Making Ideas Happen (25 page)

There are laws of economics and human behavior that, over time, bring clarity and fairness to any situation. But impatient and impulsive leaders are liable to stumble during short-term periods of ambiguity. Their judgment becomes shaky and they can lose their grounding and respect within an organization.

The best practice here is to develop a tolerance for momentary injustice and periods of ambiguity. Stay strong and stay calm as a situation settles itself over time and the clouds around any period of change start to dissipate. Your fortitude wil yield greater respect and opportunity that wil reward you over time.

Capture the Benefits of Failure

When a project goes awry, we must remain open to the lessons that can be learned.

As British author A. A. Milne once said, “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience—wel , that comes from poor judgment.” Digesting the realizations that accompany failure is a crucial part of the creative process.

Most of us have a hard time with failure because we feel not only the professional loss but also the personal hurt when our idea fails to gain traction. But this tendency poses a grave problem as we commit ourselves to act without conviction and kil ideas liberal y.

By doing so, we wil meet many dead ends. Projects that encounter, or end with, failure have great value, but only if we can recognize it and reap the benefits.

When something goes wrong, there are three questions we should seek to answer:
What external conditions may explain the failure?
When the outcome of any creative project is not what you intended, you should try to identify what, if any, external factors were responsible. Perhaps the client’s brief was not properly explained, or the timing was wrong. Perhaps there were other signs that the support required from others was missing. There are lessons to be learned that wil help you better steward future projects.

What internal factors may have compromised your judgment?
When a project fal s short of expectations, there is almost always something that you could have done differently along the way. Perhaps you didn’t seek enough restraints from the client.

Maybe there were incorrect assumptions that you made in the early stages of the project. Ask yourself: if you had to pick two things that you would have done differently, what would they be? You don’t need to share your answer with others, but you should chal enge yourself to have an answer. Through self-awareness, you should be able to identify the factors that compromised your judgment.

Are there any gems in the unintended outcome?
Francis Ford Coppola once quipped, “Art is partly being available to accidents that fal into your lap.” Achieving this sense of availability can be especial y difficult when your flow is disrupted by the unexpected. But rather than dwel only on what went wrong, consider what you may have inadvertently discovered.

Avoid the Trap of Visionary’s Narcissism
During my time at Goldman Sachs, I had the opportunity to be a fly on the wal in a lot of meetings in the executive office during both the dot-com bubble and the dire period that fol owed it. I always found it interesting how every chal enge was presented as an unusual one-off: “Never before have we had a market bubble, fol owed by such volatility in interest rates, interspersed with terrorist concerns.” The business leaders would nod their heads in affirmation. “This is an extraordinary time,” someone else would say.

Based on al the times I have heard “This is the most unusual X, the greatest period of Y, the new era of Z,” you might think that had I not been born in the last thirty years I might have missed the most exciting years of business since the beginning of time! Of course, if you consider the big picture, you see more patterns than exceptions. There was the railroad craze, the tulip craze, the radio craze, the Internet craze—and the leaders who bought in, the “carpe diem” executives who put it al on the line each time.

Nevertheless, despite history, the tendency to think that a given opportunity or chal enge is a one-off persists. I have come to cal this propensity “visionary’s narcissism”—it is a leader’s default thinking that he or she is the exception to the rule.

As creative minds, we are especial y susceptible to bouts of visionary’s narcissism.

Not only can we get carried away with the uniqueness of a particular problem or opportunity, we crave firsts and love to do things differently. While our tendency is to approach every creative project with a fresh set of eyes, we should also accept a grounding realization: not much is entirely new, and yes, we can adequately learn from the past.

Chal enge yourself to have some perspective. Don’t get so caught up in the novelty of what you are doing that you lose touch with what’s been done before. As you encounter negotiations with clients, col aborations with vendors and partners, or unique decisions or investment opportunities in your business, ground yourself with the fact that the situation you face isn’t as isolated and unique as you think. Previous knowledge is yours for the taking, often risk-free and time-tested. Today never feels like it wil be history, but it wil . And more likely than not, you wil look back and realize that you should have known.

Combating Conventional Wisdom with

Contrarianism

As you harness the lessons of the past, you must also question them. Of course, nobody should wil ful y disregard good advice and fal victim to visionary’s narcissism.

But as creative professionals, we cannot become imprisoned by the status quo.

Yet another conundrum arises: how should we reconcile our tendency to seek the advice of experts with our desire to do things differently—and perhaps better? We should be wary that “best practices”—the tried and true ways of doing things—often become conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is often wrong.

There is a somewhat healthy tendency in every discipline to defer to the knowledge of elders. From the apprenticeships of the pre-Industrial Age to the traditional corporate hierarchies that permeate our life today, societies are built on col ective wisdom from the past. Major conferences around the world gather industry experts to share their wisdom.

We painstakingly listen to our elders’ projections as if they were coming from an oracle.

However, for the smal portion of society that is tasked with innovation and pushing the envelope, a reliance on conventional wisdom is damning. We have to temper advice with a dose of skepticism, and we must always consider the merits of developing new platforms rather than more and more derivatives.

An early theme that emerged in my interviews with creative professionals was the practice of “contrarianism,” or the act of purposely thinking against the grain when approaching problems and brainstorming new ideas. Contrarians are wil ing to manage (if not embrace) the uncertainties and risks inherent in thinking differently. And by questioning the norms, they are bound to either find better approaches or to feel more confidence in the old ways of doing things.

The fol owing are a few tips for engaging in the practice of contrarianism and navigating the terrain of conventional wisdom. Needless to say, consider them with a dose of skepticism!

Don’t revere someone based on age.
There is an inherent prejudice against young people—or people who are new to our industries—because we question how much they could possibly know given their relative lack of experience. However, novices have very legitimate advantages when it comes to detecting trends, adopting new technology, and attempting risky undertakings that more experienced creatives would shy away from.

When working with novices, you should pass judgment on their raw interests and skil s rather than their age or number of years in the industry.

Reconsider your approach to mentoring.
Your tendency may be to look to those above you for guidance, connections, and opportunities. Yet your greatest advisers, partners, col eagues, and financiers are likely sitting around you rather than standing in front of you at the podium. While society may suggest that you have the most to learn from those at the top, you must make an effort to look around and below you as wel .

View mentoring less as an act of graciousness and more as a strategy to capture the benefits—through relationships or otherwise—that are likely to transpire for you as wel .

Distinguish past accomplishments from present knowledge.
We al have a tendency to “rest on our laurels,” but cutting-edge knowledge becomes antiquated very quickly. The bril iant expert from yesterday may have little insight that is relevant today. In fact, such experts may be too biased by their own past experiences and success to see how the times have changed. As such, you should question the correlation between one’s past accomplishments and present knowledge.

Aspire to better practices, not the best.
Rather than default to the way things have already been done, recognize that anything can be done better. While it is certainly worthy to find and fol ow time-tested methods as we pursue projects, it is dangerous to passively accept advice. Al conventional wisdom and “best practices” should be taken with a grain of salt and built upon as we aspire to “better practices.” (This applies just as much to the advice in this book!)

Consider Yourself an Entrepreneur

You have a responsibility to make your ideas sustainable. For an idea to thrive over time, it must be treated as an enterprise. Whether you work in a large corporation or on your own, when it comes to leading ideas, ultimately you are an entrepreneur.

“Entrepreneurs are not the ones with the best ideas,” says Andrew Weinreich, a trailblazing serial entrepreneur. “They’re just the ones wil ing to jump off a cliff without the answers.” Weinreich created one of the earliest social networks, SixDegrees.com, which he eventual y sold in January 2000 for $125 mil ion. Most recently, he has founded Xtify.com, which offers free location-based services for mobile phones and Web apps, and MeetMoi.com, a mobile dating service. In al of these ventures, Weinreich has played the role of founder and leader.

Weinreich’s business escapades did not start with thoughtful strategy and business planning. He graduated from law school with over $100,000 in debt. But he had ideas and grand visions of what they might become. “You can live longer off passion than off money,” Weinreich explains to me. But when he took the plunge on his first venture, he didn’t see a finish line—and he thinks it is wrong to have one in mind. Instead, he believes that entrepreneurs should just try “to stay in the fifth inning forever”—meaning they should focus more on incremental progress than on the need to win. The big win is likely far off in the distance, many iterations and ideas away from the current state of the project. This practice of perseverance is consistent with the notion of short-circuiting your reward system. Weinreich cal s it “the process of wil ful delusion.” You must somehow stay engaged with incremental progress and maintain momentum, even if you find yourself staying in the same inning—making repeated attempts at the same idea.

“When our [start-up team] first came together,” Weinreich recal ed, “I told them that their biggest risk was joining the team—and that the rest of the experience would just be fil ing the holes in the boat. If we sat stil , the boat would sink. The faster we moved, the more slowly the water would creep in, and we’d simply plug al of the holes over time.”

Weinreich believes that the key to surviving the start-up experience is momentum. “When you stop moving, the music stops.”

For Peter Rojas, the cofounder and CEO of RCRD LBL, mentioned earlier, the hardest part of pursuing a new idea is “pul ing the trigger—being mental y in it or out.” He recal s that after he left Engadget he had a number of other tech-focused ideas regarding video networks and TV, but he decided that his mind wasn’t ful y engaged by any of these ideas. He wasn’t ready to jump off the cliff.

When you come across ideas worthy of your time and energy, it is important to know which assurances you need—and which you don’t—before you decide to take the plunge. You don’t need (nor wil you ever have) al the answers, but you do need to feel that the risk of giving it a go is less than the risk of not trying. You don’t need to see a finish line in sight, but you do need enough momentum to stay afloat.

In Anne Lamott’s international best sel er
Bird by Bird
, about the art of writing, she cites a quote by the award-winning American author E. L. Doctorow on what it is like to write a novel. “It’s like driving a car at night,” Doctorow proclaims. “You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Along the journey to turn ideas into action, you must keep up the momentum, even if you can only see a few yards ahead. Most entrepreneurs wil admit that the value of having a masterful business plan is overrated. What matters most is your ability to keep moving and pushing your ideas forward, yard by yard.

Be Willing to Be a Deviant

We have talked a lot about the personal obstacles that are common in creative pursuits and how to overcome them. In addition to the chal enges posed by our own tendencies, there are also external, often societal, pressures that, at weak moments, can obstruct our journey.

Most of the extraordinary creative minds I interviewed over the course of writing this book spoke of times in their lives when they made decisions that were unpopular but necessary. Whether it was dropping out of col ege to pursue a passion, quitting a wel -

paying job to start a company, or declining certain opportunities that appeared golden to others—their paths were unconventional. As these budding creative leaders hacked their own paths, they lost support from others. But amidst a cacophony of discouragement from teachers and even their own families and friends, they persevered and learned to gain confidence from being questioned. They became deviants of a sort.

Deviants are maverick-like, wil ing to be unpopular, misunderstood, and even shunned during creative pursuits. The vision of extraordinary achievement is, by definition, a few steps beyond consensus and conventional logic. As such, we should become emboldened by society’s doubts rather than deterred.