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 will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach?

Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying. If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

-Page 24, Made to Stick

The concept described here is so powerful. It took a little while to really sink in when I first read it. But I find myself referencing this idea ALL THE TIME.

Don’t just read what this passages says, but what it implies. What they’re describing here applies to so much more than just creating sticky ideas. It describes the process for effectively doing almost ANYTHING.

The message: Don’t start from scratch and try to reinvent the wheel. The things that work almost always follow a common pattern. Research what others have said the successful pattern looks like. If you can’t find any research, at least make an attempt to infer the pattern on your own.

A page earlier the authors write,

Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creatives ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

Whatever you want to do there’s a small finite number of effective approaches that are far superior to randomness or just “trying stuff and seeing what happens”, whether it’s creating sticky ideas, creating a startup, getting people to like you or achieving happiness.Taking this idea a level of abstraction higher is an homage to the patternist view of life. We are not our matter, we are our pattern.

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 new things that are interesting.

You need to be selective about the 20% of your time you spend entertaining new ideas that are interesting but not related to your core passions and work. Ideally you’d like everything that’s interesting but not in your core circle to have the potential to become one of your core skills.

It becomes one of your core skills by being developing it enough to put you in the top 25% of people.

Personal Example:

Why do I watch so many TEDTalks then?

I want to reduce what I don’t know I don’t know and it gives me a lot of conceptual ammo to formulate new ideas and frameworks about the cutting edge.  And understanding the cutting edge is one of my core pursuits.

Should other people watch TEDTalks who don’t have a desire to be on the cutting edge? Yes, but they probably shouldn’t try to watch as many as I do. Their watching should be more targeted and focused on the talks closely related to their core interests.

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 that can be automated will be. Automation squeezes all jobs out of the marketplace except the ones that require creativity. On the flip side, these automated tools also enhance human creativity for those who choose to embrace it.

If robotic scientists made their way into other labs, their human counterparts would not be out of a job anytime soon. If anything, they may find their work more exciting.

“There may be teams of humans and machines,” says King. “Robots will be doing more and more of actual experimental work and simple cycles of hypothesis generation. Humans would migrate to more strategic and creative positions. How can we waste trained post-docs by making them pipette things in labs? It’s crazy.

The run of the mill engineering student who can solve known problems is no longer safe. It is a necessity both for the innovative progress of the world and the scientist’s ability to find work that he be able to break new ground, not just incrementally improve on existing innovations.

At a panel at Singularity University I attended in early August, Scott Hassan of Willow Garage, who worked closely with Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, told the story of how they built the first prototype of Google. He recounted how they coded every evening for about 6 weeks. Only 6 weeks. And now they have thousands of engineers just working on improving that small piece of code they churned out in 6 weeks. “What we have found is that it’s very easy to find someone who can improve something just a little bit, but it’s very rare to find someone who can create even just a prototype of something completely new.”

Recommended Reading: Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. Richard Florida’s The Rise of The Creative Class (which admittedly I haven’t read yet but it’s on my list. But I have heard Florida’s thesis expressed many times.)

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 going there are often two competing needs: The need to make enough to pay the bills and the need to invest a lot of hours to get an idea off the ground. In order to circumvent these challenge he suggested that people learn how to quickly make money on the side, like doing social media consulting on the side for older people who don’t understand for $50 an hour. In launch Fast Company he and his co founder launched a side business called Fast Company Knowledge Exchange or FCKE to finance their work getting their business going.

While I agree that is a very good skill and may be something Force For the Future needs to develop, it’s not the best solution if we want to maximize for impact. Let me draw an analogy from nature. Humans have the biggest brains of any creature that has walked the earth. We also have one of the longest maturation periods of any animal. The more space in the formative years you give an organism to develop the greater it’s potential. That’s what society should be doing, providing longer intellectual incubation periods for its young people. Universities occupy the space where this is supposed to happen yet most young people are at school just because it feels like what they are supposed to do. And they get out of school take an average job, get used to the money and sacrifice their dreams.

The best time to do a startup is in that period of 18-23. You’ve got the least to lose, are capable of functioning autonomously in the adult world and succeed or fail, it’s an amazing learning experience that will push you into a world of possibility, with plenty of interesting opportunities for your next job/venture whatever it may be.

Here I’ll let Seth Berger, who founded And1 while he was in college, do the rest of the talking for me again (besides you probably didn’t read my other posts anyway), because I’m tired of seeing college students go down the corporate route, flush their dreams down the toilet and never leave because double quilted TP is too nice a luxury to sacrifice.

Q: As a successful entrepreneur, what advice do you have for students who are interested in starting a business?

Berger:  Start a business before you go get a job. Here is the reason. If you go get a job, you are going to succeed…. If you come out and work, what are you going to make? 50K to start? You tell me.

So let’s say you are 21 and you get out of school making $60,000. You do real well and three years later they say, “I am going to send you back to grad school. I am going to pay for you. Then, come back to work. When you come back you are making $175,000.” Five years after that, you are going to be making a half million bucks. You are going to have a husband or a wife, two kids, nice car, summer home, country club. At what point are you going to say, “I am going to go start my own company.”? The answer is never.

What you will do is work until you have made enough money, somewhere in your 50s, to go do something you really want to do, instead of now, when you are broke…. When I got out of graduate school and I drove a Honda Civic Hatchback. I was broke. I didn’t care. It just didn’t matter. But once you get used to the good life, you won’t go back. So if you are thinking about starting a business, start the day you graduate. You don’t need experience. You don’t need money. You don’t need someone else to tell you that you can do it. Just go start it before you get used to making all that money.

(Expect an update to this theory sometime soon)

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 first he didn’t know what to do, then he got an idea, but the challenge seemed too daunting and he thought about giving up, but he persevered and made it happen. You can do it, too! And then they run off a list of traits that they think allowed them to succeed. But those lists are most of the time emotional feel good junk food. They make us feel good, pump us up and let us know that it is possible for us to enjoy that success as well. But pumping someone up and not giving them good options about how to proceed is very dangerous. It’s deceptive to credit success with tips that hint at the process that underly it without providing enough awareness of the real ingredients. It is the process that unlocks that potential to replicate results.

I’m not saying these are bad, it’s good to share your story and I don’t know how much more can be accomplished in the time speeches like these are given, except for the emphasis on the hard work needed, and on pointing to resources that allow the inspired to learn more in depth about the process of building a strong foundation for success. I don’t know many of organizations that really prepare young people holistically for success. School certainly doesn’t teach you how to be successful. It teaches you socialization and a narrow band of academic knowledge. Being more transparent about your process will give other people the opportunity to guide you in the right direction through offering advice, point to resources and opening up opportunities. That’s the approach I’ve taken, I had no idea how to get Force For the Future started. So I took my ambitious ideas for a project and learned how to get lunch and coffee meetings with people who could give me the feedback and point me to the resources necessary to begin down an entrepreneurial road. I picked their brains and told them about my problems and got advice about how to succeed and now I have a network of friends and advisors who I can rely on for almost any problem I have.

Getting pumped up is necessary but being told something is possible without being told how is like telling a kid there’s candy hidden somewhere in a one hundred room mansion. He’ll be excited at first and run around looking for it. But then he’ll give up after while, frustrated. And maybe his eyes will light up again when he’s reminded tomorrow that there’s still candy somewhere in the mansion. But his enthusiasm will soon fade and his expectations will lower next time you bring it up. And he won’t ever find the candy because he was only told of it’s existence he wasn’t told anything about how to find it. And that’s how most people start to feel about success: like a helpless kid who just doesn’t want to be messed with anymore. He’d rather sit and suck his thumb than get his hopes up again only to be disappointed.

We need better structures to support those with the desire to do something big to actually make it happen. This is an incredibly important problem to solve. We need more young people on a trajectory towards solving today’s big issues and providing the resources, support structure and education for them to do that is the difference between resigning to dispassionate ‘pay the bills’ work or an insatiable entrepreneurial drive to improve humanity. This is a problem that I think is very surmountable and am working with some great people on some solutions right now.

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 of the complexity of the real world,  closed environments are great testing grounds for honing narrow theories, skills and practices.

During Halftime of the NBA Finals there was a great segment where Dwight Howard, a future great, was spending time learning from Bill Russel, the greatest winner of all time — 11 championships.  Michael Wilbon talked about the importance of listening and its tendency to be underrated. Wilbon praised Howard’s willingness to listen to Bill Russell.

They were discussing how you become great and Russell told Howard that when the season ended he should take a month off and not even look at a basketball. This violated Howard’s worldview — “That’s time others could be working,” he replied incredulous.  Intuition says Howard is right: maximize time working. But I’m inclined to trust the greatest winner of all time. It fits with the current paradigm of the productivity-obsessed that the correct paradigm is to focus on energy management not time management.

High achievers who strive to be the best seem to undervalue the long term benefit of taking time off. Growth requires focus and intensity and you simply can’t do that 24/7/365. Stepping away, recharging, and revitalizing is crucial for long term growth. And think long term growth whenever possible.

Jeff Van Gundy made another astute point on a common error most people make. Van Gundy was addressing criticism other people had of Kobe Byrant, that he should shoot more or pass more. Van Gundy said focusing on passing more or shooting more was flat out wrong. Instead he said, just focus on making the right decision. Let the situation dictate your decision making. If they go single coverage go 1 on 1, if they try and double team, find the open man. This lesson struck me as very universal. So many times we can get zeroed on doing something regardless of the situation, like deciding we should pass more or shoot more. Instead focus on the right thing: being flexible, assessing the situation and adapting. “Mind like Water” as they say.

If you’re trying to write a popular blog don’t focus on the wrong metrics like “driving more traffic” to your site. Instead focus on better content first. If you’re in a conversation with someone important or beautiful and you’re nervous, don’t focus on saying the perfect thing instead just focus on having 100% belief in what ever comes to mind. If you’re trying to get the ear of someone who is incredibly busy and you see them at an event, don’t make a pact that you’re going to get him to help you no matter what, instead if you do enter in conversation just go with the flow, make a good impression and follow up later.

But is focusing on asking the right questions the right model? Perhaps this idea is breaking down train of thought too finely to render focusing on the right question paralyzing rather than catalyzing. Yesterday on Twitter I asked “When is the advice not to take it one step at a time? Or are those words of wisdom universally applicable?” I think the answer is that, yes focusing on the next step is always the right thing to do, but the size of the step varies. The extremities run from focusing on only the desired end outcome, while ignoring the process, to focusing on an infinitum of smaller and smaller minutiae like in Zeno’s Paradoxes. In this case, I’m trying to discover what the right level of conscious focus is, to extend the complexity and length of trains of thought.

In reading, for example, first we focus on reading individual letters. Then we graduate to reading individual words. Then a few people move on to reading sentences. And even a smaller select few claim to be able to read paragraphs the same way most people read words. This is essence of what most speed reading programs teach. Those levels are the “what” of faster reading but what’s more interesting is the “how”, because that allows us to know not just what’s possible but achieve it ourselves. I’ve been experimenting with some of these techniques and have been able to get up to the level of reading sentences and thus paragraphs in a few eye movements in situations with few distractions (though those are hard to come by lately). Reading with a purpose is one such technique, but more on specific reading techniques another time.

In writing there is a similar process. We start out with very simple ideas and then string them together to form longer, complex thoughts. What is the technique, the “how” that unlocks the potential to begin connecting multiples of complex thoughts together. I think focusing on the right questions might be one successful approach.

Ultimately, what I’m talking about here is consciously understanding and modeling what many elite figures do intuitively and unconsciously, so if you asked them there’s a good chance they couldn’t articulate how they do what they do. What I hope to talk more about is the tremendous power and flexibility in understanding consciously many of the processes that skilled naturals understand only intuitively.