Being the Board Excerpt From The Art of Possibility by Ben Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander: WHEN the way things are seems to offer no possibility; when you are angry and blocked, and, for all your efforts, others refuse to move or cooperate, to compromise, or even to be halfway decent; when even
Can you time-box it? It's a trick statement to say, "I am working on it full-time." What does that mean? Does that mean 40 hours a week? Does that mean more? Or less? Full-time allows us to get off the hook. Instead, "I am committing to work on it
When the voice is heavy. When resistance is heavy, it becomes difficult to move forward on any task, even those that we would have otherwise done easily. The voice creates doubts and asks questions. "Is this something you should be doing right now?" "Isn’t there a better way to do this?
When in doubt, ship it. When in doubt, ship it. Don't think. Don't delay. Ship it. You can always make it better later. But, for now, ship it.
Permission slip. Excerpt From Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert: "You do not need a permission slip from the principal’s office to live a creative life. Or if you do worry that you need a permission slip—THERE, I just gave it to you. I just wrote it on the back
Building new habits. Old habits are like 4-lane highways in our neural system. They go from cue to craving to response to reward in an instant. The number of iterations are the reason behind the efficiency of such a system. On the other hand, new habits, especially those where we are affected by
What needs to be done? If we get done what needs to be done, we create space for what we want to do. It doesn't work the other way around. "I'll do only what I want to do" is for amateurs. "I'll do what I need
Getting the wrong message. When someone says no, the amygdala reacts a couple of seconds faster than the pre-frontal cortex can respond. The amygdala perceives the no as personal, as malevolent, as insidious. There is a chance that the amygdala might be right but the likelihood of that is extremely low.
Navigating blind spots. Asking for help. Enrolling for tough feedback. It's a gift to surround yourself with friends who can nudge and tell you that you have spinach in your teeth. You can't fix what you can't see.
The generosity of the cheerleader. They push the creative forward. They create a defence against the voice of doubt. They make the creative believe and take the leap. Cheerleaders make us feel like a team playing on its home ground. The wind is behind our back when we are surrounded by them. When in doubt,
What does v1 look like? The original iPhone did not have "copy and paste" functionality. It didn't matter that it might be only have been a few hours work for a software person to put the functionality in. It didn't matter because when we think of a phone, this
Insufficiency or optimism? Which story do we choose to tell ourselves? What are we creating evidence towards? Insufficiency is a bottomless container which will always find evidence proving us to be insufficient. Optimism, on the contrary, is a story of growth, of change, or making things better. Fear can make us choose insufficiency
The data doesn’t lie. There’s a saying in the health world, “Blood doesn’t lie”. You may believe what you want to believe about your health, but a blood test can tell exactly how it is. How can we create an equivalent of this for our work? What metrics would tell us the
Accepting all of you. Desire. fear. love. ambition. Taking all the parts with you. With love, with compassion. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. But it requires all the parts to be whole.
"I will do this later." This is a trap. The trap lies in the missing question, "Okay! When is later?" Without the answer to "When is later?", we are off the hook. There is no accountability. Later encompasses the remaining entirety of our lifetime. And hence, every time the thing pops
What direction are we moving towards? What direction are we moving towards? What direction do we want to move towards? What would it take for us to change the direction? What are we waiting for? If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. ~ Lao Tzu
The art of slowing down. Turning the volume knob anti-clockwise. Reducing the speed to 3/4x, 1/2x, 1/4x. Coming to the present moment and staying there. There's an art to slowing down. And it's worth learning.
Self-love and compassion. It's a skill. We can learn to be compassionate to ourselves through practice. We can learn to love ourselves through practice. Every time we choose to be compassionate with ourselves instead of being unreasonably critical, we do the equivalent of one compassion push-up. Over time, we build the
Downward spiral or possibility? We can choose. Image from The Art of Possibility by Ben Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander
Taking rest. How do you know you have rested enough? How can you rest even more? “I regret resting too much”, said no one ever.
Bad blogs. Bad blogs are the way to a good blog. No blogs are not. When in doubt, write a bad blog over no blog.
Idea machine The brain is an idea machine. If we sit in front of a blank screen with our hands on the keyboard, it will churn out ideas, one after the other. Not all ideas will be great, but not all will be bad either. One thing's for sure, though,
One thing at a time. One day at a time. That's how we turn professional. That's how we beat resistance. It's simple. But it's not easy. “The magic of the creative process is that there is no magic” ~ Seth Godin, The Practice
The magic of saying no. Saying no is hard. Instead of saying no, we try to adjust to doing things that we don't want to do, attend meetings that we don't want to attend and commit to projects that don't align with our goals. But, once we learn to
System or exceptions. Exceptions are the one-time changes that are needed in case of emergencies. Once they are taken care of, they give us an opportunity to make changes at the system level. But, if all we do is to work on handling the exception without making the requisite changes in the system,
