Alexander Lee's Key Ideas from Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind
by Biz Stone

A useful exercise with any problem or idea is to visualize what you want to see happen for yourself over the next two years.

The goal isn’t to solve anything. If you take an idea and just hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward that goal. The practice is what helps you to manufacture your own opportunities. In essence it builds confidence. Furthermore, this confidence helps you seize opportunities or create your own so that you can achieve what you desire.

A limit automatically forces you to be creative, because now you have to come up with a way to get around it.

Limits can be financial, biological, social, or even made up.

When Steven Spielberg shot Jaws, he wanted to get an animatronic shark, but it was too expensive at the time. To get around this limit, he decided to film from the shark’s point of view, making the movie scarier than it could ever have been with some mechanic model. Ultimately, this is what made the movie a big hit and sparked a whole new point-of-view genre in horror movies.