Making Ideas Happen I

As I wrote earlier, I’ve been reading a really good book called Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky. It’s helped to shape many of my philosophies recently- and I’ll write about a few of the lessons I’ve learnt.

Many of you who know me know that I’ve always had a lot of ideas- and have managed to push out very few of them. Scott Belsky argues that it is a problem shared by many people of the “creative class”- right brainers, whose creativity is at odds with the discipline and rational logic required to execute ideas. Ideas, he argues, are useless if you don’t make them happen.

He studies those who are consistently able to produce great work- and finds that the best are not necessarily the most creative, but those most comfortable alternating between the creative phase of idea generation, and then the disciplined phase of idea execution. As Jonathan Harris put it, “the first is a more pleasing way to live life, but the latter is the only way to get anything done”.

This, for me, is really enlightening. I’ll continue to write about the most compelling ideas (for me) from this book as I go along.