afraid of too serious experiments, they are afraid to go beyond the usual framework and create something new.
How often are our heroes in complete peace? It's hard to imagine Spock and Captain Kirk landing on a planet and just relaxing for a month or two.
Idleness has nothing to do with "going boldly where no man has gone before."
What distinguishes us from other creatures is that we go to unfamiliar places, where no human has gone before. We do this often and voluntarily. The only things that make our work and our lives interesting are discoveries, the ability to be surprised and the risk of pioneering (insert scene with the Spanish inquisitors from the Monty Python series).
In-line production has robbed us of our sense of adventure. The economic imperative of the last century was to avoid risks, avoid change, and most of all, avoid discoveries and everything new. An efficient company is afraid of change because it means retooling, risk, performance failure. Of course, we can live with change when necessary and welcome predictable, incremental productivity-enhancing changes, but when it comes to the word "bravely," sorry.
Risk avoidance worked then, but not now.
If you see something unusual - tell me!
Do we really need this slogan and accompanying posters?
Let's take a moment to analyze them.
If you see something (namely: a dangerous device, a bomb, for example, or a zombie with a knife, or a suitcase from which sparks fly out, or pieces of asbestos hanging from the ceiling in kindergarten), say something (namely: pick up the phone, dial the emergency number 911, point it out to the uniformed soldier).
Would anyone hesitate to report zombies?
Yes, because we were taught to be silent and look under our feet. Because those who are in power do not like annoying people and nosy neighbors who keep order. Therefore, they make it inconvenient to speak out. In many police stations, it is customary to consider the first suspect the one who took the time to report the conflict.
Allowed (not allowed)
Most employees will show you a long list of what they are not allowed to do. There are such lists in schools, in human relationships, and at work. There is a park near my house where dogs, residents from other areas and groups celebrating birthdays are not allowed.
Interestingly, the list of allowed things is much more difficult to remember and write down. I think we are afraid of the freedom we really have and what is expected of us in connection with this.
Living with a list of bans is much easier and more convenient. We remember it, we resent its existence, but in the end we feel comfortable in the enclosed space it creates. When revolutions are made, when the list gets shorter, it takes us a surprisingly long time to act. A simple example: when blogs or Twitter appeared, how long did it take you to start speaking out? Before that, you didn't have a cheap, easy, accessible way to let the world know what you think. You weren't allowed to.
And then they let you.
However, for most people who use these tools, it took years (!) to get going.
The death of idealism
Sooner or later, many idealists turn into heartless realists who mistakenly believe that being realistic means giving up everything.
Initially, idealists believe that any action is better than no action. They understand the system, the process, how they work. They want to fix everything, to change, in any case - to create a movement.
Over time, these politicians, entrepreneurs, or activists find that, as they gain momentum, they lose exactly what helped them get where they are. The people who are in favor of accepting the status quo are the same people who fought to change it just a few years ago.
Many can avoid such a transformation.
As illusions dissipate, people stop experimenting. They find that they lose their fuse, dissuade, cool down and begin to accept the existing order of things. The irony is that the act of creating and implementing great ideas is what can change the status quo. If you send curses to the TV presenter, you will not change anything. If you yell long enough, you'll just get hoarse, and nothing else.
An alternative approach is to relentlessly and consistently start something (and see it through to the end). Julie Taymor, Alice Waters and Sarah Jones could do nothing and join the ranks of disillusioned realists. Instead, they, like everyone else who changes something in the world around them, continue to experiment. This is their choice.
Don't tell Woody
My dog Woody has a collar with what is called an invisible fence. A special wire is laid around the perimeter of our courtyard, and if the dog approaches it, the collar will beep. If he continues to move, he will receive a mild electric shock. (I think this only happened once in reality.) Woody attributes the signal to shock and never approaches the boundary of the lot.
The most interesting thing is that a year ago the wire was damaged, and the system no longer works. But for Woody, the collar is associated with a certain behavior, so it only goes out of the yard if we take it off.
The boundary is laid in the dog's head, not in the system.
What if…
All of the above works through curiosity.
Successful individuals easily follow proven instructions. We would all be happy to walk the card if it comes with a guarantee.
Meanwhile, no one gives it. The cards don't exist. They are all outdated and no longer as valuable as they used to be, because your competitors also have cards.
The opportunity is to be guided by your own curiosity instead. It does not reject failure. It makes us go to a haunted house because we are more interested in an unexpected adventure than safety.
Curiosity can push us to the path of implementing ideas, make us bring something new into the world, consider, improve, and then start all over again (again and again).
Three thousand talks at ted conferences
The TED conference was originally attended by the giants of the scientific and literary world (as well as some politicians). No wonder this series of talks became an internet sensation.
But the most interesting began later, when Chris Anderson and his working group encouraged people all over the world to host their own version of TED. The independent conferences are called TEDx and feature speakers from a wide range of industries and mostly regular positions.
After 3,000 people spoke at the conference, it became clear that big ideas and revolutionary concepts are not the exclusive prerogative of those who are paid to do so.
In fact, everyone can experiment. In any country, in most industries, there are passionate fanatics who can change the world for the better. Because they are capable of it.
If you had the opportunity to speak at TED, what would you talk about? About your discoveries, about your knowledge, about what you can teach? You need to choose one theme. Even if you do not stick to only it, you must be prepared for the fact that you need to stop at one thing.
The Joy of Mistake
The Pike Place Market in Seattle still has the first Starbucks coffee shop. She looks odd though. It has a different logo, a different internal structure.
Turns out Starbucks didn't originally sell coffee.
They sold coffee beans, loose teas and even herbs. But it was impossible to drink coffee there, only tasting coffee from a particular variety of beans (regular, not espresso!).
Starbucks made a mistake. Jerry Baldwin, one of the founders, made a mistake. He believed that the main thing is the coffee beans, not the finished coffee. If everything depended on Jerry, Starbucks would fail. It took Howard Schultz, a trip to Italy, and a love of espresso to make the Starbucks coffee shops we know them. And in what happened, a great merit of Howard.
But what if the "wrong" Starbucks store was never built? What if Jerry and his partners said, "Well, we're not sure the coffee bean idea will work, so let's do nothing"? Without Jerry Baldwin and his misguided idea of a coffee bean store, we wouldn't have frappuccinos. One led to the other in the usual way, which is never direct.
Initial project spaceship Enterprise was created by Matt Jefferies. It looked like a hybrid of a flying saucer and a can opener. Completely wrong.
But Matt had the ability to see things through to the end. He took a flawed initial idea, and then improved and updated it until Enterprise became the way we know and love it. The most difficult, as it seems to me, was to create the first, unsuccessful, version.
Experiment does not mean always being right. It implies action.
The world is harder than it seems
By solving the "find the word" puzzle, Google finds the right answer for you among 12 billion pages.
The blogger formulates a precise plan of action in three paragraphs.
The book informs you about 13 steps to success.
The company's internal policy contains the answer to your question, and only a few of its vice presidents can clarify it.
There are two forces in favor of accepting ready-made answers. The first is the industrial age, which forces us to jump to conclusions immediately, because there is simply no time for indecision when cars, markets, and people are waiting in line.
The second force is the digital age because computers love coincidences, algorithms, and binary. They don't like uncertainty.
Initiative and undertaking have nothing to do with either one or the other. They are associated with "let's see" and "try".
If there is no clear answer, you might want to try something else. In a complex world, a new path is often the right one.
cramming
I have a poor idea of what happens to people: they don't learn by understanding. They learn in some other way - by rote memorization or otherwise ... Their knowledge is so unstable!
Richard Feynman
"Maybe it won't work"
Can these four words be spoken?
Is your work so serious, devoid of flaws and urgent that everything you do every day must be flawless?
Change is a very powerful thing, but it is always accompanied by failure. “Perhaps nothing will work out” - you don’t have to put up with this, you need to strive for this.
One of my earliest memories is going with my grandmother to the Ringling Brothers circus. We were sitting in the dark hall of Madison Square Garden when the lights suddenly turned on and the host announced (not announced, but announced): “Ladies and gentlemen, now the trapeze acrobats will attempt a triple somersault ...”
And the way he said “try” gave us the idea that they might not succeed. They will try. They won't do the trick. They won't show the number. We didn't come to have the acrobats show us something well-practiced. No, we wanted to see something new, risky, interesting.
Only in systems where quality is taken for granted does effort matter. I'm not sure that Master Yoda was right when he said: "You can do it or not do it, you can't try." You can try. Trying is the opposite of dodging.
Remove the cover
The thread running through my discussion of experimentation is this: you already have all the good ideas, you already have something to say, you already have a lively internal dialogue about what you can do and how it could improve the situation.
If this is not there, if nothing happens inside you, I think you would not have read the book to this point.
For everyone else, for the majority, there is an engine that runs on the word "improvement". We have a demon sitting in our head - a voice that often starts with the phrase "what if ..." and then leaves, outraged by our inability to really try and experiment something.
The reasons for inaction are clear, obvious and stupid. The opportunity lies in the adoption of a new order that will allow you, with almost no risk and spending a minimum of money, to find out how smart, productive and endowed with intuition you are.
What has been started should (should) be finished
What is the difference between having a great idea, brainstorming, doing something for yourself, and actually starting something?
If you start something, then you will finish it someday. If the idea doesn't work, you've lost. The experiment must lead to something, otherwise all your efforts have been in vain.
Just starting something without finishing it is bragging, marking time, a waste of time. I can't stand people who think they're doing a great job but hide the results from the market. If you are not moving forward, you can assume that you did not start anything. At some point, your work must go to market. At some point, you will need feedback on whether your idea worked or not. Otherwise it's just a hobby.
Inventory is needed in the warehouse, not in your work
Everyone has in stock different ideas, assumptions and even good guesses. Testing them is not the same as experimenting with a real problem.
If you don’t finish anything, it means you didn’t really start anything, and if you didn’t start anything, it means you haven’t progressed at all.
Fear of big water
In a world where public display and self-made achievements are especially highly valued, for some people, oddly enough, it can be especially difficult to start something. The reason lies in the fact that if you start working on a product, you have a real chance to complete it and bring the product to the market, and this increases the drama of the situation.
It's one thing to have fun exchanging brilliant ideas with someone who will never take action, and quite another to talk to a person who has real practical experience behind him. The writers and guests of Saturday Night Live quickly realized that what they said on Wednesday could reach an audience of 10 million in just a few days. As a result, some began to speak less, censor their speech, limit themselves. And some viewed this situation as the most attractive opportunity in life.
Writing this manifesto is sometimes unbearably difficult. I know that at least a few people will read it. If I focus on that, that my work will be seen, criticized, used and misinterpreted, adopted and distributed, I will inevitably start to hold back. The main difficulty is to focus on the work, and not on the fear associated with its implementation.
As you learn to present your achievements to the public, you may find that your ability to motivate action decreases. The realization that your idea can turn into something is paralyzing. This means that your ideas and guesses will be subject to even more self-control. And the new manager says to himself: “Perhaps I won’t tell employees that it has become fashionable to serve pickled cucumbers for a snack, otherwise they will immediately appear on the menu, and then the fashion will pass and I will remain extreme.”
The initiator is an outsider
Society is cruel to those who do not fit into it. We expel such people, call them names, persecute them.
Part of the doctrine of uniformity is driven by social pressure. The Dilbert comics serve as a daily reminder of how much effort organizations put in to maintain the established order.
In strong organizations, standards based on the expectation that nothing will change are turned upside down. In rapidly growing companies, the best way to become an insider, a leader, significant person- become an initiator.
In all the organizations in which I enjoyed working, initiative was valued. Unfortunately, too many companies are mired in a culture of stagnation.
Jim thinks I'm crazy
Jim Wahlberg sent me a kind email thanking me for the crazy ideas. He used " workbook" to drive employees from their homes and force them to implement their plans.
Of course, my ideas are no more crazy than yours. At least I hope so.
The only difference between us is that I have a lot of experience experimenting, understanding what ideas might resonate, and experience putting them into practice. The more you do, the more you will do and the less crazy you will seem to yourself.
Every year my town hosts a beloved family event. Parents and young children are given paint and offered to paint a shop window. The best two-by-three-foot window panel wins a prize.
The easiest way to win is to guide the actions of your child, and then convince the judges and the kid himself that he drew it himself.
The easiest way to ensure that a child loses is to sit silently, do nothing, but simply wait until he takes a brush and draws something.
The first way, perhaps this moment the best, but in the long run it is completely unsuitable.
Putting in the strongest player, following the rules, rewarding someone who has already done it before you are great ways to win in the moment. Meanwhile, in the end it will turn out that you are inculcating conformity and suppressing the initiative.
One of the reasons why organizations are stagnant is that they hold on to the best players so tightly that they lose the bench. In an ever-changing world, an inflexible team that does not see the future and that has no hidden reserves always loses in the end.
noisy child
Children are the initiators. They create unexpected situations. They're causing a stir. Everything, for the most part.
If the noisy ringleader is left to himself, he will remain so forever. He will not stop at five, ten, or twenty years. The essence of human nature is initiative.
But we are not on our own. Our parents put pressure on us, our peers humiliate us, teachers punish us, and the authorities “build” us; we are hired and brainwashed - until our behavior causes no one the slightest disturbance.
And we (for the most part) become exemplary.
Except for those who can not be re-educated. Except for the instigators, instigators, instigators, skeptics and innovators - those who continue to initiate things, great and small.
And it comes at the right time.
As the economy develops, large (and small) organizations are discovering that brainwashing was a huge mistake. If you sleep on the go, you won't achieve anything. If you only do what to optimize, explosive growth will not happen. If you get bogged down only in organizational matters, it is impossible to achieve impeccability.
But we can reverse the effects of brainwashing while there is still time.
"Best thing I've ever done"
46 years ago, Domenico DeMarco was walking down Jay Avenue in Brooklyn. Later, he said that he saw a lot of passers-by, huge crowds of people - and a store for rent on the corner. Domenico immediately rented it and opened a pizzeria.
Since then, every day he makes each pizza by hand, one by one. Every day, DeMarco sends his creations directly to people who can appreciate his work. For him, each pizza is a new project, not just a part on an assembly line. Perhaps to some, he will seem like a simple artisan who makes pizza slowly and for little money. I have a different opinion about him. Domenico starts with the simplest elements and puts a piece of his soul into them, hundreds of times a day.
What would his life be like if instead he spent more time thinking, evaluating and analyzing how good or bad his idea of devoting himself to manual labor was?
How did you get into this job?
Almost every time I ask this question, they answer me: “Oh, this is a very funny story.” But usually it's not funny at all.
Rather, it is the story of several atypical breakthroughs and unrecognized initiatives. People are valued for being able to express themselves.
Annie Duke is a former World Poker Champion. Thanks to her skill, she won more than $4 million.
People in this profession are interested in asking the question: how?
How did you get here? How did you manage to be successful in this business?
Hint: you are not chosen by someone else.
Annie led a miserable existence in Montana and tried to figure out how to make ends meet. Her brother convinced her to go to a poker game in Billings. No permission, no documents, no connection to the game. She won $2000.
At this stage, most poker players collect their money, go home and return to work. This is not a career, because there is no perseverance. It's not a career, because with the first big loss, everything ends. But with Annie Duke it was different. She was ready to lose often
to improve. Annie treated it like a professional task. She studied, planned the budget and lost. Often.
Is this really the best way? Apparently not.
The person who fails the most is usually the winner.
I think this phrase needs to be explained a little more.
A single failure, even a major one, cannot be considered a defeat. Game over, you lost, you're broke, you're in jail. But you didn't fail.
If you never fail, then you are either lucky or you have not achieved anything.
But if you win often enough to get the privilege of losing the next time, you're on your way to a series of failures. Lose, win, lose, lose, lose, win - well, you get the idea.
Talk to any successful person. He will gladly tell you about the long streak of failures that haunted him.
I set up a recording studio and failed. I started a fundraiser for light bulbs and failed. I ran an aquarium project on a home video system and failed. I published a lot of books and failed.
Juggling is all about throwing, not catching.
That's why it's so hard to learn how to juggle. We are set up to catch, keep everything to ourselves and, no matter what happens, never drop the ball.
If you spend energy only on catching, this will inevitably affect your throws. You will be praised for how you catch, but you will always fall behind, because you will throw worse and worse.
Paradoxically, if you learn how to throw well, catching will come naturally.
The best way to learn to throw is to throw. Throw badly, over and over again. Throw well, again and again. First, learn how to throw well.
The paradox of success
Untrusted or unresourced people rarely accumulate enough punch to get their ideas out into the light.
Trusted people with resources are so busy maintaining them that they can't take their bold ideas out into the world.
The greatest challenge any successful organization faces is getting the courage to risk existing success in order to do something extraordinary. And risking your current success is ultimately the only way to accomplish something great.
Bob Dylan got lucky when he was booed at the Newport Festival. Everyone passed the failure. It's time for art.
Elizabeth Gilbert was lucky when her book Legal Marriage did not sell as well as Eat, Pray, Love. Everything, failure is behind, you can start writing again.
Finding the crisis of the second year, the problems of the second album, the mismatch of expectations, and then take it to the boss, to the shareholders, write it down, discuss it and work tirelessly to fix this problem - this is the best way to return to the reason why you started doing it in the first place. , what you are doing.
Walking to Cleveland
Setting sail is an event. You had a life before sailing, and now at some point you go to sea. But life goes on even after sailing.
However, getting started is a little different. Starting something is not a one-time event, but a series of events.
You decide to walk to Cleveland. And you are taking the first step in the right direction. This is the beginning. You spend the rest of the day walking towards Cleveland, shifting your feet step by step. At the end of the day, after walking 20 miles, you stop for the night at a hotel.
And what happens the next morning?
Either you drop the project, or you start over and hit the road on foot to Cleveland. In fact, each step is a new beginning. Sure, you're closer to your goal than you were yesterday or last week, but you're still on your way to Cleveland.
Keep starting until you're done.
Science is the engine of progress
In two years, a small scientific group in Palo Alto, California, invented a laser printer, a screen with high resolution, the mouse, screen windows, and even the frame buffer that was the basis of all the special effects in cinema. All this was invented within 24 months.
What was it, maybe some kind of virus in the water?
Something like that.
This group was distinguished from others by the expectation of initiatives. At PARC, you couldn't be a star unless you had something out of the ordinary to offer.
This is how all great science is done. Someone proposes something non-standard, contrary to the established order, and goes on a path that at first seems ridiculous.
Fear of being wrong
No wonder we all have doubts at times. Starting any business maximizes the chances that everything will go wrong.
Here's a nightmare for you, and a very vital one: the boss finds the offender and scolds / punishes / humiliates / fires him.
If you haven't done anything wrong, this won't happen.
On the other hand, here's another scenario: the boss finds someone who never started anything, who never starts anything, who always studies, criticizes, plays devil's advocate and scolds/punishes/humiliates/fires him.
Ah, sorry for that little tease, it doesn't work that way.
The typical "factory-type" organization cultizes the absence of errors and takes no time at all to get rid of people who don't start anything.
In a networked economy, an innovative organization simply has no choice but to hunt down those who don't start anything.
AT modern world failure to innovate is a far greater sin than a mistake. If you start something, you have the opportunity to develop and adjust it to turn the mistake into something of value. But if you haven't started anything, you don't have a chance.
10,000 hours, hard work and instant success
Hollerado is a musical group that you may have heard about for the first time. Meanwhile, she has been experimenting for a very long time. Here is the letter they sent to blogger Bob Lefsetz (slightly edited by me).
We come from the small town of Manotick in the Canadian province of Ontario. We've been on tour for four years now.
When we first decided to tour America, no one wanted to invite us. So instead of planning shows, we drove as far away from our native Canada as we could. And we started going to places where there were some concerts, and said that we were 2000 miles from home and that we had a concert scheduled at a place across the street, but everything was suddenly canceled. “Guys, do you mind if we play a couple of songs for you today?” IT WORKS! So we played a huge number of concerts.
But since we were paid mostly with a couple of drinks and sometimes pizza, we had to earn money for gas. We had a laptop on which our demo CD was stored. We went to the Best Buy electronics store and bought a CD burner and a couple of boxes of blank blanks. Then they recorded a hundred demo discs right in the parking lot, returned the recorder to the store and stuffed the discs into string-lock bags. (By the way, hence the name of our first disc - Ziploc bags, or "Record in the package.")
With a pack of CDs, we would drive to the nearest mall and set up a shop in front of Hot Topic" (probably the most cheeky thing we've ever done in the name of the band). We'd stand there for hours, armed with players and CDs, and anyone who came up to listen to the music. , offered to buy discs in a bag.Even selling them for $ 5 apiece, we "beat off" $ 4.50 for gas from each disc.
This went on for two years. Whomever to work, just not to work, right? In February 2009 we released our first full album on the Internet. FOR FREE.
In the same month, we invented the REGULAR SCHEDULE TOUR. They took the old concept of a constant schedule of performances on the same day of the week in the same bar as a basis - and brought it to the point of absurdity. We have scheduled weekly performances in seven different locations, one for each day of the week, for a period of a month. Every dank February Sunday we gave a concert in the same club in Boston, every Monday - at the Piano's club in New York, on Tuesday - in the city of Lacolle, in the Canadian province of Quebec, on Wednesday - in Hamilton, Ontario, in Thursday in Toronto, Friday in Ottawa, Saturday in Montreal Repeat four times 28 shows in a row Over 12,000 miles by car on terrible Canadian winter roads in 28 days.
In February 2010, we founded our own studio to bring Records in a Package to Canadian stores. Every single distributor we spoke to said it was impossible, but finally we managed to convince one of them (the Arts and Crafts costume jewelry store) to literally pack the Record in a Pouch in string-lock bags filled with small souvenirs. To date, we have sold over 10,000 copies of the album in Canada. With no brand endorsement, our first single "Juliet" was a Top 5 hit on a well-known alternative radio station in Canada.
We started to have success and soon got access to the Canadian touring grant system. When we were given funds for a trip with a special program to China, we squeezed everything possible out of this budget. We turned the tour into a three-week tour of this country. We recorded the song in Mandarin Chinese and put it online on a Chinese website. Six months later we returned to China for another tour.
We are good with tools. We play live and a lot, hundreds of gigs a year. we work hard. We fulfill orders. We undertake to play cover versions of songs we don't know. We play for the audience and for each other, because without the audience we would still be sitting in our Manotica, doing what we don't like. We play anywhere, anytime. We love what we do more than anything else.
The four of us are close friends (two of us are brothers). We're going to be doing our thing for a very long time. We want to build a career, produce catalogs that we can be proud of. Personally, I think that the video clip we mentioned is far from the best
our song. Since then, we've written a whole bunch of new songs, and like anything else, the more we practice, the better we get.
Climax: Four years of working on something new, trial and error, more and more attempts. Again and again. The music industry is tough, but the guys are holding the punch. And at the same time, ordinary bands are playing in a nearby cafe and whining about how difficult it is to achieve recognition from famous studios.
The market is looking for new
So create something new. Your junk has already tired everyone.
Organization for Pleasure
Traditional corporations, especially large-scale service and manufacturing companies, are organized for efficiency. Or persistence. But not for enjoyment.
Pleasure is given by surprise, involvement, humanity, transparency, something new. In many organizations, these concepts are foreign.
McDonald's, Hertz, Dell, other corporations work hard. They keep promises. Reduce costs. Measure results with a stopwatch.
The problem with this mindset is that as you approach the point of maximum efficiency, there is little room for improvement. Reducing the cost of making one "Chicken McNugget" by an additional 0.00001 cents will not bring any significant increase in profits.
Moreover, the nature of work is inherently unattractive. If you are afraid of non-standard requirements, if your employees are just cogs in a huge mechanism, if you need to prescribe everything in instructions, the chances are that your company will have outstanding person, are quite low.
Such organizations hire employees to patch up holes that have already arisen, rather than motivated individuals who want to enjoy the work.
It seems to me that the alternative is an organization created in the name of pleasure. There are companies that give people freedom and, of course, expect them to create, collaborate, and surprise in return. These are organizations where courageous accomplishments are welcomed and no time is wasted looking for a broken rule in an office instruction.
Just in case I wasn't clear enough, the tireless work of an inventor, innovator, and initiator is the best market asset.
For more clarity
I do not urge you to be bold and right in everything. I am not advocating that you continually come up with smart, effective, and profitable ideas.
I encourage you to just start something. Often. Constantly. Be the initiator.
"How to do?" versus "What to do?"
There is no shortage of knowing what to do. Organizations large and small have a lot of very smart, specially trained people who know exactly what to do.
The problem is the lack of people who are ready to implement it. Start. Come forward and start. Apparently, many of us have simply forgotten how to do it.
The slogan "Just do it" does not contain the word "just"
The problem with Nike's slogan is that it implies that to take the lead, you have to take the lead, that it's purely a matter of desire. For some of us it is possible, but for others it takes a lot of effort.
You are not an initiator because you did not believe in the idea, you were not taught it and you were not rewarded in such a way that it became a habit.
Now you know what's at stake and it's up to you.
The Adventures of Andre and Wally the Bee
In 1984, director John Lasseter began working with new program computer animation. He created a short digital cartoon "The Adventures of Andre and Wally the Bee" to entertain his son.
The film horrified the boy. The idea did not develop into a full-length cartoon. The project did not even bring money.
John has been nominated for an Academy Award six times and won twice, and has played a key role in the evolution of Pixar, one of the most successful film companies in history. The rest didn't even come close to that.
John got the ball rolling.
Space between frames
In The Essence of Comic Book, Scott Macleod explains not only how comics are built, but how life itself is built.
The secret of the comic is not in what you see in each picture, but in the tiny gap between the frames. Since it is not filled with the artist's drawings, you fill it in. This space is addictive. You create the plot as the story unfolds.
Open any comic and see for yourself. Come on, let me wait.
Most comic book artists never draw solutions. Of course, they depict an action and its results, not a hero or villain in the process of making a decision (because it is difficult to depict).
And it is the gap between the frames that makes experimentation so effective. Implementing the plan is easy. But the ability to create it is a rare and valuable ability.
The Secret to Early Growth
Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution notes that almost all of the real growth in the number of employees occurs in the first five years after the founding of the company. And this is logical. As organizations gain momentum, they usually begin to change employees, rather than invent new positions.
In the period of formation, no one has an unambiguous idea of what needs to be done. It's not a job, it's a passion, a mission, an experiment. Employees are confused, perplexed, exchanging ideas like crazy - trying to survive. When an initiative bears fruit, the company begins to work and hire employees to develop this direction. They keep working and initiating until they have enough power to relax. And then they stop.
Companies that continue to grow beyond their fifth year of operation grow by experimenting.
Do what it takes
I hope everyone will agree that there are moral obligations to be honest, to treat people with respect, and to help those in need.
I'm wondering if there's a moral obligation to start something.
I'm sure there is. I am convinced that if you have the necessary resources and capabilities to do something, this is no longer a recommendation for you. This is a commitment. You must do something, otherwise the chance will be missed. And an unrealized opportunity deprives you of the ability to participate in something, and, most unpleasantly, in this case you rob everyone around you.
If you have joined an organization, formed a relationship, become a member of the community, then your duty to partners is to become a starter. Initiator. Those who create some kind of movement.
By settling for less, you are stealing from them.
If you hide your ideas, bury your talent in the ground, hide your questions and ideas from the team, you can consider that you have caused others the same harm as if you stole a laptop and sold it on eBay.
Business lunch
Early in my career, I briefly worked at Yahoo! and was a pioneer there. It's in my nature; it's the only thing I'm good at.
One day, about three weeks after starting work, I organized a lunchtime business meeting with a dozen colleagues so that everyone could talk and brainstorm.
When I returned from lunch, my boss told me not to do it again. “Slow down,” he said, implying that I should sit quietly and wait for instructions.
Maybe your boss is like that too. If so, I can advise one of two things:
1) ignore this book (for the time being);
2) start looking new job, RUNNING.
(There is, of course, a third option, and I will describe it here, but it can only be taken seriously if you are impatient, courageous and determined to change something. Ignore the boss and continue to implement your initiatives. After all, you will definitely win.)
If your organization refuses to start, if it is so busy harvesting that it is not interested in sowing, it may not be worth investing time and effort in such a company.
History has judged that in the long run, my former boss at Yahoo! didn't do well in his career. And I (at least on that day) turned out to be insolvent as an ordinary employee, because I looked at the world through different eyes. However, with rare exceptions, there is nothing fatal in failure. The process of starting something and constantly looking for opportunities can never be considered a failure. For those who aspire to success, it is vital.
When everything is falling apart
Ten years ago, Vince McMahon founded the XFL - "Extreme Football League". Football is not a new idea, neither is television. And only Viné, everyone's favorite crazy showman, guessed to start a bold project based on football, television and professional wrestling.
The games were memorable, reviews of cheerleaders and women in general bordered on misogyny, and the brutality of the game turned even avid American football fans away. To top it all off, there was little to no press coverage of the league, and television audiences so thin that one of its partners, NBC, canceled the broadcast just a year later.
Failure on all counts.
Forgive me for being stupid, but I want to ask: “So what?”
All the anxieties, worries, fears, unexpected stops and annoyances associated with starting something, especially if it's the worst thing that can happen as a result, is not so bad.
Vin survived. NBC too. And in the end, they were ahead of those who did not have the courage to start.
If an organization does not have the XFL culture of accepting failure, it will be impossible to launch a successful project. The policy of "only success!" not viable. It in itself guarantees the absence of success.
And if you work for someone who is guided by such a policy? You have the choice to follow it or not, and make that your personal standard when deciding whether or not to take the initiative.
You will still have other, better positions and bosses to welcome your creative growth. And the only way to find such a job and such leaders is to set a personal standard that provides for failure, and does not guarantee success. Being intellectually active is more than just being smart, it involves taking your ideas out into the world.
"Not what I expected"
By this phrase it is easy to recognize the report of a good scientist. A science that produces results that are unexpected for the researcher is probably valuable because it does not contain self-fulfilling prophecies.
Part of the undertaking is the willingness to discover that the fruits of your work are different from what you wanted to receive. If you don't have that mindset, it's no wonder you're afraid to start.
Starting something is not the same as controlling it. It means to initiate. The ability to manage implies the ability to control, but this is a completely different skill.
What can you create?
There are so many around open doors and so many ways to achieve goals. If you could create anything (and you can do it!), what would you create?
institution;
popular idea;
relationships;
reputation;
practice;
piece of art;
instruments;
significant changes.
If the only reason you're not initiating any of these goals is because you're afraid to start, you might need to think carefully about what's at stake. Do you realize the cost of not starting?
Impact on twitter
It's always fun to watch someone start using Facebook or Twitter for the first time. He registers, says something indistinct and watches the reaction of the world around him:
"Class! I got a message from Lisa… How did she find me so quickly?” "Hey! I write messages from the plane and get answers!”
But this is not the initiative I am talking about. This is not a real attempt to showcase their achievements, not real change. It is their surrogate, offering no opportunity for success or creative growth.
If you can't fail, the attempt doesn't count.
Initiation -
Nobody randomly answers the phone. It's not often that we mistakenly show up to a meeting or read an email message. Much of what we do at work is conscious action that involves preparation or at least some direct effort on our part.
Initiation is also something like that.
It's not uncommon for someone to say they've come to help with planning, analysis, checking, and even troubleshooting. We are constantly hiring specialists in optimization, synchronization, organization.
Why not invest in a start-up?
Why does the school prohibit taking the initiative
It's not on the schedule, is it?
How much time do we devote to teaching our children to take the initiative?
From the football team, where the defender is not allowed to make independent decisions, to the jazz band that reads music instead of playing solo, even extracurricular activities go through the program.
I often encourage children to organize their own clubs, extracurricular groups. But they don't. It's not right, they say.
Is it any wonder that we promote this philosophy? Businesses and managers don't need pioneers, they don't even need innovators. As a rule, they require only obedience.
We expect innovation from a handful of rebels, but today innovation is our only option.
The high cost of being late
When you are late, you have no room for choices, decisions, or initiatives. When you are late, the road is well lit, the choice is clear. Run! Run along the beaten track.
Being late is a tool for people who are not able to take responsibility for their actions. Time pressure is just a cover; it gives us the opportunity to rush ahead, without creativity, without frills. "Can't you see that I'm late!" we shout as we go about our daily business, not even pausing to think about how we could have done it differently.
Being late can be useful, but it is extremely costly. This strategy, which we choose out of fear of choice, leads to many losses: reduced product quality, missed flights, overtime, and even the closure of the enterprise. Plus, she's tedious.
The alternative to late planning is to initiate processes before they are needed, send shipments ahead of schedule, come up with ideas before a crisis strikes. This bold act provides you with influence, leverage and control in a way that the politics of time pressure never dreamed of.
Dandelion Philosophy
In 1998 Cory Doctorow and his wife had a daughter. Fatherhood inspired the writer to the following reasoning, which may well change your life.
Mammals invest a lot of energy in the arrangement of the fate of each of their offspring. Of course, this is natural: we invest so much energy and resources in children that it would be just awful if they wandered somewhere, fell off a balcony, or fell into a garbage disposal. We have. mammals, it is in our blood to perceive such a misfortune as a moral tragedy, a colossal psychological trauma so deep that some of us do not recover from it all our lives.
It follows that we attach great importance to the fate of each of our works, we wring our hands over copies of books "not for resale" intended for critics, and tear our hair out at the thought of it. that Google will crawl our books to include them in the search index. And while publishing a book can't even come close to the effort it takes to raise a child, it's a fact that every copy printed is money spent, and every unaccounted copy sold is money stolen from us.
There are other organisms with other reproduction strategies. Take the dandelion, for example: one plant can produce 2,000 seeds a year by mindlessly throwing them into the sky at the slightest breeze, without caring where they go or whether they will be given a warm welcome at the landing site.
To be honest, many of those thousands of seeds will fall on the hard, impenetrable asphalt and lie there unsprouted and unfulfilled, losing the genetic race to survive and reproduce.
But from a dandelion's point of view, the position of each individual seed, or even most of them, doesn't matter. The important thing is that every spring every crack in the asphalt is covered with dandelions.
That is the goal, isn't it? So that everything around is filled with your ideas, innovations and creativity? But the only way to achieve this is to prepare for the fact that many of your ideas will fail, figuratively speaking, fall on the asphalt, be perfect, but not take root.
We can lament our failures, but that will keep us from the next idea. And you can rejoice at them, seeing in them proof of the courage of our undertakings, conscientious work, regardless of whether this particular idea worked.
When was the last time you spit on failure?
How to learn to ride a bike and be an adult
I helped a child learn to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. He told me that he didn’t really want to study and gave very logical reasons: there are no bike lanes near his house, he has nowhere to ride at all, his pants get dirty from riding, none of his friends ride a bike, etc.
After a series of philosophical discussions, we nevertheless got to the point: the child was afraid to learn.
We are extremely resourceful when we hide fear. We spend most of our time in public, covering up, justifying and in every possible way denying our own fear. Fear fuels wars and drives people to religious services.
We are not children and this is not a bike.
The goal of our manifesto is not to magically remove your fear. The goal is to call a spade a spade. The definition of "fear to take the first step" is the beginning of the path to the expulsion of fear. If you can accept the idea that success and happiness depend on overcoming the fear that binds you, you will be 90% closer to the goal, because we are not children and this is not a bicycle.
What to do with good ideas?
Are you one of these?
One of the people who has too many good ideas? People whose notebooks are filled with ideas and whose head is filled with dreams of the future?
You have definitely met such people. They are too busy recording to do anything, and too busy inventing to really start anything.
You can stop this process by doing two simple things.
To begin. And then…
Present the results of your work to the public.
The second is impossible without the first.
Paul is one of those people. He carries ideas behind him like a bag of stones, hiding behind them from criticism and accusations. “Hey, you see, I have a laptop full of ideas! How can you demand action from me when I’m busy with yet another invention… If only those idiots from Troupe B would listen to me, everything would be great.”
I think the problem has nothing to do with the "idiots" that Paul works for, and is the fear of starting something. In addition, the constant brainstorming allows him to enjoy, as it justifies his inaction and at the same time reduces the short-term pain of failure.
Fear on the left, fear on the right
Some of us hesitate instead of just getting started. We hold back, we promise to conduct additional research, we are waiting for the moment, we are looking for a benevolent audience.
This habit is incredibly widespread. It devours our talent and destroys our ability to contribute what we are fully capable of. You can call it hypodynamia, or a trap for those who constantly lack something to start.
Oddly enough, the reverse is also true.
Some people deal with fear and hide behind a new case. As soon as they start one project, they are already dreaming about the next, even grander than the previous one. On Monday they set up a blimp transit company, on Wednesday they drop what they started and start a patent application for an environmentally friendly engine, and if that doesn’t work in a day or two, they’ll take care of notary services at home.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald described this phenomenon with amazing aptness in The Great Gatsby. His character argues: "What good is it to do great things when I can have a much more pleasant time telling her about my plans?" It’s easy to fall in love with the idea of starting something so much that you can’t actually realize it.
A person who constantly asks questions, interrupts, takes endless notes and just gets in the way all the time, not only bothers everyone - he engages in self-sabotage, a form of evasion. This hyper-dynamic attitude is just as risk-free as the more common reluctance to start something, because if you are constantly dreaming and thinking, you certainly cannot be held accountable for your work. Firstly, you are crazy, and secondly, you are too busy with the next case to be responsible for the previous one.
It is bad to be overweight or underweight. It is bad to have too high or too low blood pressure. Only in an intermediate position, conforming to the market and adapting to it, can we achieve effective productivity.
For every hyperdynamic person I know, there are 99 people I have observed who could start contributing more than they do now, but they don't. If you don't change anything, it's probably because you're afraid. And that fear can show up at either end of the spectrum.
They don't take money for asking.
Actually, they take it. The wrong question, the unprepared question, the question asked without permission is quite costly, because you will not have another chance to ask it correctly.
If you accidentally meet Elton John in a cafe and say: “Hey Elton, will you sing at my daughter’s wedding?” It will kill any opportunity for you to get into his field of vision. You just trained Elton John to say no; you told him that you were not only selfish, but also far from reality.
If a potential customer walks into your car dealership and you walk up to them and say, “Pay me $200,000 for this Porsche immediately,” you might sell the car. But I doubt it. Most likely, you have just pushed back this perspective and turned the opportunity presented to you into a wall that fenced off the client from you.
Last week I received a note from a stranger. "I heard you'll be in LA," he began, and immediately began asking for a half-hour backstage during an afternoon workshop I was running. I am sure that he had the best intentions and he considered this a step towards experimentation, towards learning new things. I am also quite sure that this man's unpreparedness and the decision to ask a question, the answer to which is obviously no, is a cruel joke of his own mind, which ensured his failure, because it is easier to fail than to achieve the goal. Great excuse for a failed attempt - he asked, but his request came to nothing!
Of course, from time to time questions in the forehead bear fruit. So what? Even those (especially those) who want to be the initiator must wisely prioritize and calculate the benefits.
Instead of mass emailing offers, spend some time and earn the right to ask questions. Prepare the ground. Get connections. This increases the riskiness of your venture - after all, you have invested more than two minutes in it! When you have something to lose, initiation is often more successful than when you act without preparation.
Button control
The best way to lose on Your Own Game has nothing to do with preparation or smarts. People lose because they do not have time to press the button after the prearranged signal.
Press too early - the presenter will not have time to finish reading the question. Press too late - someone else will get the right to answer.
It's the same with beginnings.
We all know the offhand colleague who is too aggressive, too sure it's time to "push the button," and too annoying to do anything about it.
We overreact to it and therefore do too little.
Like most significant moments, the beginning of the process involves a difficult choice, and not only from two extreme options. If you're not working as efficiently as you could, you might want to think about the timing of your button presses.
But how? What is the best way to do this?
I bet that your main problem right now is that you rarely press the button. Most suffer from this. We're holding back. We want to be sure of something.
There is also a minority - people who press the button too often. If you are one of them, then you probably do the same.
The solution seems simple to me. Press the button more often. Follow the result. Press more often. Repeat cycle. As your willingness to push the button grows, you will be exposed to the marketplace, executives and peers, and people who want to buy from you. Will anything still happen?
Of course, those ideas that gain popularity win, but ideas that no one mentions are simply doomed to defeat.
Fear of arrogance
We all know the tragedy of Icarus, even those who do not remember any of ancient Greek myths. The gods are angry with those who dare to fly, and they are punished with unheard-of cruelty.
In Australia, this is referred to as the "tall-stemmed poppy problem". Don't stand up or lean out or you'll be cut down.
We are trained to fit in, not stand out, and the easiest way to fit in is to give up the initiative. Don't speak up. If you notice something, shut up.
Indeed, we spend most of our lives waiting to be allowed to start something. That is why I wrote this appeal.
If you know someone who needs permission, give them the opportunity. If you need permission, think of a mentor, instructor, or friend to give it to you. Someone gives you permission. Someone, perhaps indirectly, has hired you, funded you, trained you, encouraged you, all so that you can see what needs to be done and do it.
But what if everyone does this? What if everyone had their say, noticed things, started projects and believed they could get attention?
Then there would be new problem, is not it? In fact, you would have a whole bunch of new problems.
You would be faced with the choice of which great new ideas are worth developing and which are not great enough.
And you would have a problem, what are the best new inventions to present to the public, and what are not.
Both of these issues are significant enough, but neither suggests that we can do anything to anger the gods or fall from the sky like Icarus.
Starting as a new way of life
Innovation is mysterious. Inspiration is often unpredictable. But the clear examples of success that we see in the market clearly demonstrate that we can rise to the occasion. Once the habit of innovation takes root and you become the initiator, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to pay attention to and to inspire and initiate. An impulse will be created, and then you will be better at generating such cases. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to take the initiative throughout the next day, you will wake up with a to-do list ready. And as you create a culture of people who are constantly looking for opportunities to connect, improve, and experiment, the bar will rise.
Issues that your competitors decide at the level of the board of directors will be considered in your company as a matter of course. Where a competitor needs a manager to intervene, your company will solve everything at the level of an ordinary employee, saving time and money (and delighting the client).
This incredibly prosaic idea, this simple act of initiation, actually has tremendous transformative power.
Moving forward is a full-fledged production asset of the company.
Security
Halloween is not safe. Something bad might happen. Moreover, sooner or later it will definitely happen.
Flying in airplanes is not safe. You and I know a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand ways how one aggressive person can cause serious damage.
Selling is not safe. You can get rejected (and sometimes you will).
In any case, you have nothing to lose.
Two mistakes can be made on the way to the truth: not reaching the end and not taking the first step.
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) Thanks
Thanks
I thank Dan Slater for being willing to experiment. I thank Ishita Gupta, Lisa DiMona, Lisa Gansky, Jacqueline Novogratz, Vicki Griffin, Ras Grandinetti, Sara Tomashek, Terry Goodman, and Jeff Bezos for their support. As always, special thanks to Katherine Oliver and Red Maxwell. Helen and Alex & Mo. Thanks to the brilliant and talented publishing community that supports writers and their ideas - such giants as Adrian Zackheim, Michael Kader, Stuart Krichevsky, Pam Dorman, Wendy Bronfin, Megan Casey; thank you to independent bookstores, and to everyone who has ever paid money for books. Paul Robinson, Martha Cleary, Corey Brown, Gil to the Rescue and Jonathan Hull provided technical support. Thanks to successful creators who give way more than they take, including Neil Gaiman, Kevin Kelly, Susan Piver, Pema Chodron, Zig Ziglar, Tom Peters, Max Barry, Corey Doctorow,
Steve Pressfield, Kurt Andersen and Elizabeth Gilbert. Thanks to the inimitable Mark Frauenfelder and Kseni Jardine for their daily experiments, as well as to everyone who blogs and dedicates their lives to provocation - in the positive sense of the word.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother. People who knew her will understand why.
About the Domino project
Books worth buying are books worth sharing. We hope you find someone to give this copy to read. More information about the project can be found at http://www.TheDominoProject.com.
Here are three ways you can spread the message of this manifesto.
1. Have a group discussion in the office. Get people to read the book and start a discussion. How open is your company to innovation and failure? What will you do if your competitors are more successful than you?
Who supplies good ideas?
Think again.
Why doesn't more mean better? Add your name to any combination. Steve Jobs and Paul Allen. Dogfish Head and Magic Hat companies. Why shouldn't your contribution be close to the achievements of Emerson or Jagger?
In fact, everything is possible.
Choose yourself
Why do many successful people assume that permission to start must be agreed with someone else?
Even the most creative and enterprising people believe that they should wait to be chosen. Writers wait to be picked by an agent and then by a publisher. Entrepreneurs wait to be chosen by a venture investor. "Choose me" is about acknowledging the power of the system and transferring responsibility for the undertaking to someone else.
Get in the habit of starting
Before you start, make a plan of action. Don't let failure, worry, or fear distract you from your task. If you work hard but still get rejected and fail, work on it, write, rewrite over and over again - that's not the best time to put your hands down.
When you try something new and take risks, you often feel uncomfortable, fearful, and insecure about the threat of making mistakes. It's natural, but it's not natural to stop there. Most of the time we stop. But if we continue, there is a (good) chance that we will overcome our fear and feel confident in our knowledge and abilities. There is nothing wrong with making a few mistakes - or even a lot. In fact, we learn from them what not to do.
Any development is a leap into the dark, a spontaneous, unintentional action when experience does not provide any advantage.
Henry Miller
Adventure does not involve guarantees or promises. Risk and profit are Siamese twins
and that's why my favorite advice needs to be translated but needs no disclaimers: Fortes fortuna javat -
We will hurt the one we love. It's hard. We don't want our mistakes to hurt our friends and our family or disappoint those we love.
We may not be able to immediately identify the root of our problems, but knowing their source will help to separate the risk from what only they see as a risk, since we have not yet learned to take the initiative.
Training for those who take risks
Just like an athlete trains before a game, you need to train to learn how to take risks. You will need practice, proper support, and a little courage.
We're not trained to take risks, but we've been trained to hold meetings, stop talking when we feel like talking, and stay on track. We were told to strive for safety and level our creativity if it is too obvious.
When did you do something that involved risk? What made you do it? What did you feel afterwards?
What does it mean to you to take risks? Do you think that this is one of your character traits, and do you want it to be so?
To what extent are you risk averse? How does your past experience indicate your willingness to take risks?
How risky do you think it is to start something new after you have failed a hundred times? How do you feel when you achieve victory for the hundredth time? Even if you've been successful, that should further motivate you to take even more risk.
Making mistakes is necessary
Now that we know what it means to experiment, we can no longer dramatize this process. Experimentation is about finding problems. If you don't constantly unravel the whole tangle of problems, you will have few accomplishments to showcase. To experiment means to act and generate so much that deadly fatigue becomes normal. But you crave it. You require it. Soon, just like Lady Gaga, Stephen King and the governor of California, your success, perseverance and efforts will speak for themselves.
Is there anything preventing you from starting a new project?
Every innovation and every achievement in our world began with a long list of failures.
Errors are a necessary part of the experiment. You have to look for something new, which means going beyond the status quo and seeing what happens, even though you don't know what the result will be. There is a risk of injury. When we accept the possibility of failing once, or twice, or twenty times, we understand that failure is a completely natural thing, and we come to terms with it. As soon as we do this, we become stronger and increase the chances of a likely victory.
you ever
called a loser?
You are in good company!
In the book "Try it - it will work!" there is a list of famous people who have failed many times. The list includes Harlan Ellison, Steve Carell, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Wright, Mark Cuban, Mehmet Oz, George Orwell, Michael Bloomberg, Nan Talez, Gloria Steinem, etc.
You don't have to be famous to fail, but it's good to know that even the most successful of us may have started where we are.
Did this list surprise you? Would you like to enter it? It takes willpower to consistently fail, which is what it takes to become world famous like Walt Disney or Gloria Steinem. As well as a long list of failures and the ability to quickly restore mental strength in order to continue what was started.
What we are
never changes. We are what we think of ourselves.
Mary Almanak
Celebrate!
When we reach a goal, we raise our heads, and when we fail, we often become frustrated and afraid to start all over again. Can the joy of courage that we had before the defeat help in the fight against the state that occurs after failure?
Many of us do not take the initiative because we are afraid that we will do everything wrong. And it's natural. Man is so arranged that when we encounter something new, we want to immediately understand it. For many of us, it is very, very difficult not to understand exactly what we are doing or exactly when we will reach the goal.
An important part of experimentation is that the only way to get better is to practice. Be curious. Try again and again. To learn from your mistakes. To be patient. One day you will become a professional. In the meantime, start something again.
Let's Benefit Now
Start initiating - projects, picnics, ways to improve your office without waiting for someone to tell you to do it.
Start writing a book proposal without thinking about a literary agent. Start boiling eggs, even if you can't soft-boil them the way your kids want them to. Listen to your father more carefully, although he probably won't notice.
Sometimes we do things unconsciously. We follow" social norms when all we really want is to take control of the situation. It's time to listen to that small voice within us that says, "Start now!"
When we start a project, we encourage others to do the same. We rid the object of study of mystery (and ourselves of fear) when we begin to experiment and try new things. There is no better way to lead than by example.
Experimentation is crazy
So if you are experimenting, you are crazy.
Because it is not typical, trying to come up with something new is often perceived as disturbing, abnormal, or inappropriate. When you experiment and people around you want to do the same but can't, you are looked at as an outsider, a person of a different religion. They are scared (like you), but the initiative is in your hands - you do your thing, no matter what happens. At first it is difficult, but the longer, sometimes pushing yourself, you do what you want, the less you will care about the opinions of others. When you start something, you almost immediately enjoy it. You are inspired by the simple knowledge that you are capable of creating something new.
Thanks for reading!
About the cover
The hurrying man is an archetype first seen in hieroglyphs ancient egypt. He is you, the excited, optimistic experimenter who understands that risk is misunderstood and that the key to success is moving forward. This image is a trademark of The Domino Project, but we give you permission to use it for non-commercial purposes to encourage colleagues to keep moving forward.
thank you for reading
As many critics of the education system point out, educational establishments most industrialized countries are not designed to develop creative thinking and the ability to ask - their main goal is to train employees.
In Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin writes: "Our grandparents built schools to teach people their whole lives to be a productive workforce that is part of an industrial society. And they succeeded."
The current education system emphasizes obedience and the rote memorization of basic knowledge - excellent qualities for an employee. (The Simpsons animator and creator Matt Groening put it this way: "It seems that the main rule of traditional schools is to sit still in neat rows, which is ideal for working adults in a boring office or factory, but does not contribute to education." )
And it doesn't encourage questioning: as long as schools are like factories, students' desire to ask "how the world works" will be considered rebellious. This raises (at least for me) a not entirely politically correct question: "If schools were built after factories, weren't they designed to suppress the urge to ask questions?"
Logically, during the transition from an industrial society to an entrepreneurial society, we should have changed the factory, obedience-based model of teaching in schools to a new one, based on the ability to ask. But while the world has changed, and jobs have changed with it, the old model of education hasn't evolved much—and for the most part hasn't adapted to the modern economy's need for more creative, independent-minded "workers."
Godin and others believe that an attempt to modernize old models schooling should begin with the formulation of programmatic questions about the purpose of education. As a starting point, Godin offers the question: "What are schools for?"(it can be formulated differently: "Why do we send our children to school at all?").
Despite the heated debate around education reform (discussions about conflicting school models, competing teaching philosophies, different testing ideas, drafting curricula and teacher appraisals), this fundamental question, which can help widen the scope of the discussion, is almost never raised.
If we leave aside Godin's question for the time being, although no one has yet fully answered it, many will agree that at least part of the answer can be formulated as follows: "Prepare students for citizens capable of benefiting society in the 21st century" .
This raises another fundamental question: "What kind of preparation do modern workplaces and societies require of citizens, that is, what kind of skills, knowledge and abilities are needed to be useful and achieve personal well-being?"
This too is difficult to answer, but many who study the educational needs of the evolution of worker demands (with Tony Wagner and John Seely Brown at the forefront of this research) agree that this new world needs citizens with self-learning, creative, inventive and able to adapt to constant change. Both Wagner and Brown put asking at the top of their list of key survival skills in the new marketplace.
(And what about the skills that not needed in this new environment? For example, with the ability to memorize and reproduce facts, since new technologies provide many of these facts, saving us from the need to memorize. From this follows another provocative question of Godin: "Should we stop the failed experiment of learning by telling the facts?")
If we simply focus on the "Why?" question of the purpose of schools, if we agree that one of their main purposes is to enable the 21st century citizen to continue to learn and adapt to constant change throughout their lives, and if we recognize the ability to ask effectively as one of the the most important survival skills, then all this naturally will raise the following questions:
"What if our schools could develop students' ability to continue lifelong learning and better adapt to change by teaching them the art of questioning?"
"How can we create such schools?"
To begin answering these questions (in trying to imagine tomorrow's school with the art of asking baked into it), it's helpful to look back at Harlem in the 1970s, where replacement teacher Deborah Meyer became principal and created a radical model conducive to questioning.
Can schooling be question-based?
Deborah Meyer, now in her eighties, is considered a legendary figure in educational circles. A pioneer of the small school movement decades ago, she was the first educator to receive the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant Award in recognition of her successful work in alternative schools. central park East in East Harlem.
Today, Meyer continues to be involved in a number of schools she founded in the northeast of the country, and maintains a popular education blog, where she raises consistently interesting questions:
"Is test-oriented education the most likely path to nurture resourceful and energetic citizens?"
"What will an ordinary school lesson if we want to make sure that children are not afraid to make mistakes?"
And now the question that I personally like the most:
"What would human potential be like if we really encouraged children to ask rather than repressed it?"
I asked Meyer to elaborate on the second question, and she said that it came to her mind about forty years ago, when a third grader from a Harlem high school admitted: “This school is different from others in that you are interested in what we not We know, not just what we know." Meyer was very touched by this comment. It was the best confirmation for her (more convincing than test results) that she achieved what she wanted when she created the Central Park East schools.
Meyer opened her first school in 1974 in a dilapidated school building in East Harlem, an area that at the time, in the words of former school superintendent Seymour Fliegel, "was the epitome of the collapse of the New York City public school system." Meyer herself was educated at the prestigious private school New York. After receiving her master's degree, she found a teaching position in one of the public kindergartens in Chicago and was outraged to the core by what was happening there. Meyer began working on experimental approaches to teaching, which attracted the attention of one of the New York district school inspectors, who was well aware of how desperate things were in Harlem, and gave Meyer a chance to try out some of her ideas at school.
Meyer believed that schools should not just hammer information into children, but teach them to make sense of what they are told so that they know how to relate to this information and how to use it. In an interview, she said: "My main concern is how to help students develop the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that a democratic society so badly needs."
Her approach was based on five "habits of the mind", or learning habits, each of which was expressed by a corresponding question:
Consider evidence. How can we know what is true and what is not? What evidence can you rely on?
Consider different points of view. What will it look like if we take the place of another person and look at the situation from the other side?
Unite. Is there a pattern to this? Have we seen something similar before?
Build assumptions. What if you do it differently?
Determine significance. Why is it important?
Meyer's key questions are the result of her own connecting research. They combined elements of the ethical culture she taught at an elite private school with ideas she had drawn from other world-famous educational innovators such as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Theodore Sizer.
Slava Pankratov and Sasha Orlov translated Seth Godin's book "Stop Stealing Dreams!" which was reported to me in the mail in Stratoplan's mailing list.
It was a shame not to read a free book, and even competently translated.
By the way, the translation is very good.
So what is the book about.
Seth Godin raises a very thorny issue - the issue of efficiency and correctness modern system education.
There is a selection interesting facts, but one of them, in my opinion, is the most important.
(I will rearrange the fragments a little so that the course of my thought is clear)
1.
During a trip to Prussia, Mann got acquainted with the paramilitary education system and introduced it here: first painted it, and then introduced it in the Northeast of the United States, from where it spread over time throughout the country.
2.
The development of the student's personality was as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic.Instilling values such as obedience to authority, punctuality, attendance, organizing time around bell rings helped prepare students for future employment.
This is how Seth Godin describes the origins of the American public school.
How is it different from ours? In essence, nothing.
Only by the fact that our school is not borrowed indirectly from the Americans, but directly from the Prussians (this is solely my opinion).
This idea seems to me the key - everything started from here, including everything that we are disentangling now.
Now the thesis of the rest of the thoughts from the book.
- The school system of education was formed under the influence of industry and serves its needs - the supply of "good" workers - accommodating, submissive, dependent.
- Current economic situation this does not fit well - the growing automation of production and outsourcing, as a result of growing unemployment.
- School and society do not nurture passion and leadership in children.
- Children are not taught to work together - all training is aimed at industrial quality control of each graduating student, and not "the party as a whole", much less competitiveness.
- There were more people in the mass, but there were significantly fewer of those who would move progress - the school educates entrepreneurs and scientists, and clerks and secretaries.
- The cost of obtaining information is as low as ever before the current moment, but even in this situation, no one consumes it, because there is no willpower.
- And I'll quote directly
"Stupid people used to be the by-product of lack of access to knowledge, bad teachers or parents. Today, being dumb is a choice. Choices made by individuals who don't want to learn."
The school and what and how children are taught in it is the main reason for the current situation with human resources at the level of the household system as a whole.
If we want to change society and the trend of development, then we need to start from there - from school.
Now from myself:
1. Teamwork
Have you ever tried to organize a group of 3-4 year students of the university, even if only to do the work that they were given for the whole group?
I tried twice, I even practiced SCRUM on them :).
No, they were not stupid or finished ghouls - all normal people, with at least an average head, jobs and aspirations in life.
But no one taught them to work collectively.
They didn’t teach at school, they tried it at the institute.
It didn't work out for everyone.
And then these people come to your team, and you will have to explain to them that you need to fit into the existing, well-established ecosystem, and not rewrite it for yourself.
And that the work of other people sometimes (or even often) depends on the result of their work.
2. Leadership.
Don't even ask me what leadership is - I don't know for sure myself.
But I know that without dedication to the cause and taking responsibility for oneself (others / common cause - underline as necessary), this concept cannot even be approached.
This is not taught in our schools either - basically they teach "to sit on your ass evenly", mutual responsibility, and enthusiasm is encouraged if and only if the school itself (as an institute) has an exhaust from this.
3. Networking
I really don't like that word, but still.
Do you know what your classmates are doing?
And how can they help you in your current activities? (questions of phalometry "who became who after school?", "Who has a cooler jyp?" Let's leave for a discussion about human nature en masse).
And how many people from the class started a business together or at least work in the same enterprise? None of mine.
We know very little even about each other's capabilities/abilities/skills that may be useful to us.
School doesn't teach it either.
Even to the smallest extent.
I read this book for a very long time, despite the fact that it only has 80(!) pages.
At times, the author's thought goes very deep, at times - right on the surface.
Makes you think about what you will teach your child.
And what should the school teach him?
In this book there is not a single answer to the questions posed by the author, but even despite this, I do not raise my hand to give her less than 7 points on a 10-point scale.
The guys from the team
How to restructure thinking?This!
The GTD algorithm “installs” a “trap” (trap) in the head in the form of a question that you need to constantly ask yourself when a task appears: “Do I have to do this, or can I delegate?”.
But there is no emphasis on the fundamental question - should this be done at all?
Some time ago I read my old (years ago) todo lists with surprise and laughter. What conclusions did I draw...
"Visyaki".
It turned out that I “dragged” some projects through the years, and they are still in my portfolio. While studying Autofocus techniques, I learned that postponing is a sign that a project should be abandoned. I even thought that the todo system should specifically mark tasks as “suspicious” if they were postponed several times or moved from drawer to drawer, i.e. help identify tasks that need to be abandoned.
Yes, the toad pressed that years had passed, but I had not done it. But after I abandoned such hanging projects, it was as if a stone had been lifted from my shoulders.
There is another trick, I don't remember where I read it. Instead of telling yourself “I want to do this,” or worse, “I will do this,” say to yourself, “I could do this,” and free your brain by putting such ideas off the Someday/May list. be" but into the "May be" list, it's important to draw a clear line between Someday and May be.
Further.
I've also found that cases tend to "dissolve", disappear on their own. The project was either done by someone else, or it simply lost its relevance. It turned out that after a while what was important becomes unimportant. This was a discovery, since I had never entered cases into the folder “it will be solved somehow, sometime, in itself, maybe”.
Summary - if there is no urgency in the result of the project, it should be postponed. Maybe the result will not be needed.
And last but not least :-)
You need to find your own path, and not stray from it, not succumb to temptations.
I'll give you an example.
I was a big fan of scoring domains for future projects.
Since 2004, I have registered about a hundred. Every year I threw away about $1500 USD for renewal. I sold a couple of domains. But a few weeks ago I "leaked" almost all of my domains. He simply “leaked” them, refusing to renew (nic.ru), or deleting them, releasing them immediately (godaddy).
Yes, I could put them up for auction, and earn (spending my time).
Could look for interested parties, as I sold a couple of domains (wasting time).
But I realized that cyber squatting is not my way, not my business. You need to do your job, and not rush right and left for easy money.
Therefore, I gave up potential money in the future, but gained time in the present, freed my head from “problems”.
Now, every time I start something new, I constantly keep in mind the “path” of this project, and how long it takes in the end. And as soon as he goes out of budget and "pulls" me out of my way, I "shoot" him.
I'll give you an example. I left a short comment. I didn't know what I was getting into yet. And a short comment turned into several hours of time for long detailed answers. But! This is within the framework of my path, which I have chosen and accepted.
But SFLOW.RU is not in the sphere of my key interests, although in the sphere of my work. Once I decided that I would potentially be engaged in this technology, and scored a website to promote potential products and services. But if I ever do this, and the domain is busy, I'll just find other ways to promote.
And I just gave a couple of domains, getting +1 in karma and new friends :-)
In general, I realized that you should not run ahead of the locomotive :-)