By RAJNEESH BHANDARI
It happens most of the time that people come with amazing ideas, they’ll work on them for some time and leave them in the middle. They’ll soon start working on the next idea without completing the previous one and this cycle continues. Has this happened with you before? With me, yes!
Scott Belsky’s book, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision And Reality, is the right option for leaders who want to push creativity to transform idea into an innovation. What does that mean? It means not to leave your ideas without making it happen.
He puts it raw, saying that there’s no “best way” to be creative. But for executing ideas one has to go through the hard way.
In this blog I am going to talk about three golden rules Belkys talks about for making every project a success. There are three important steps that Belsky suggests in order to make ideas happen: a) action steps, b) backburner items and c) references.
- Action Steps: After coming with an idea, we may not take important steps that need to be taken to achieve our goals. Actions steps are the steps that could be taken out effectively and that start with verbs. Belsky suggests to keep them away from notes and sketches. Some of the action steps I came with are:
- Write a blog
- Edit Sustainability Documentary
- Make titles for the video
- Read 3rd Chapter of Making Ideas Happen
2. Backburner items: it’s about keeping the important ideas that aren’t important at the moment. Belsky recommends to put these ideas collected in a central location and go back them periodically. I always have ideas that are scattered. After reading this chapter, I am going to put my ideas in a central location. I started using Apple’s pages recently and I like it. So, I will be adding my ideas on pages now.
3. References: The third step is keeping the notes, sketches and other things in one big file. Belsky suggests it’s OK to put references chronologically. That’s much a better way isn’t it?
Inspiration and Perspiration
Belsky repeats Thomas Edison’s famous lines,
“Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
His message in the book is about hard work. But it was frustration that inspired Belsky to write this book.
“There is SO MUCH discussion in the creative world about inspiration and creativity, but very little discussion about organization and execution,” he said.
Making ideas happen = Ideas + Organization + Communal forces + Leadership capability
In this video Belsky talks about why finishing the idea is more important than coming up with new one.
What I liked about Belsky’s book is that it targets creative professionals. And for every creative professionals like me, it’s completing the ideas that we have in our mind more important than coming up with new one.
Reviewed by Desiree.
