Student of Life
We will give you suggestions for tailoring you ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose. But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach [...]
Spend 80% of your time on your passions, improving your core skills. There are plenty of things you can find that simply meet the “interesting” criteria. The argument that colleges expose you to things you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to is not that compelling a value proposition because it is not very hard to find [...]
I recently followed a link to this article on Wired profiling the first scientific discovery made by a machine with no human intervention. This doesn’t signal the end of the role human scientists. Instead it puts increasing upward pressure on scientists developing their creative faculties. And this trend is not prevalent just in science. Everything [...]
On Thursday Morning, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Alan Webber over an early morning coffee, who founded Fast Company over a decade ago. We were talking about some of the skills young people should have in order to launch successful ventures. Alan noted that while someone is trying to get a startup [...]
I think it’s important to become obsessed with an idea and to continually critique and iterate it, to expand the vision and then shrink it down. To get lots of feedback and talk to everybody about how you can improve your idea, and assess how to make it most valuable to your customers. Even if [...]
So many people write about the solutions they’ve found and the things they’ve discovered. I rarely see people write about they problems they are confronting, the different factors they are weighing, the sacrifices they are making and ultimately how they decide. We hear success stories all the time, that follow a traditional story arc: at [...]
I’ve written about sports frequently because I think the lessons are incredibly transferable. Athletics are extremely competitive with a long history of results-oriented focus. It’s a huge business, with a lot of attention, money and science aimed at maximizing results. While transferring lessons from a game can be dangerous, because any game is an over simplification [...]
Good writing and good conversation seem to have many parallels. In order to continue to write you’re basically having a conversation with yourself and you need to intuitively, or perhaps, sliently whisper the right questions to yourself to prompt an interesting recall or synthesis of information. Asking myself better questions is definitely something I want [...]
Captures ideas when you have them. If you don’t, these creative insights will try to flee and bringing them back is a sweat inducing struggle. Creativity is often romanticized but really it’s just making connections between disparate ideas. And it’s actually far easier to be creative when you say to yourself ‘What are some connections [...]
As I said earlier, it’s a bit overwhelming approaching this blog as blank slate. It feels similar to what it must be like standing at the base Mount Everest, confronting an almost insurmountable challenge. Internally my mind is like a well-developed spider web consisting of many intertwined, interdependent thoughts. How do I begin to approach [...]
