To know what you don't know is power.To ask and learn what you don't know is a super power.

People need to understand that Ego is enemy of your growth.

creativity

Creativity

books

Books

Ankur Warikoo is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Ankur Warikoo has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Ankur Warikoo's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Ankur Warikoo

Do Epic Shit

DO EPIC SHIT.

We all have a mind, Please don't mind😅Thoughts are generated from our eyes and ears, as "What we See and Listen is what we become"And these generated thoughts feeded into our mind and then when we make any decisions, conclusions and every thinkingMakes a Thought Process

Thought Process

Don't think about removing bad thoughts, Think about adding good thoughts, So that no space left for any bad thoughts in your mind.Mind is what, Your brain and Your brain is your remote, don't give this remote to others.

How to Remove bad thought Processes

If your answer to the above question is YES, then you already have power for making good thoughts because you know your faults and that's your power.

If You Already Have Bad Thoughts ?

THANK YOU SO MUCHDo like this thoughtForYourself

READ THIS AND IT WILL BE VERY IMPORTANT FOR YOU

philosophy

Philosophy

mindfulness

Mindfulness

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Thoughts

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.

Visualizing Our Goals

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.

Limits Make You More Creative

Ideas rarely enter the world fully formed and ready to go. That’s why he always remains open to changes, even after the idea has been released.For example, most of Twitter’s main features were user suggestions. People initially copied tweets they liked to share them, so Twitter introduced the “retweet.” When one user wanted to bundle together all tweets about the South by Southwest Festival, he added #sxsw to his tweets, and voilà, the hashtag was born.

Get The Raw Idea Out

Frustration is a great source of motivation. You can’t stop at building a solution. You have to use it too. If you’re not the most ecstatic advocate and power user of your own product, you’ll never be able to build it to a point where enough people use it so it’s profitable.

Solve Your Own Problem

this is the core of entrepreneurship – being the person who makes something happen for yourself.

The true promise of a connected society is enabling our dormant potential for empathy.

When you hand good people possibility, they do great things.

Your goals should be bigger than your ego

If you make the opportunity. you'll be the first in the position to take advantage of it

Creative lessons from the co-founder of Twitter.

Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, discusses the power of creativity and how to harness it, through stories from his remarkable life and career. THINGS A LITTLE BIRD TOLD ME From GQ's "Nerd of the Year" to one of Time's most influential people in the world, Biz Stone represents different things to different people. But he is known to all as the creative, effervescent, funny, charmingly positive and remarkably savvy co-founder of Twitter-the social media platform that singlehandedly changed the way the world works. Now, Biz tells fascinating, pivotal, and personal stories from his early life and his careers at Google and Twitter, sharing his knowledge about the nature and importance of ingenuity today. In Biz's world: -Opportunity can be manufactured -Great work comes from abandoning a linear way of thinking -Creativity never runs out -Asking questions is free -Empathy is core to personal and global success In this book, Biz also addresses failure, the value of vulnerability, ambition, and corporate culture. Whether seeking behind-the-scenes stories, advice, or wisdom and principles from one of the most successful businessmen of the new century, THINGS A LITTLE BIRD TOLD ME will satisfy every reader.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, discusses the power of creativity and how to harness it, through stories from his remarkable life and career. Things a Little Bird Told Me From GQ's "Nerd of the Year" to one of Time's most influential people in the world, Biz Stone represents different things to different people. But he is known to all as the creative, effervescent, funny, charmingly positive and remarkably savvy co-founder of Twitter-the social media platform that singlehandedly changed the way the world works. Now, Biz tells fascinating, pivotal, and personal stories from his early life and his careers at Google and Twitter, sharing his knowledge about the nature and importance of ingenuity today. In Biz's world: Opportunity can be manufactured Great work comes from abandoning a linear way of thinking Creativity never runs out Asking questions is free Empathy is core to personal and global success In this book, Biz also addresses failure, the value of vulnerability, ambition, and corporate culture. Whether seeking behind-the-scenes stories, advice, or wisdom and principles from one of the most successful businessmen of the new century, Things a Little Bird Told Me will satisfy every reader.

Biz Stone

Things a Little Bird Told Me

Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind

Integrating innovation throughout a company is crucial to ensure a continuous flow of creative and actionable ideas. This requires the existence of a formal innovation network that sits alongside the execution engine and supports and incentivises the involvement of middle management. 
While they are the oft-forgotten foot soldiers of innovation, they play a key role in championing and channelling promising ideas to implementation.

Building a Support Network to Implement Promising Ideas

Creation needs to take place across the company. Innovation is often just defined as R&D. But that’s not enough; it’s important to involve everyone in the innovation process and make it accessible across the company.
Integration is the process by which the dispersed innovating capabilities and resources within a firm are brought together into a corporate-wide innovating capability.

Creation And Integration

The integration process encompasses two main elements: “connecting the dots” between all the new ideas that are springing up from around the organisation; and selecting, channelling and testing those ideas and deciding whether they are worthy of implementation.

The Process Of Integration

<ul>
<li>Senior leaders must face the reality of an increasingly uncertain business environment, so they naturally recognise the need for continuous innovation.</li>
<li>Frontline employees are interacting with customers and their issues on a daily basis, so they, too, fully grasp the need for innovation.</li>
<li>Middle managers are typically focused on the execution engine, which means they can often be detached from the pressures to innovate, even seeing time spent on innovation as an unwelcome distraction from day-to-day objectives.</li>
</ul>

The Role Of Middle Managers

Middle managers are a vital part of innovation, without them, innovation is lost.
It is middle managers who have the power to give employees the time and motivation to innovate. And it is the middle managers who can make sure that any ideas generated are refined, filtered and, if worthwhile, brought to the attention of senior leaders.

The Importance Of Middle Managers

This cross-company innovation framework at Bayer is supported by WeSolve, a digital platform that allows all employees to post any challenges or problems they are facing. Issues submitted can range from a frontline worker in Spain trying to help farmers monitor pesticide levels, to a manager in India asking for brand name suggestions for a new product. 
The critical part is that any employee from any department, regardless of job title or training, can visit the forum and post potential solutions to any challenge.

Making Innovation Accessible: Bayer Example

The importance of building a support network to implement promising ideas.

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Middle Managers: The Forgotten Heroes of Innovation

From the moment we first open our eyes in the morning to the moment we go to bed, we’re confronted with a barrage of decisions. Which outfit should I wear? What should I make for dinner? What’s the fastest route to take to work today? Our minds are often full of a continuous stream of tasks, and it takes a toll on our mental well-being. 
With so much information coming from different sources—from news to social media outlets to our own family in the background—our brains can feel completely overwhelmed.

The Brain Is Always On

The truth is, our mind isn’t at its best or at its most creative when it’s being held under the weight of thousands of tasks and projects.
We need to work on clearing our mind and freeing up space—both physically and mentally—to allow our creative ideas to start flowing.

Declutter Your Mind

Try something called a “brain dump” in the first hour of your day. This exercise, which only requires 10 minutes, can help you empty your mind of negative thoughts and streamline your focus on what matters most.
It works like this: Take a few minutes to write down on paper everything that’s weighing you down, letting your mind flow freely onto the page. If you think keeping everything you need to know neatly packed away in your head is a smart way to run your life, you’re probably hurting your productivity and stifling your creativity.

The Brain Dump Exercise

One can try embracing quiet reflection and moments of doing absolutely nothing. When you disconnect from distractions, you give space for your mind to create new pathways.
If you’re hesitant to break away because you feel that you’re on a roll, be mindful that it might be a false impression. Your brain needs downtime to remain industrious and generate better ideas.

Being Passive

It’s been proven that spending time in nature relieves attention fatigue and increases our creativity. If you’ve been using your brain to multitask—as most of us do most of the day—and then you set that aside and go on a walk, without all of the gadgets, you’ve let the prefrontal cortex recover.
That’s when we see these bursts in creativity, problem-solving, and feelings of well-being.

Be In Nature

Our never-ending obligations are important, but those flashes of creativity, the ones that come to you spontaneously in some quiet hours, are pushed to the back of your mind.
Honouring your passion can help you tap into your emotions and boost your creative genius, but only if you allow yourself the space to pay attention. When you open your eyes first thing in the morning, rather than rehearse your multitude of to-dos, remember to reflect on the ideas that enliven you, the ones that fill your cup with meaning. Those are the ones that should be at the top of your list.

Respect Your Passions

You’ve decluttered your home for remote work. Now declutter your mind.


How to quiet your mind by doing a brain dump

Creativity is not an innate gift or a talent you're born with. Rather, creativity is a skill and a choice — it can be learned and expanded. 
The key to becoming more creative is to get into the habit of shipping or sharing your creative output all the time.

Creativity Can Be Learned

When you ship or share what you create — whether you get paid for it or not — you establish a "Practice" which will help your creative skills to grow and expand even more in the future. 
This kind of practice is self-driven, and is not outcome-based. The more you ship, the faster your creative skills will grow and expand, and the better your art will become, whatever form it may take.

Self-Driven Practice

The magic of the creative process is that there is no magic.

You were born ready to make art. Art is the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work.
But you've been told that you can't trust yourself enough to do so. You've been told you don't have enough talent (but that's okay, because you can learn the skill instead). And you've been told that if you can't win, you shouldn't even try (but now you see the journey is the entire point).

It's Not About The Results

Creativity is a choice. If you aspire to find a new truth, solve an old problem, or make the world a better place, you can. To achieve this, establish a "Practice" of consistently generating, sharing, and shipping what you make.
The five key principles in doing this that are:
<ul>
<li>Trust yourself to make great art.</li>
<li>Be generous with your art.</li>
<li>Be professional.</li>
<li>Aspire to make change with your art.</li>
<li>Generate your art consistently.</li>
</ul>

The Conceptual Foundation

The key to building a creative practice for yourself is to be consistent in generating and shipping your art — whatever form it may take. Certainly, good processes help you generate professional-quality outputs, but consistency really is the key to moving forward. Generating art is something that you do, not merely something that you speak about.The second set of five key principles which underpin this idea are:<ul><li>Make bold assertions.</li><li>Earn your skills by consistently producing.</li><li>Welcome and harness your constraints.</li><li>Watch for creative ideas.</li><li>Be unquenchable.</li></ul>

Making It Happen

<ul><li>Establish a "Practice" to ship whatever you create to a schedule. The discipline of doing that will cause you to be even more creative in the future.</li><li>Write every day. Blog, and record your thoughts. It will establish your identity, and help you arrange your thoughts. That's the foundation for your creative output of the future.</li></ul>

Important Activities

The real breakthrough is doing work that is worth doing, even though you know it's not going to work.
The Western mindset is "tell me if it's going to work and then I'll do it." This mentality of only doing what's needed if it gets me an A on the test holds back creators.

Not The Straight A Grade Stuff

The colloquial understanding of magic is someone who does a coin trick. The coin disappears from one hand and is gone for just a moment. At that moment we feel the tension. How is that possible? 
Once we know how the trick is done the magic evaporates. This magic can be found in the things we create. Creators can make magic happen for the people they seek to help.

Creating Magic

The way we act determines how we feel way more often than the way we feel determines how we act. The way you behave will inform your identity. 
If your practice is to go running every day, the more this practice is done consistently you will have a runners identity. We are what we do.

The Practice Becomes Your Identity

From the bestselling author of Linchpin, Tribes, and The Dip comes an elegant little book that will inspire artists, writers, and entrepreneurs to stretch and commit to putting their best work out into the world. Creative work doesn't come with a guarantee. But there is a pattern to who succeeds and who doesn't. And engaging in the consistent practice of its pursuit is the best way forward. Based on the breakthrough Akimbo workshop pioneered by legendary author Seth Godin, The Practice will help you get unstuck and find the courage to make and share creative work. Godin insists that writer's block is a myth, that consistency is far more important than authenticity, and that experiencing the imposter syndrome is a sign that you're a well-adjusted human. Most of all, he shows you what it takes to turn your passion from a private distraction to a productive contribution, the one you've been seeking to share all along. With this book as your guide, you'll learn to dance with your fear. To take the risks worth taking. And to embrace the empathy required to make work that contributes with authenticity and joy.

habits

Habits

From the bestselling author of Linchpin, Tribes, and The Dip comes an elegant little book that will inspire artists, writers, and entrepreneurs to stretch and commit to putting their best work out into the world. Creative work doesn't come with a guarantee. But there is a pattern to who succeeds and who doesn't. And engaging in the consistent practice of its pursuit is the best way forward. Based on the breakthrough Akimbo workshop pioneered by legendary author Seth Godin, The Practice will help you get unstuck and find the courage to make and share creative work. Godin insists that writer's block is a myth, that consistency is far more important than authenticity, and that experiencing the imposter syndrome is a sign that you're a well-adjusted human. Most of all, he shows you what it takes to turn your passion from a private distraction to a productive contribution, the one you've been seeking to share all along. With this book as your guide, you'll learn to dance with your fear. To take the risks worth taking. And to embrace the empathy required to make work that contributes with authenticity and joy.

Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change.Godin is author of ten books that have been bestsellers around the world, and he is also a renowned speaker. He was recently chosen as one of 21 Speakers for the Next Century by Successful Meetings and is consistently rated among the very best speakers by the audiences he addresses.Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the industry's leading interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998.He holds an MBA from Stanford, and was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by Business Week.

Seth Godin

The Practice

“We’ve let the market dictate what our smart kids do, and they’re being systematically funneled into obvious, structured paths that don’t serve them or the economy terribly well.”

Our most talented and educated young people are doing the wrong things. Our smart people are heading to finance or law school or management consulting, instead of building or developing companies. We need to get our smart people to do things again. They’d like to but are often led to seek jobs with status and progress rather than a genuine desire or natural fit.  Meanwhile, there are huge needs in other sectors needing smart people who can manage, operate, improve and innovate.

Top students often end up in the same industries

Companies less than five years old used to make up half of all companies. Now it is less than a third. Since 2008, most US workers are employed at companies with 500+ employees. However, big companies don't create jobs. They don't move the economy forward.  The bigger companies get, the more they try to automate as much as they can and then reduce the number of employees, not increase it.Big banks and consulting firms give advice around cutting costs, firing people and outsourcing work that can be done cheaper elsewhere.

Big firms don't add to job growth

Countries need jobs, especially jobs in healthy, growing companies. Without it, there are no complex transactions to support bankers, lawyers, and consultants already in the graduate school pipeline. Innovation happens in startups. Pairing young, smart, hardworking people with startup teams and mentors can lead to a meaningful contribution, leading to more jobs and new ventures in the future. After two years of working at a startup or growth company, the desire to build things will drive you to bring more jobs to your neighbourhood.

How students can take an entrepreneurial exit

Much has been made of the extraordinary degree of independence and responsibility that you have at a startup, even as a fresh-faced graduate…you can matter at a startup in a way you can’t at a big company—not unless you spend years slaving your way up the PowerPoint hierarchy.

This book explains that the existing education system stunts the economy. Instead of talented students blazing new paths and building new ventures, they are led to follow existing paths that are well paved and require little ingenuity.

Andrew Yang, the founder of Venture for America, offers a unique solution to our country’s economic and social problems—our smart people should be building things. Smart People Should Build Things offers a stark picture of the current culture and a revolutionary model that will redirect a generation of ambitious young people to the critical job of innovating and building new businesses. As the Founder and CEO of Venture for America, Andrew Yang places top college graduates in start-ups for two years in emerging U.S. cities to generate job growth and train the next generation of entrepreneurs. He knows firsthand how our current view of education is broken. Many college graduates aspire to finance, consulting, law school, grad school, or medical school out of a vague desire for additional status and progress rather than from a genuine passion or fit. In Smart People Should Build Things, this self-described “recovering lawyer” and entrepreneur weaves together a compelling narrative of success stories (including his own), offering observations about the flow of talent in the United States and explanations of why current trends are leading to economic distress and cultural decline. He also presents recommendations for both policy makers and job seekers to make entrepreneurship more realistic and achievable.

education

Learning & Education

Andrew Yang, the founder of Venture for America, offers a unique solution to our country’s economic and social problems—our smart people should be building things. Smart People Should Build Things offers a stark picture of the current culture and a revolutionary model that will redirect a generation of ambitious young people to the critical job of innovating and building new businesses.As the Founder and CEO of Venture for America, Andrew Yang places top college graduates in start-ups for two years in emerging U.S. cities to generate job growth and train the next generation of entrepreneurs. He knows firsthand how our current view of education is broken. Many college graduates aspire to finance, consulting, law school, grad school, or medical school out of a vague desire for additional status and progress rather than from a genuine passion or fit.In Smart People Should Build Things, this self-described “recovering lawyer” and entrepreneur weaves together a compelling narrative of success stories (including his own), offering observations about the flow of talent in the United States and explanations of why current trends are leading to economic distress and cultural decline. He also presents recommendations for both policy makers and job seekers to make entrepreneurship more realistic and achievable.

Andrew Yang

Smart People Should Build Things

Author Blair Enns highlights what he believes are the 12 proclamations every professional creative firm should follow when they want to start running a successful practice. The 12 Proclamations:<ol><li>We will specialize </li><li>We Will Replace Presentations with Conversations</li><li>We Will Diagnose Before We Prescribe</li><li>We Will Rethink What it Means to Sell</li><li>We Will Do With Words What We Used to Do With Paper</li><li>We Will Be Selective</li><li>We Will Build Expertise Rapidly</li><li>We Will Not Solve Problems Before We Are Paid</li><li>We Will Address Issues of Money Early</li><li>We Will Refuse to Work at a Loss</li><li>We Will Charge More</li><li>We Will Hold Our Heads High</li></ol>

What is the Win Without Pitching Manifesto?

"If we are not seen as more expert than our competition, then we will be viewed as one in the sea of many and we will have little power in our relationships with our clients and prospects."We Must<ol><li>Choose a focus.</li><li>Articulate that focus via a consistent claim of expertise.</li><li>Constantly work to build the missing skills, abilities, and processes necessary to support our particular focus. </li></ol>What does this mean:Creatives often want to provide their services to every potential customer that comes their way. This is wrong. Focus on specializing in a particular service and industry segment.

I | We Will Specialize

"We will break free from our addiction to the big reveal and the adrenaline rush of putting ourselves in the win or lose situation of the presentation. Until we break ourselves from this addiction we will never get rid of the pitch."We Must:<ol><li>Establish the rules of collaboration before every engagement.</li><li>Never present creative work without an agreed-upon strategy.</li><li>Encourage client input on strategy.</li><li>Always review strategy before any creative work is shown.</li><li>Have fewer options of better quality.</li><li>Always present our work to decision-makers.</li></ol>What does this mean:Avoid one-sided pitching or presenting.

II | We Will Replace Presentations with Conversations

"Well it is common practice in the creative profession to prescribe solutions without fully and accurately diagnosing the problem. In almost every other profession such a sequence would render the professional liable for malpractice. Too often we are guilty of this flawed process and our clients are guilty of trying to impose such a process through the pitch."We must:<ol><li>Diagnose the problem </li><li>Prescribe the therapy</li><li>Apply the therapy</li><li>Reapply the therapy as necessary.</li></ol>What does this mean:A doctor will never start operating based on a self-diagnosis from a patient. Treat your clients the same.

III | We Will Diagnose Before We Prescribe.

"The first thing we must understand if we are to approach selling properly and respectfully, is that the client's motivation and by necessity our role as a salesperson evolves as he progresses through the buying cycle."To sell we must:<ol><li>Help the unaware.</li><li>Inspire the interested. </li><li>Reassure those who have formed intent. </li></ol>What does this mean: Many clients are unaware of bottlenecks within their business. Our job is not to sell a solution but to help them discover new opportunities, and inspire them to take action all through a careful and articulate demonstration of our expertise.

IV | We Will Rethink What It Means To Sell

As I continue to reread this book I will add more proclamation summaries and interpretations. Stash this if you love the book!  Erick Leon is a creative director and brand strategist at <a href="https://www.evolvbam.com">Evolv Branding Advertising & Marketing.</a>

Blair Enns takes a deep dive into what it takes to make a name for yourself as an agency or creative firm.  Explore the 12 proclamations with me as I reread the book! 

product

Product & Design

A manifesto of business practices for those who sell ideas and advice, The Win Without Pitching Manifesto lays out twelve steps in the form of proclamations that owners of creative businesses can take to distance themselves from their competition, regain the high ground in their client relationships and learn to win business without first parting with their thinking or writing lengthy proposals. The twelve proclamations were written to inspire owners of independent creative businesses (e.g.: design firms & advertising agencies) to rethink how their services are bought and sold. Anyone who sells ideas or advice will find relevance in their teachings. -- Amazon.

Blair Enns

The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are. The notion that genius is only thinly separated from insanity goes back at least to ancient Greece. Aristotle linked the two when he said, “There is no great genius without a touch of madness.”*Many of history's most celebrated creative geniuses were mentally ill, from renowned artists Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo to literary giants Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe.

There Is a Thin Line Between Genius and Insanity?

Current findings of some 20 or 30 scientific studies endorse the notion of the "tortured genius." Of the many varieties of psychosis, creativity appears to be most strongly linked to mood disorders, and especially bipolar disorder. "People with bipolar tend to be creative when they're coming out of deep depression. ""When a bipolar patient's mood improves, his brain activity shifts, too: activity dies down in the lower part of a brain region called the frontal lobe, and flares up in a higher part of that lobe. Amazingly, the very same shift happens when people have bouts of creativity. "

Tortured Genius

Of course, no one is bursting with creative energy during a severe bout of depression or schizophrenia. Above all, these conditions are debilitating and even life-threatening, the scientists said, and although society benefits from the productivity of its tortured geniuses, those individuals don't always consider their moments of brilliance to be worth the extensive suffering.

Suffering  > Brilliance

“There is no great genius without a touch of madness.”* 

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

writing

Reading & Writing

Geniuses and Mental illnesses.

Good ideas do not – for the most part – come from inside someone’s head. Instead, they come from outside – specifically from social interaction.
A study conducted in leading research laboratories found that scientists rarely, if ever, had a flash of inspiration or eureka moment alone in the lab. Instead, ideas happen in conversation with colleagues. So want a great idea? Then go to a coffee house and talk with someone.

Where Good Ideas Don't Come From

Good ideas don't come from thoughts or visions. Instead, they come from stuff. 
Every great idea is a combination or mutation of an idea that has already been brought to life. Ideas brought to life in products that are already out there are the building blocks of innovation – not thoughts.

Ideas Come From Stuff

Good ideas do not come from looking forward or back, rather they come from looking left and right, to what is adjacent to us. Tomorrow’s great innovations are built from the stuff of today – specifically from the things around us that can be combined into something new.The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.

Adjecent Possible

<ul><li>What new possibilities are there today, that didn’t exist earlier? (principle of adjacent possibilities)</li><li>What hunches have you had for some time about what to do? (principle of slow hunches)</li><li>What do fresh eyes think we should do? (principle of liquid networks)</li><li>What’s worked that’s surprised us? (principle of serendipity)</li><li>What’s the biggest learning from our biggest error? (principle of error)</li><li>What other purpose can our product or service be used for? (principle of exaptation)</li><li>What big success can we build on? (platform principle)</li></ul>

Seven Questions for Finding Good Ideas

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts.
Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, re-invent.

The Path To Innovation

With a name like Brand Genetics, we’re predisposed to the central idea that ideas are never ‘created’ out of nothing, but are creative combinations and mutations of existing ideas that have already been brought to life. 
The principle of exaptation(finding new uses for existing things) is underused and potentially powerful in innovation. As is the notion of the adjacent possible; don’t look forward, backwards or inwards – but instead outwards to our left and right seems sound advice.

Brand Genetics

Four billion years ago, carbon atoms mulled around the primordial soup.First, they had to form simpler structures like molecules, polymers, proteins, cells, primitive organisms and so forth. Each step along the way opened up possibilities for new combinations, expanding the realm of what was possible, until finally a carbon atom could reside in a sunflower.Both evolution and innovation tend to happen within the bounds of the adjacent possible, in other words the realm of possibilities available at any given moment.

Evolution And Innovation

Great leaps beyond the adjacent possible are rare and doomed to be short-term failures. The environment is simply not ready for them yet. Had YouTube been launched in the 1990s, it would have flopped, since neither the fast internet connections nor the software required to view videos was available then.

The Timing Of Innovation

According to Darwin, the theory of natural selection simply popped into his head when he was contemplating Malthus’ writings on population growth. But Darwin’s notebooks reveal that far before this so-called epiphany, he had already described a very nearly complete theory of natural selection. This slow hunch only matured into a fully-formed theory over time.Only in retrospect does the idea seem so obvious that it must have come in a flash of insight.

Natural Selection Theory

As a child, Tim Berners-Lee read a Victorian-era how-to book and was fascinated by the “portal of information” he had found.
Working as a consultant at the Swiss CERN laboratory and partially inspired by the book, he tinkered with a side-project which allow him to store and connect chunks of information, like nodes in a network. Later, CERN officially authorized him to work on the project, which finally matured into a network where documents on different computers could be connected through hypertext links.
After decades work, the World Wide Web was born.

How The Web Was Born

Ecologists use the term keystone species to describe organisms which are disproportionately important to the welfare of the ecosystem.Such platforms exist in the sphere if innovation as well, and they are used as springboards to leap into the adjacent possible. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a good example of such a platform. Originally developed for military use, it has now spurned countless innovations from GPS trackers to location-based services and advertising.

Platforms: The Catalysts Of Innovation

The most creative individuals have broad social networks that extend outside their own organization, and hence get new ideas from many different contexts.
To better understand the roots of scientific breakthroughs, in the 1990s psychologists decided to record everything that went on in four molecular biology laboratories. One imagines that in a field like molecular biology, great discoveries are made by peering through a microscope. Strikingly, it turned out the most important ideas arose during regular lab meetings, where the scientists informally discussed their work.

Innovation And Evolution Thrive In Large Networks

Over the past 600 years, the way that great inventions and discoveries are made seems to have gravitated increasingly away from individual inventors and toward networks of people. 
And even as the age of capitalism dawned and bloomed, most great discoveries have gone unrewarded by the markets. The World Wide Web, the theory of relativity, computers, x-rays, pacemakers and penicillin are but a few examples where the inventor has not profited.

Collaboration And Competition

In the Origin of Species, Darwin himself placed equal emphasis on the wonder of complex collaboration between species as on the natural selection that comes from competition for resources.
Similarly open networks of connections among innovations can be just as generative as vigorous competition. Free markets have greatly spurred innovation, but so has the collaborative, open way of sharing knowledge in networks.

The Origin Of The Species

Water moves and churns, dissolving and eroding everything in its path, thus fostering new kinds of connections between atoms in the primordial soup. Just as importantly, the strong hydrogen bonds of water molecules helped maintain those new connections.This mix of turbulence and stability is why liquid networks are optimal both for the evolution of life and for creativity. Innovative networks too must teeter on the brink of chaos, in the fruitful realm between order and anarchy, just like water.

How Ideas Are Churned

Random connections drive serendipitous discoveries. Dreams for example are the primordial soup of innovation, where ideas connect seemingly at random. 
In fact, neuroscientists have confirmed that “sleeping on a problem” greatly helps solve it. Centuries ago, the German chemist Kekulé dreamt of a mythological serpent devouring its own tail, and subsequently realized how carbon atoms in a ring formed the molecule benzene.

Random Connections

Consider the modernist cultural innovations of the 1920s. Many of them were largely a result of artists, poets and writers meeting at the same Parisian cafés. Shared interactions allow ideas to diffuse, circulate and be combined randomly with others.On an individual level, facilitating such serendipitous connections is simply a matter of simultaneously introducing ideas from different disciplines into your consciousness. Innovators like Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin favoured working on multiple projects simultaneously, in a kind of slow multitasking mode.

Serendipitous Discoveries

Philosopher John Locke understood the importance of cross-referencing as early on as 1652, when he began developing an elaborate system for indexing the content of his commonplace book, essentially a scrapbook of interesting thoughts and findings. Such books formed his repository of ideas and hunches, maturing and waiting to be connected to new ideas.
On an organizational level, the key to innovation and inspiration is a network that allows hunches to mature, scatter and combine with others openly.

The Importance Of Cross Referencing

Error is present in both the evolution of life and the innovation of great ideas, and it is not always a bad thing.Consider natural reproduction: genes are passed on from parent to offspring, providing “building instructions” for how the offspring should develop. Without occasional mutations, meaning random errors in those instructions, evolution would have long ago come to a virtual standstill. The elephant’s tusks or peacock’s feathers would have never emerged if only perfect copies of existing genes would have propagated. Mutations endow creatures with new traits.

 Great innovations And The Importance Of Errors

Ideas are often similarly repurposed along the way. 
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a tool for scholars, but in the course of time, it became a network for shopping, social networking and pornography, among other things. Johannes Gutenberg found an innovative use for a 1000-year-old invention: the wine screw press used to squeeze the juice out of grapes. Using this ancient technology and his knowledge of metallurgy, Gutenberg created the world’s first printing press.

Innovation Thrives On Reinventing And Reusing The Old

Discarded spaces are also transformed through innovation. Just like the skeletal structure left behind by dead coral forms the basis of the rich and thriving ecosystem of the reef, abandoned buildings and rundown neighbourhoods are often the first homes of innovative urban subcultures. Their unconventional thinking and experimentation often has no place in glitzy mainstream malls and shopping streets initially. Old buildings allow subcultures to interact and generate ideas that then diffuse and spill over into the mainstream.

The Overlooked Empty Space

Both evolution and innovation thrive in collaborative networks where opportunities for serendipitous connections exist. Great discoveries often evolve as slow hunches, maturing and connecting to other ideas over time.

A fascinating deep dive on innovation from the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Unexpected Life The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery--these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the breakthrough technologies that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson's answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out the approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality.

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