THE 99U

BOOK SERIES
–

Manage Your Day-to-Day:

Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

Maximize Your Potential:

Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks, and Build an Incredible Career
Text copyright © 2013 by Behance
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written
permission of the publisher.

Published by Lake Union Publishing

www.apub.com

eISBN: 9781477850190
For those who strive
TABLE
–
OF CONTENTS

What is 99U?

Preface

Foreword: You’re a Free Radical, Run with It

by Scott Belsky, Founder of Behance

CHAPTER ONE - CREATING OPPORTUNITIES

Cultivating Your Craft Before Your Passion

by Cal Newport

Rediscovering Your Entrepreneurial Instinct

by Ben Casnocha

Q&A: Re-imagining Your Career, Constantly

with Robert Safian

Making Your Own Luck

by Jocelyn K. Glei

Finding Your Work Sweet Spot

by Scott Belsky

Key Takeaways - Creating Opportunities

CHAPTER TWO - BUILDING EXPERTISE

Focusing on Getting Better, Rather than Being Good

by Heidi Grant Halvorson
Developing Mastery through Deliberate Practice
by Tony Schwartz

Q&A: Learning to Live Outside Your Comfort Zone

with Joshua Foer

Reprogramming Your Daily Habits

by Scott H. Young

Keeping a Diary to Catalyze Creativity

by Teresa Amabile, Steven Kramer & Ela Ben-Ur

Key Takeaways - Building Expertise

CHAPTER THREE - CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIPS

Asking for Help on Your Journey

by Steffen Landauer

Building Resilient Relationships

by Michael Bungay Stanier

Q&A: Networking in a Connection Economy

with Sunny Bates

Creating a Killer Collaborative Team

by David Burkus

Leading in a World of Co-Creation

by Mark McGuinness

Key Takeaways - Cultivating Relationships

CHAPTER FOUR - TAKING RISKS

Demystifying the Fear Factor in Failure

by Michael Schwalbe
Understanding Your Role in Risk
by John Caddell

Q&A: Re-Engineering the Way We Think About Mistakes

with Tina Seelig

Leaning into Uncertainty

by Jonathan Fields

Making Purposeful Bets in a Random World

by Frans Johansson

Key Takeaways - Taking Risks

CODA - A FINAL REFLECTION

The Better You

by Jack Cheng

Acknowledgments

About 99U

About Behance

About the Editor

Endnotes

Index
WHAT
–
IS 99U?

For too long, the creative world has focused on idea generation at the expense of idea execution. As
the legendary inventor Thomas Edison famously said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent
perspiration.” To make great ideas a reality, we must act, experiment, fail, adapt, and learn on a daily
basis.

99U is Behance’s effort to provide this “missing curriculum” for making ideas happen. Through our
Webby Award–winning website, popular events, and bestselling books, we share pragmatic, action-
oriented insights from leading researchers and visionary creatives.

At 99U, we don’t want to give you more ideas—we want to empower you to make good on the ones
you’ve got.
PREFACE
–

Comedian Milton Berle used to say, “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” If we want to
realize our full potential as creatives and individuals, being proactive isn’t just an option, it’s a
requirement. Fortunately, we have more power than ever to share our ideas with the world, to connect
with others, and to define our career paths. The era of self-invention is upon us.

Where we used to associate a career with a slow rise within a single company, we are now switching
jobs eleven times on average in our lifetime. Where we used to rely on dealers to share our artwork
with the world, we can now simply build an online gallery to share new work as we produce it.
Where we used to turn to a small cadre of investors to approve our ideas for creation, we can now
pitch our projects to the masses and crowd-source funding online.

The possibilities are infinite. But so, too, are the responsibilities. Having the ability to chart your
own course shifts the onus of leadership back onto you. This means that we cannot expect our
managers to take charge of our career development and groom us for greatness. We cannot wait
quietly for the perfect mentor to arrive and guide us in the development of our craft. And we cannot
count on a future filled with signposts and certainty.

To help guide you through this brave new world, 99U’s Maximize Your Potential assembles insights
around four key areas that we believe are essential to long-term career success: identifying and
creating new opportunities, cultivating your expertise over time, building collaborative relationships,
and learning how to take risks.

Dedicating a chapter to each of these focus areas, we’ve assembled an incredible group of creative
minds—Bob Safian, Ben Casnocha, Joshua Foer, Teresa Amabile, Tony Schwartz, Tina Seelig, and
many more—to share their wisdom with you. Drawing on intensive research and deep personal
experience, the essays in Maximize Your Potential provide a powerhouse of perspectives on how to
build a career filled with excitement, achievement, and meaning.

Let this volume be your guide as you craft—and re-craft—your own creative career over time,
constantly striving to up the ante on just who you can become.

— JOCELYN K. GLEI, editor-in-chief, 99U

FOREWORD:

YOU’RE A FREE RADICAL, RUN WITH IT

–
by Scott Belsky, Founder of Behance

When it comes to our careers and our experience at work, we’ve become selfish
—but in a good way. Getting paid is no longer enough; we expect to actually
learn on the job. We want our skills to be fully utilized and are left unsatisfied by
“easy jobs.” We want more responsibility when we’re ready, rather than waiting
until we’ve “put in our time.” We expect to do more of what we love, automating
the more laborious and monotonous parts of our work.

We are an ambitious and impatient cohort, and rightly so. Why? Because we’ve entered a new era that
empowers us to unleash our full potential. But opportunity and achievement do not flow from a sense
of entitlement. Your ability to realize your potential will depend upon your willingness to hone your
skills, to take bold risks, and to put your ego on the line in pursuit of something greater.
Chalk it up to new technology, social media, or the once out-of-reach business tools now at
your fingertips. The fact is, we’re empowered to work on our own terms and do more with less. As a
result, we expect more from those that employ us and we expect more from ourselves. When we get
the resources and opportunities we deserve, we create the future. If you’re reading this book, I
suspect you identify.
Here’s a name for us: Free Radicals.
Free Radicals want to take their careers into their own hands and put the world to work for
them. Free Radicals are resilient, self-reliant, and extremely potent. You’ll find them working solo, in
small teams, or within large companies. As the world changes, Free Radicals have re-imagined
“work” as we know it. No doubt, we have lofty expectations.

We do work that is, first and foremost, intrinsically rewarding. But, we don’t create solely for
ourselves, we want to make a real and lasting impact in the world around us.

We thrive on flexibility and are most productive when we feel fully engaged. We demand
freedom, whether we work within companies or on our own, to run experiments, participate in
multiple projects at once, and move our ideas forward.

We make stuff often, and therefore, we fail often. Ultimately, we strive for little failures that help
us course-correct along the way, and we view every failure as a learning opportunity, part of our
experiential education.

We have little tolerance for the friction of bureaucracy, old-boy networks, and antiquated
business practices. As often as possible, we question “standard operating procedure” and assert
ourselves. But even when we can’t, we don’t surrender to the friction of the status quo. Instead, we
find clever ways (and hacks) around it.

We expect to be fully utilized and constantly optimized, regardless of whether we’re working in
a start-up or a large organization. When our contributions and learning plateau, we leave. But when
we’re leveraging a large company’s resources to make an impact in something we care about, we are
thrilled! We want to always be doing our best work and making the greatest impact we can.

We consider open source technology, APIs, and the vast collective knowledge of the Internet to
be our personal arsenal. Wikipedia, Quora, and open communities for designers, developers, and
thinkers were built by us and for us. Whenever possible, we leverage collective knowledge to help us
make better decisions for ourselves and our clients. We also contribute to these open resources with a
“pay it forward” mentality.

We believe that “networking” is sharing. People listen to (and follow) us because of our
discernment and curatorial instinct. As we share our creations as well as what fascinates us, we
authentically build a community of supporters who give us feedback, encouragement, and lead us to
new opportunities. For this reason and more, we often (though, not always) opt for transparency over
privacy.

We believe in meritocracy and the power of online networks and peer communities to advance
our ability to do what we love, and do well by doing it. We view competition as a positive
motivator rather than a threat, because we want the best idea—and the best execution—to triumph.

We make a great living doing what we love. We consider ourselves to be both artisans and
businesses. In many cases, we are our own accounting department, Madison Avenue marketing
agency, business development manager, negotiator, and salesperson. We spend the necessary energy to
invest in ourselves as businesses—leveraging the best tools and knowledge (most of which are free
and online) to run ourselves as a modern-day enterprise.
99U was founded with the Free Radical in mind, to provide education and insights that we didn’t get
in school but sorely need as we mine opportunities in this new era of work. The book ahead is all
about maximizing your potential and taking the reins on your career. I encourage you to absorb these
insights, remembering that you’re in charge now. With the wind at your back, the responsibility is now
yours: challenge and improve yourself—and the world—in every way you can.
Traditional career advice suggests a passive approach to finding your
calling: Pick a job listing, apply, wait for a response. Get the job,
perform your duties, wait for a promotion. Rinse, repeat, stagnate. But a
wait-and-see attitude is hardly the path to greatness.
With the access and resources of the twenty-first century at our fingertips, we can and should be
active participants in shaping our future. We must seek out opportunity by strategizing with the
resourcefulness and adaptability of a start-up entrepreneur, and we must draw opportunity to us by
relentlessly developing our raw skills—excelling at our craft in a way that cannot go unnoticed.

We must look at the market and align our interests and abilities with something that people actually
want. And we must keep an ear to the ground for the unexpected—never holding so tightly to our
plans that we let luck pass us by.

Greatness doesn’t come from taking a “lean back” approach to career planning. Get out in front of
opportunity—and it will come to you.
CULTIVATING YOUR CRAFT BEFORE YOUR PASSION
–

Cal Newport

“Follow your passion” is bad advice. I reached this conclusion after spending a
year researching a basic question: What makes people love what they do for a
living? This research turned up two strikes against the idea of following passion.
First, it turns out that few people have pre-existing passions that they can match
to a job. Telling them to “follow their passion,” therefore, is a recipe for anxiety
and failure.

Second, even when people do feel strongly about a particular topic, decades of research on career
satisfaction teaches us that you need much more than a pre-existing interest to transform your work
into something you love. Many a passionate baker, for example, crumbled under the stress of trying to
run a retail bakery, just as many a passionate amateur photographer has lost interest in the art when
forced to document yet another interminable wedding.
If you want to end up passionate about your working life, therefore, you need a strategy that’s
more sophisticated than simply trying to discover some innate calling hardwired in your DNA. In this
piece, I want to explore one such strategy—one that turned up often when I studied the lives of people
who have built compelling careers. Let’s take a well-known literary personality as our case study.

Bill McKibben is an environmental journalist. He became famous for his 1989 book, The End of
Nature, which was one of the first popular accounts of climate change. He has since written more
than a dozen books and become a prominent environmental activist. If you attend a McKibben talk or
read a McKibben interview, you’ll encounter someone who is obviously passionate about his work.
But how did he get to where he is today?
We can pick up McKibben’s story when he arrives at Harvard as an undergraduate and signs
up to write for the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. By the time he graduates, he is the
paper’s editor. This puts him on the radar of New Yorker editor William Shawn, who taps the recent
grad to write for Talk of the Town, a column that runs at the front of the magazine.
In 1987, five years after arriving at the New Yorker, McKibben makes his move. He quits the
magazine and moves to a cabin in the Adirondacks. Sequestered in the wilderness, McKibben pens
The End of Nature, which becomes an instant classic in environmental journalism, laying the
foundation for the passionate life that he enjoys today.
McKibben’s story highlights two lessons that my research has shown to be crucial for
understanding how people build working lives they love.

LESSON 1: WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING MATTERS LESS THAN YOU THINK
McKibben built a career he loved as a writer. Having studied him, however, I would argue that there
are many different career paths he could have followed with an equal degree of passion. The two
things that seem to really matter to McKibben are autonomy (e.g., control over what he works on,
when he works on it, where he lives, etc.) and having an impact on the world. Therefore, any job that
could provide him autonomy and impact would generate passion. One could imagine, for example, an
alternative universe in which we find an equally happy McKibben at the head of, say, an important
education non-profit or as a respected sociology professor.
This pattern is common in people who love what they do. Their satisfaction doesn’t come
from the details of their work but instead from a set of important lifestyle traits they’ve gained in their
career. These desirable traits differ for different people—some might crave respect and importance,
for example, while others crave flexibility in their schedule and simplicity—but the key point here is
that these traits are more general than any specific position. To build a career, the right question is not
“What job am I passionate about doing?” but instead “What way of working and living will nurture
my passion?”

LESSON 2: SKILL PRECEDES PASSION

McKibben was able to gain autonomy and impact in his career only after he became really good at
writing. When he first arrived at Harvard, for example, he was not a great journalist. His early
articles, which can be found in the Crimson archive, show a beginner’s tendency toward overwriting
—a 1979 report on the opening game of the Celtics basketball season, for example, describes the
arena as an “age-crusted catacomb” and references the team’s retired uniform numbers as “a list of
saints, identified only by the Kelly-green number that they once wore, dangling from the skylights.”
What McKibben’s colleagues remember most about him was not some innate gift for his craft
but rather his tenacity in working to improve it. Part of Crimson lore is the night when McKibben
returned to the office late after a Cambridge city council meeting. There were only thirty-five minutes
until the next day’s articles needed to be finalized. He bet his fellow writers a bottle of Scotch that he
could finish three stories before the deadline. He won that bottle.
All told, McKibben wrote more than four hundred articles as a college reporter. He next spent
five years writing for the New Yorker, which publishes forty-seven issues a year. By the time he made
his pivot toward a life of autonomy and impact—moving to the mountains to write The End of Nature
—he had developed a tremendous amount of professional skill to support this transition. If he had
tried to become a full-time book writer earlier in his career, he almost certainly would have failed.
 This pattern is common in the lives of people who end up loving their work. As described in
Lesson 1, careers become compelling once they feature the general traits you seek. These traits,
however, are rare and valuable—no one will hand you a lot of autonomy or impact just because you
really want it, for example. Basic economics tells us that if you want something rare and valuable,
you need to offer something rare and valuable in return—and in the working world, what you have to
offer are your skills. This is why the systematic development of skill (such as McKibben ripping
through more than five hundred articles between 1979 and 1987) almost always precedes passion.

Now let’s step back and pull the pieces together. The goal of feeling passionate about your work is
sound. But following your passion—choosing a career path solely because you are already passionate
about the nature of the work—is a poor strategy for accomplishing this goal. It assumes that you have
a pre-existing passion to follow that matches up to a viable career, and that matching your work to a
strong interest is sufficient to build long-term career satisfaction. Both of these assumptions are
flawed.
Bill McKibben’s story, by contrast, highlights a more sophisticated strategy for cultivating
passion—one deployed by many who end up with compelling careers. It teaches us that we should
begin by systematically developing rare and valuable skills. Once we’ve caught the attention of the
marketplace, we can then use these skills as leverage to direct our career toward the general lifestyle
traits (autonomy, flexibility, impact, growth, etc.) that resonate with us.
This strategy is less sexy than the idea that choosing the perfect job can provide you with
instant and perpetual occupational bliss. But it has the distinct advantage that it actually works.
Put another way: don’t follow your passion, cultivate it.

CAL NEWPORT is a writer and a professor at Georgetown University. His book So Good They
Can’t Ignore You argues that “follow your passion” is bad advice. Find out more about Cal and his
writing at his blog, Study Hacks.

→ calnewport.com/blog
REDISCOVERING YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL INSTINCT
–

Ben Casnocha

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and microfinance pioneer, says,
“All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all
self-employed… finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history
began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became ‘labor’ because they
stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.”

All humans are entrepreneurs not because all people should start companies, but because the will to
create and forage and adapt is part of our DNA. As Yunus says, these qualities are the essence of
entrepreneurship. To adapt to the challenges of the world today, you need to rediscover these
entrepreneurial instincts.
One of the best ways to do this is to think of yourself as an entrepreneur at the helm of a living,
growing start-up venture: your career. When you start a company, you make decisions in an
information-poor, time-compressed, resource-constrained environment. There are no guarantees or
safety nets; dealing with risk is inevitable. The competition is changing and the market is changing.
These realities—the ones entrepreneurs face when starting and growing companies—are ones we all
now face when fashioning a career in any industry. Information is limited. Resources are tight.
Competition is fierce.
Becoming the CEO of your career isn’t easy; it requires a particular mind-set and a specific
set of skills.

KEEPING YOURSELF IN PERMANENT BETA

Technology companies often keep the “beta” label on software for a time after the official launch to
stress that the product is not finished so much as ready for the next batch of improvements. Gmail, for
example, launched in 2004 but only left official beta in 2009, after millions of people were already
using it. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, concludes every annual letter to shareholders by
reminding readers, as he did in his first letter in 1997, that “it’s still Day 1” at Amazon.com: “Though
we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.” In other words, Amazon
is never finished: It’s always Day 1. For entrepreneurs, finished is an f-word.
 Finished ought to be an f-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents
an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, and grow more. Keeping yourself in “permanent
beta” makes you acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s more testing to do on yourself, and that
you will continue to adapt and evolve. It means a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth.
It is a mind-set brimming with optimism because it celebrates the fact that you have the power to
improve yourself and, more important, improve the world around you.

EMPLOYING YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS

But a different mind-set alone is not enough. Rediscovering your entrepreneurial instincts is not
enough. To thrive as a creative, entrepreneurial professional, you have to acquire the skills to adapt to
modern challenges. Here are a few specific suggestions:

1. Focus on building a competitive advantage. Ask yourself, “In which ways am I better and
different from other people who do similar work?” If you stopped going into the office one day, what
would not get done? Just as business entrepreneurs focus on how their company can deliver a product
faster/better/cheaper than other companies, you should be identifying how your combination of assets
(skills, strengths, contacts) and aspirations (dreams, values, interests) can create a unique offering in
the career marketplace. Other professionals are competing for the same desirable opportunities—
develop the skills or relationships or interests that will make you stand out from others in your
industry.

2. Plan to adapt. Entrepreneurs are supremely adaptable. Just consider all the companies that
pivoted away from their original idea, such as Starbucks, Flickr, PayPal, and Pixar, to name a few.
But entrepreneurs also engage in thoughtful planning. They make flexible plans. Each of us must do
the same in our career. Set a Plan A that’s your current implementation of building a competitive
advantage (your current job, hopefully), but also have a Plan B—something you could pivot to that’s
different from but related to your current work. Finally, have a steady Plan Z—a worst-case scenario
plan in which you might move back in with your parents or cash out your 401(k). With a Plan A, Plan
B, and Plan Z, you’ll be thinking carefully about your future yet also braced for radical change.

3. Build a network of both close allies and looser acquaintances. Entrepreneurs, contrary to
stereotype, are not lone heroes; they rely on networks of people around them to grow their company.
You need to grow a team around you, too. We hear a lot about networking, but there’s a big difference
between being the most-connected person and the best-connected person. One just has a long address
book. The other has built a balanced set of strong alliances and looser acquaintances. Your allies are
the people you review life goals with, the people you trust, the people with whom you try to work
proactively on projects. Acquaintances are valuable because they tend to be folks who work in
different companies, industries, or cities. They introduce the strength of diversity into your network.
Connect in both ways and you’ll be ready to tackle challenging projects with plenty of hands-on
support while enjoying a fresh stream of ideas and inspiration from people who run in different social
and professional circles.

4. Take intelligent risks. Risk tends to get a bad rap. But it’s not the enemy. Entrepreneurs
proactively yet prudently take on intelligent risk. Because the flip side of every opportunity is risk, if
you’re not taking risks, you’re not finding the breakout opportunities you’re looking for. In your
career, good entrepreneurial risks include taking on side projects on nights and weekends, embarking
on international travel, asking your boss for extra work, and applying for jobs that you don’t think
you’re fully qualified for.

You change, the competition changes, and the world changes. What cannot change is your
determination to continue investing in yourself. Steve Jobs once called Apple the “biggest start-up on
the planet.” In the same way, you need to stay young, agile, and adaptive. You need to forever be a
start-up.
The start-up is you.

BEN CASNOCHA is an entrepreneur and author. He is coauthor, with Reid Hoffman, of The Start-
Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, and author of My
Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley.
BusinessWeek named him one of America’s best young entrepreneurs.

→ www.casnocha.com
Q&A:

RE-IMAGINING YOUR CAREER, CONSTANTLY

–

with Robert Safian

As editor of Fast Company, Robert Safian lives at the intersection of design,

technology, and creativity—monitoring the pulse of new trends in our businesses
and our careers. In a 2012 cover story, he coined the term “Generation Flux” to
describe those who will survive and thrive in this complex new world of work.
Among others, signature GenFlux capabilities include being adept at developing
new skills and being naturally at ease with uncertainty—no small feat to be sure.
We chatted with Safian about what flux means for the future of creative careers
and how we can excel at coping with it.

Do you think that careers in the traditional sense exist anymore?

I think careers have always been mythic. There’s this idea that you would get a job somewhere, work
your way up the ladder for forty years, and retire with a gold watch. If that myth were ever true, it’s
certainly not true anymore. The average amount of time that an American worker stays in his or her
current job is 4.4 years. That means we’re changing jobs all the time, and yet we’re still seeking
careers that are more steady than that.

What kinds of skills should people be cultivating?

I think the most important skill in the age of flux is the ability to get new skills. To constantly be open
to new areas of learning and new areas of growth. That is what will make you most valuable to the
employer, partner, start-up of the future. And it is also what gives you the most options moving
forward. That doesn’t mean that you should be a dilettante. You have to develop a certain level of
expertise in whatever area you choose. But you need to have very little tolerance for stagnation, and if
something you’re working on doesn’t go the way you wanted, you need to have a high capacity for
discarding it and moving on to something else.

How does that mind-set play out in practice?

It means that when you have an opportunity to learn and interact with something new, you should be
running toward it instead of running away from it. If you have a strong passion and you want to go
deep in that one place, go deep. But don’t be surprised if you end up going deep in the wrong place.
And know that, at some point, you’ll pull back and start again somewhere else. That’s just the way it’s
going to be in the time of flux.
If you don’t have one place where you really have a passion to go deep, then dig into all the
areas in which you’re interested. For me, in the world of flux, I think there’s no single model that’s
going to work. There’s no single model that’s going to work for a company, and there’s no single
model that’s going to work for a career. The time we’re coming out of, we’re trained to be looking for
one answer, one way. Here’s how I get from here to there. Here is the career track. Here is the ladder.
But that one way doesn’t exist anymore.

Do you think it’s more about having a personal mission that becomes a compass for
making decisions in your career?

I think that the guiding principle is your own passion and your own search for meaning. What mission
are you on? What is the mission that you are trying to fulfill in your life that gives your business
meaning, that gives your work meaning? And the answer to that may change over time. You may have
various missions during the course of your life. But that’s what will dictate how you should be
spending your energy.
In my experience, people who love what they do are much better at it. They’re more
successful, are constantly adding new skills, and continue to drive themselves forward. The more
passion you can find around what you’re doing, the more voracious you’ll be in adding and building
the skills that will be useful for you in the long run.
There’s this saying, “The moment you move to protecting the status quo instead of disrupting
the status quo, you put yourself at risk.” That’s the challenge for businesses, and that’s the challenge
for individuals: understanding the point at which you are protecting what you know and defending
what you know, instead of looking at what else you can learn and how you can grow.
ROBERT SAFIAN oversees the editorial operations of Fast Company and its digital affiliates. He
was previously executive editor at Time and Fortune, and led Money magazine for six years.

→ www.fastcompany.com
MAKING YOUR OWN LUCK
–

Jocelyn K. Glei

If the twentieth-century career was a ladder that we climbed from one

predictable rung to the next, the twenty-first-century career is more like a broad
rock face that we are all free-climbing. There’s no defined route, and we must
use our own ingenuity, training, and strength to rise to the top. We must make
our own luck.

The lightning-fast evolution of technology means that jobs can now become indispensable or
outmoded in a matter of years, even months. Who knew what a “community manager” was ten years
ago? What about an “iPad app designer” or a “JavaScript ninja”?
A substantial portion of the working population now earns its livelihood doing jobs that didn’t
exist ten or twenty years ago. And even if the nature of your job hasn’t changed, chances are you’re
using new and unanticipated technology and skills to perform that job. Think of the designer who
blogs, the comedian who tweets, or the filmmaker who raises a budget on Kickstarter.
Ten years from now, we’ll probably all be doing some new type of work that we couldn’t
possibly imagine today. That thought is both exhilarating and frightening. How do we prepare for a
future filled with uncertainty?

1. Look beyond the job title, and focus on your mission. It’s easy to get sucked into chasing after a
specific job title—whether it’s becoming a creative director, a chief marketing officer, or a product
manager. But titles are a trap. The job you want today may not exist tomorrow. Thus, by tailoring your
goals and your skill development to attaining a specific position, you limit your options.
Rather than setting your sights on a specific role, focus instead on what you want to
accomplish. Ask yourself: “What problem am I solving? What do I want to create? What do I want to
change?” Your mission will spring from the answers. It could look like: “I want to invent a new
business model for online publishing,” or “I want to use technology to bring education to underserved
communities,” or “I want to be part of the conversation about clean energy.”
By adopting a mission, you reframe your ambitions in a way that allows other people to get
excited and connect with you (e.g., “I’m passionate about clean energy, too. Do you know Mosaic, the
clean energy investment marketplace?”). It also gives you a better baseline for aligning your values
with potential companies and collaborators. Sure, the company you’re interviewing with may need a
product manager, but do they share your passion for bringing education to underserved communities?
The more clarity you have in your stated mission, the better equipped you’ll be to adapt in a
changing marketplace and to attract and assess new opportunities.

2. Explore new technologies with enthusiasm. The tools you use today will not be the tools you use
in the future. You may have heard the term “life sport” before. It refers to sports—like golf, tennis, or
swimming—that you can play from ages seven to seventy. Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly recently
expanded this concept to include technology as life sport, outlining a list of “techno life skills” that
we should all cultivate.
As Kelly puts it: “If you are in school today the technologies you will use as an adult
tomorrow have not been invented yet. Therefore, the life skill you need most is not the mastery of
specific technologies, but mastery of… how technology in general works.”1
Whether it’s interviewing someone over Skype, developing an affable Twitter persona,
learning how to publish an e-book, or experimenting with a new task management app, we must
become adept at testing out new technologies that can benefit us in our personal and professional
lives. Sometimes, we will choose not to integrate a new technology into our lives, and that’s okay.
It’s the experimentation, and the awareness we gain through it, that’s key.

3. Make a habit of helping people whenever you can. We can all be pretty sure we’re going to need
help at some point in the future. As leadership expert and ethnographer Simon Sinek articulated in a
rousing talk at our 99U Conference, “We’re not good at everything; we’re not good by ourselves.”
Sinek went on to describe how the ability to build relationships is the key to our survival as a race
and to thriving as idea-makers. The number one way to build relationships is, of course, by helping
each other.
But in an age of complex connections and contingencies, there isn’t always a simple one-to-
one correlation among acts of generosity. (As in, “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine.”) And
there shouldn’t be. Helping our peers, colleagues, and allies should be a regular habit and its own
reward. We usually can’t foresee how, but the goodness always comes back around.

4. Be proactive about taking on additional responsibilities and pitching new projects. The days of
“grooming” young employees for senior positions are over. No one is going to spend more time
thinking about your career than you are. (And, honestly, why would you expect them to?) As New York
Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas Friedman wrote, employers “are all looking for the
same kind of people—people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding
jobs that technology can’t but also people who can invent, adapt, and reinvent their jobs every day, in
a market that changes faster than ever.”2
You won’t be rewarded with exciting new opportunities by keeping your head down and
following the rules. If you want a new challenge at work or more responsibility, it’s on you to pitch
your boss or your client on what needs to be done, why it’s a good idea, why you’re the best person to
do it, and why everyone will benefit. Lead the way with your own creativity and initiative, and back
it up with enthusiasm and a strong business case.
5. Cultivate your “luck quotient” by staying open and alert. A chance meeting at a coffee shop
leads you to your first business partner, a friend of a friend introduces you to a mentor who changes
your life, a comment you posted on a blog ends up landing you a new writing gig. These are the kinds
of chance events we chalk up to luck, as though they are totally out of our control.
But it turns out that, far from being a mysterious force, luck is the outcome of a specific set of
character traits. Being lucky is actually a way of being in the world—and it’s one that you can
cultivate. Here’s what Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program
(whom we’ll interview later in this book) wrote in her excellent book What I Wish I Knew When I
Was 20:

Lucky people take advantage of chance occurrences that come their way. Instead of going
through life on cruise control, they pay attention to what’s happening around them and,
therefore, are able to extract greater value from each situation… Lucky people are also
open to novel opportunities and willing to try things outside of their usual experiences.
They’re more inclined to pick up a book on an unfamiliar subject, to travel to less familiar
destinations, and to interact with people who are different than themselves.3

In short, lucky people are open-minded, upbeat, proactive, and always willing to try something new.
While it’s good to be directed in your career, you’ll want to stay open and alert to unexpected
possibilities. And when they show up, act on them. You never know what the outcome might be.

6. Always be asking “What’s next?” If you’re not asking questions, you’re not going to find
answers. We often wait to ask those hard career questions right up until the moment when we need the
answer desperately. We wait until we get laid off to think about what’s next. Or we wait until we’re
completely miserable and burned-out at our current job before we even begin to contemplate the next
one.
But if you’re going to switch jobs every four years or so, you should be asking yourself
“What’s next?” all the time. Not in a way that disengages you from your current position, of course,
but rather in a way that helps you push yourself and hone in on your passion. What new skills do you
want to develop? To whom should you reach out to be your mentor? Should you take on that big new
project at work—the one that kind of scares you?
If you don’t ask, you’ll never find out.

JOCELYN K. GLEI leads the 99U in its mission to provide the “missing curriculum” on making
ideas happen. She oversees the Webby Award–winning 99u.com website and curates the popular
99U Conference. Jocelyn is also the editor of the 99U book series, which includes the titles
Manage Your Day-to-Day and this book, Maximize Your Potential.

→ www.jkglei.com
FINDING YOUR WORK SWEET SPOT
–

Scott Belsky

There are two types of work in this world. The first is the obligatory kind, the
work we do because of a job or a contract, often with an eye on the clock. The
second—very different—type of work we do is “work with intention.”

When we are working with intention, we toil away endlessly—often through the wee hours of the
morning—on projects we care about deeply. Whether it’s building an intricate model of an ancient
ship, writing a song, or mapping out an idea for your first business, you do it out of genuine interest
and love.
If you can make “work with intention” the center of your efforts, you’re more likely to make an
impact on what matters most to you. But how do you actually do that?
Over the years, I’ve met many creative leaders and entrepreneurs who have made an impact in
their respective industries. It should come as no surprise that they love what they do. But when I’ve
asked probing questions about their career paths, I always find that their good fortune was anything
but predestined. Aside from lots of hard work, great creative careers are powered by an intersection
of three factors: interest, skill, and opportunity.
The same thinking applies to successful creative projects. The magic happens when you find
the sweet spot where these three factors intersect.

1. YOUR (GENUINE) INTERESTS

What fascinates you? What topic do you like to discuss and read about the most? Many legendary
creative careers are sparked by a genuine interest in a particular field. Perhaps it’s film, coffee, or
airplane travel. This is not about what promises the most economic gain. On the contrary, this is a
topic that trumps economic concerns because you love it so much.
While money is important, the drive that powers the most remarkable achievements comes
from a deeper place. To understand the symptoms of work performed without genuine interest, look
no further than the nearest abandoned project or malnourished career. Look to the middle managers
who count down to five o’clock. It’s not pretty.
Reaching for greatness without a genuine interest in the field is like running a marathon after
fasting. Remarkable achievements are fueled by genuine interest.
2. YOUR KEY SKILLS
What are your skills and your natural gifts? Do you have a knack for math or storytelling? Perhaps you
possess a unique understanding of the human condition? Take an inventory of what you know or could
easily learn. The skills you have are helpful indicators of the opportunities that are most likely to
flourish under your leadership. Of course, skills alone are insufficient. But when paired with a
genuine interest and a new opportunity, your innate capabilities can truly shine, opening the path to
success.

3. YOUR “OPPORTUNITY STREAM”

The third factor that plays into every successful career is opportunity. Unfortunately, this is often
where we get stuck, discounting the potential opportunities that surround us as inadequate. There is no
such thing as equal access to opportunity. “Old boy” networks and nepotism run rampant in all
industries. And most opportunities are entirely circumstantial. As such, you must simply define
“opportunity” as anything that brings you a step closer to your genuine interest.
Opportunity is less about leaps forward and more about slow but steady progress. Most folks I
meet can track their greatest opportunities back to chance conversations. This is why personal
introductions, conferences, and other networking efforts really pay off. Just surrounding yourself with
more activity will inherently increase your “opportunity stream”—the chance happenings that lead
you closer to your genuine interests.

WORKING AT THE I.S.O

(INTEREST, SKILLS, OPPORTUNITY) INTERSECTION
When you make choices that will affect your career, aim for the intersection of your genuine interests,
skills, and opportunities.
Contemplate the three circles of the Venn diagram above—one circle encompasses your genuine
interests; one, your skills; and one, the stream of opportunities available to you. An intersection
between just two of the circles doesn’t cut it. A love for basketball and a connection to an NBA scout
won’t help you if you lack the skills to play ball. You need to find your trifecta: the intersection of
your interests, skills, and opportunities (ISO).
When you engage with a project in your ISO, you’ve entered your zone of maximum impact. In
such a state, you are a potent force of nature—your avocation becomes your vocation. You can work
with full conviction, without ambiguity, and you can transcend your reliance on short-term rewards
and societal approval. This is where the magic happens.
As leaders, we must help our partners and employees find work in their ISO. Legendary
managers seek to understand the genuine interests and skills of their employees and are constantly
trying to create opportunities within those intersections.
Want to change the world? Push everyone you know to work within their ISO. Mentor people
to help them realize their genuine interests and skills and capitalize on even the smallest opportunities
around them. When it comes to your own career, make every decision with a constant eye toward your
own intersection.
A career of “work with intention” is the kind that moves industries forward. Do it for yourself
and for the rest of us.

SCOTT BELSKY is Adobe’s Vice President of Community and head of Behance, the leading online
platform for creatives to showcase and discover creative work. Scott has been called one of the
“100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company, and is the author of the international
bestseller Making Ideas Happen. He is also an investor and adviser for several companies,
including Pinterest and Uber.

→ www.scottbelsky.com
KEY TAKEAWAYS
–

Creating Opportunities

CRAFT COMES BEFORE PASSION

Passion isn’t a profession, it’s a way of working. To achieve a lifestyle (and workstyle) that you
love, start by cultivating rare and valuable skills that will set you apart.

PLAN TO ADAPT YOUR PLAN

Plan flexibly, and be ready to pivot in your career if necessary. Always have a Plan A, B, and
even Z in your back pocket.

DON’T SETTLE FOR THE STATUS QUO

Try to regularly “disrupt” your own status quo. If you’re getting too comfortable in your current
position, it’s probably time to challenge yourself in new ways.

GET MISSION CRITICAL

Think about your work—and where you are going—in terms of a larger mission. A job title is a
closed objective, but a mission can grow with you.

LUCK IS A STATE OF MIND

Expose yourself to new situations, keep an open mind, and be proactive about pursuing chance
opportunities. Luck comes to those who seek it.

WORK WITH INTENTION

Calibrate your career for maximum impact by working at the intersection of your genuine skills,
interests, and opportunities.

Get more insights and the desktop wallpaper at:

→ www.99u.com/opportunity
It’s easy to sleepwalk through life, to operate at the level of “good
enough,” to define a destination and then go on autopilot. But if we
want to truly excel in our careers, we must awaken to our own
profound capacity for growth. Our intelligence, our talents, and even
our habits are all remarkably malleable.
This is good news because the market—for skills, for jobs, for big ideas—is changing faster than
ever. The areas of expertise that are in demand today won’t be the same five years from now.
Therefore, the people who can constantly adapt and update their arsenal of talents will have a distinct
advantage.

We must adopt a mind-set that fosters constant growth, dedicate ourselves to the regular and rigorous
practice of our craft, and track our setbacks and successes over time. We must set the bar high, raise
it, and raise it again.

If you want to stand out in this world, stepping out of your comfort zone—and cultivating new skills
—is the place to start.
FOCUSING ON GETTING BETTER, RATHER THAN BEING GOOD
–

Heidi Grant Halvorson

People with above-average aptitudes—the ones we recognize as being especially

clever, creative, insightful, or otherwise accomplished—often judge their abilities
not only more harshly but fundamentally differently than others do. On the flip
side, gifted children grow up to be more vulnerable and less sure of themselves,
even when they should be the most confident people in the room.

Understanding why this happens is the first step in realizing your potential and avoiding the pitfalls
that have derailed you in the past. The second step is to learn how you can change your own mind-set
—the one you didn’t even realize you had—and learn to see your work and your world through a new,
more inspiring, and more accurate lens.

YOUR OWN TOUGHEST CRITIC

When I was a graduate student at Columbia University, my mentor, Carol Dweck, and another student,
Claudia Mueller, conducted a study looking at the effects of different kinds of praise on fifth graders.4
They were interested in how praise can influence your beliefs about what you can and cannot do, and
how you deal with the difficulties and setbacks that happen down the road. All the students in their
study began by getting a relatively easy set of problems to solve and were then praised for their
performance. Half of them were given praise that emphasized their natural ability (“You did really
well. You must be really smart!”). The other half were praised instead for their strong effort (“You
did really well. You must have worked really hard!”).
Next, each student was given a very difficult set of problems—so difficult, in fact, that few
students got even one answer correct. All were told that this time they had “done a lot worse.”
Finally, they were given a third set of easy problems—as easy as the first set had been—in order to
see how experiencing failure would affect their performance.
Dweck and Mueller found that children who were praised for their “smartness” did roughly 25
percent worse on the final set of problems compared with how they did on the first set. They were
more likely to blame their poor performance on a lack of ability; consequently, they enjoyed working
on the problems less and gave up on them sooner.
 Children who had been praised for their effort, on the other hand, performed roughly 25
percent better on the final set of problems compared with the first. They blamed their difficulty on not
having tried hard enough; as a result, they persisted longer on the final set of problems and even
enjoyed the experience.
It’s important to remember that in Dweck and Mueller’s study, there were no differences in
ability on average between the kids in the “smart” praise and “effort” praise groups—everyone did
well on the first set, and everyone had difficulty on the second set. The only difference was how the
two groups were led to interpret the difficulty they experienced—what it meant to them when the
problems were hard to solve. “Smart” praise kids were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose
confidence, and to perform less effectively as a result.
The kind of feedback we get from parents, teachers, and mentors when we are young has a
major impact on the beliefs we develop about our abilities—including whether we see them as innate
and unchangeable or as capable of developing through effort and practice. Telling a young artist that
she is “so creative,” “so talented,” or “has such a gift” implies that creativity and talent are qualities
you either have or you don’t. The net result: when a project doesn’t turn out so well, or the artist’s
work is rejected, she takes it as evidence that she isn’t very “creative” or “talented” after all, rather
than seeing the feedback as a sign that she needs to dig deeper, try harder, or find a new approach.

TWO MIND-SETS: BE GOOD VS. GET BETTER

We all approach the goals we pursue with one of two mind-sets: what I call the Be Good mind-set,
where the focus is on proving that you already have a lot of ability and that you know exactly what
you’re doing, and the Get Better mind-set, where the focus is on developing your ability and learning
new skills. You can think of it as the difference between wanting to show that you are smart versus
wanting to actually get smarter.
When we have a Be Good mind-set, we are constantly comparing our performance with that of
other people’s, to see how we size up and to receive validation for our talents. This is the mind-set
we end up with when we are given too much “ability” praise and come to believe that our talents are
innate and unchanging. It’s also the mind-set we often (unconsciously) adopt when our environment is
highly evaluative—when our work is constantly exposed to the judgment of others. For creative
professionals, this is particularly the case—evaluation and criticism are an unavoidable part of any
artist’s life.
The problem with the Be Good mind-set is that it leaves us vulnerable when things get hard or
when the people we compare ourselves with are excelling. We quickly start to doubt our ability (“Oh
no, maybe I’m not good at this!”), and this creates a lot of anxiety. Ironically, worrying about your
ability makes you much more likely to ultimately fail. Countless studies have shown that nothing
interferes with your performance quite like anxiety does—it is the creativity killer.
A Get Better mind-set, on the other hand, leads instead to self-comparison and a concern with
making progress: How well am I doing today, compared with how I did yesterday, last month, or last
year? Are my talents and abilities developing over time? Am I moving closer to becoming the
creative professional I want to be?
The great thing about the Get Better mind-set is that it is practically bulletproof. When we
think about what we are doing in terms of learning and improving, accepting that we may make some
mistakes along the way, we stay motivated and persist despite the setbacks that might occur. We also
find the work we do more interesting and enjoyable, and experience less depression and anxiety. We
procrastinate less and plan better. We feel more creative and innovative. And we remember why we
wanted to do this for a living in the first place.

SHIFTING YOUR MIND-SET

How can you retrain your brain and adopt the Get Better mind-set at work and in life?

1. Give yourself permission to screw up. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. Start any
new project or endeavor by saying to yourself, “I may not get the hang of this right away. I’m going to
make mistakes, and that’s okay.”
People get very nervous when I tell them to embrace the mistake. But they shouldn’t be,
because as studies in my lab and others have shown, when people are allowed to make mistakes, they
are significantly less likely to actually make them. Often, when we tackle a new project, we expect to
be able to do the work flawlessly no matter how challenging it might be. The focus is all about Being
Good, and the prospect becomes daunting. The irony is that all this pressure to Be Good results in
many more mistakes, and far inferior performance, than would a focus on Getting Better.

2. Ask for help when you run into trouble. Needing help doesn’t mean you aren’t capable—in fact,
the opposite is true. Only the very foolish believe they can do everything on their own. And studies
show that asking for help when you need it actually makes people think you are more capable, not
less.

3. Compare your performance today with your performance last week or last year, rather than
comparing yourself with other people. I know that you can’t really avoid comparing yourself with
others entirely, but when you catch yourself doing it, remind yourself that this kind of thinking doesn’t
get you anywhere. What matters is that you are moving forward and improving over time.

4. Think in terms of progress, not perfection. It can be helpful to write down your goals in
whatever way you usually think of them—odds are you think of them in a Be Good way—and then
rewrite them using Get Better language: words like improve, learn, progress, develop, grow, and
become. For example:

Your Be Good Goal: I want to be good at marketing my own work.

 The Get Better Version: I will develop my ability to market my own work and become a more
effective marketer.

5. Examine your beliefs and, when necessary, challenge them. No matter what kind of learning
opportunities you are given, you probably aren’t going to see lasting improvement if—deep down—
you don’t believe improvement is possible. Believing that your abilities are fixed is a self-fulfilling
prophecy, and the self-doubt it creates will sabotage you in the end. Whether it’s intelligence,
creativity, self-control, charm, or athleticism—the science shows our abilities to be profoundly
malleable. When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort, and persistence matter a lot.
Change really is always possible—there is no ability that can’t be developed with effort. So the next
time you find yourself thinking, “But I’m just not good at this,” remember: you’re just not good at it
yet.

DR. HEIDI GRANT HALVORSON is a researcher, author, speaker, and associate director of
Columbia Business School’s Motivation Science Center. She blogs for 99U, Harvard Business
Review, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post. Her books include
Succeed, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, and Focus.

→ www.heidigranthalvorson.com
DEVELOPING MASTERY THROUGH DELIBERATE PRACTICE
–

Tony Schwartz

It’s a small study—just thirty subjects, probably not enough to be statistically

significant—but it contains incredibly rich information about the pursuit of
mastery and the ingredients of great performance.

K. Anders Ericsson, arguably the world’s leading expert on performance, conducted the study with
thirty young violinists attending the Music Academy of West Berlin, one of the most selective
conservatories in the world. Ericsson’s aim was to understand, at the most granular level, not just
what these talented musicians had in common but what set them apart from their colleagues. In short,
what practices led them to the highest level of excellence?
Ericsson’s core finding is now the stuff of legend: namely that it takes ten thousand hours of
what he calls “deliberate practice” to achieve true mastery in any skilled pursuit. Nothing less will
do, but it’s possible for nearly anyone to reach excellence in nearly anything, given sufficient
persistence and expert feedback along the way. This finding is the core tenet of Malcolm Gladwell’s
bestselling Outliers, and it’s been cited in dozens of other books and articles, but it’s actually only a
small part of what the study revealed.
Practice undeniably lies at the heart of mastery. In Ericsson’s study, he divided the violinists
into three groups based on their level of skill as measured by their teachers. The lowest level group
practiced slightly less than ninety minutes a day. The top two groups both practiced an average of
approximately four hours a day, in sessions no longer than ninety minutes, after which they took a
break. The only notable difference in the training of the two groups was that the top ones had started
playing violin at a younger age and therefore had accumulated more hours of practice than those in the
second group.
But why, as more mature musicians, did they practice in almost exactly the same way? And
why is that approach also characteristic of the highest achievers among athletes, chess players,
writers, and scientists, among others?
The answer is rooted in our physiology. We human beings are designed to move between
spending and renewing energy. We’re at our best when we align with our internal rhythms. That means
sleeping at night and being awake during the day. At night, we sleep in something called the Basic
Rest Activity cycle—five stages, from light to deep sleep and back out again approximately every
ninety minutes. This same cycle recapitulates itself during the day, except we move every ninety
minutes from high physiological alertness progressively down into a state of fatigue.
The musicians in Ericsson’s study were almost certainly unaware of these facts, but the best
among them tuned into the signals from their own bodies. Nearly all those in the top two groups began
practice first thing in the morning, when their energy was the highest and the number of distractions
they faced the lowest. When they began to feel tired, as they approached ninety minutes, they rested
and renewed. After three such sessions, they were spent for the day. Ericsson subsequently posited
that four and a half hours is the natural human limit for the highest level of focus on a single task in
any given day.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE SCIENCE OF HIGH PERFORMANCE

Embedded in these findings are powerful and highly specific lessons for anyone seeking mastery. The
first one has to do with the power of ritual. A ritual is a highly precise behavior you do at a specific
time so that it becomes automatic over time and no longer requires much conscious intention or
energy.
Will and discipline, it turns out, are highly overrated. We each have one reservoir we draw
on, and it gets progressively depleted each time we use it to get something done. If we spend energy
when we wake up deciding what to wear that day, or completing a difficult task in the morning, or
resisting a chocolate chip cookie following lunch, we’re left with less energy to complete any
subsequent task. A ritualized approach to practice helps conserve our precious and finite reserves of
energy.
The second mastery lesson from Ericsson’s violinists is that the best way to practice is in
time-limited sprints, rather than for an unbounded number of hours. It’s far less burdensome to
mobilize attention on a task if you’ve got clear starting and stopping points. The ability to focus
single-mindedly lies at the heart of mastering any challenge. Time-limited sessions also make it easier
to tolerate abstaining from distractions such as e-mail and social media.
The third key to mastery is perhaps the most counter-intuitive. It’s the importance of
restoration. Many of us fear that taking time for rest and renewal will brand us as slackers. More,
bigger, faster, for longer, remains the prevailing ethic in most corporate cultures. In fact, rest is a
critical component of achieving sustainable excellence over time.
This insight leads to one that’s even more surprising. When Ericsson asked the subjects in his
study to name the second most important factor in improving as violinists, the near-unanimous answer
was sufficient sleep. Both the top two groups slept an average of 8.5 hours out of every 24—
including a twenty- to thirty-minute nap in the midafternoon. The least skilled group still slept 7.8
hours a night. The average American, by contrast, sleeps an average of 6 to 6.5 hours a night. Sleep
not only serves a restorative purpose but also allows the brain to more effectively consolidate and
retain daytime learning. The top violinists recognized this intuitively, and slept accordingly.

CREATING A PERSONAL RITUAL FOR DELIBERATE PRACTICE

I know this approach works, not only because I’ve taught it to thousands of people over the past ten
years and seen the results but also because it’s the way I’ve learned to work far more effectively on
my own projects.
 For many years, I wrote books by sitting down at my desk in the morning and staying there all
day long without specific breaks. I constantly fought distraction, couldn’t focus very well, and
frequently ended my days feeling physically and mentally exhausted and disappointed with my output.
It was only after I began studying the science of high performance that I started building a new
sort of practice ritual. I still sit down at my desk first thing in the morning when I’m working on
books, but now I write for exactly ninety minutes at a time—not eighty-five and not ninety-five. Then I
take a break. I may get something to eat, close my eyes and spend ten minutes breathing deeply, or
take a run, each activity in order to refuel and recover.
When I’m finished renewing, I come back and work the same way for another ninety minutes,
before taking a second renewal break. After that, I return to my desk for one final ninety-minute
session, and then I have lunch—another form of energy renewal. If it’s been a particularly demanding
day, I take a short nap. During the afternoon, I work on much less demanding tasks. The deliberate
practice I’ve ritualized is intrinsically rewarding. I feel accomplished—and restored—even when the
work doesn’t translate immediately into external benefits. But it reliably produces benefits over the
longer term.
During the years I sat at my desk struggling to focus all day long, each of my books took at
least a year to write. Working less than half the number of hours each day, at a much higher level of
focus, I’ve completed each of my last two books in less than six months. At least equally important,
the quality of my thinking and writing—my sense of mastery—has dramatically increased.
It’s unrealistic for most of us to set aside four and a half uninterrupted hours a day to do
anything. Assuming that’s so, consider starting with a smaller practice. What’s the skill that you wish
to develop the most? Keep in mind that you’ll be immeasurably more motivated if it’s something to
which you’re drawn deeply.
Next, set aside one uninterrupted period of, say, sixty minutes each working day to build the
skill you’ve chosen, preferably first thing in the morning. As your capacity for focus grows stronger
over time, add fifteen minutes, and then another fifteen minutes, until you reach ninety.
Consider building a similar practice, in reverse, around sleep. If you’re currently getting
fewer than seven hours—the minimum all but about 2.5 percent of us need to be fully rested—
experiment by going to sleep a half hour earlier for the next week. Monitor how you feel as a result. If
you’re deriving daytime benefits, add fifteen minutes in the second week, and fifteen minutes more in
the third.
The heart of achieving mastery, I’ve come to believe, is expanding the amplitude of the waves
you make in your life. When you’re working, give it everything you’ve got, for relatively short
periods of time. When you’re recovering, let go and truly refuel.
Average is a steady state, free of highs or lows. Unfortunately, average isn’t very satisfying.
Mastery is about regularly pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, while also learning how to
deeply restore and take care of yourself. Make rhythmic waves and you’ll not only get better at what
you practice, you’ll also feel more in control of your life.

TONY SCHWARTZ is the president and CEO of The Energy Project, a company that helps
organizations fuel sustainable high performance by better meeting the needs of their employees.
Tony’s most recent books, Be Excellent at Anything and The Power of Full Engagement (coauthored
with Jim Loehr), were both New York Times bestsellers.

→ www.theenergyproject.com
Q&A:

LEARNING TO LIVE OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE

–

with Joshua Foer

Bestselling author Joshua Foer is not the type of writer to quietly observe from
the sidelines. After covering the USA Memory Championship in 2005, Foer
became fascinated with its strange world of memorization challenges (speed
cards, facial recognition, poetry recitation) and decided to become an expert
mnemonist himself. In 2006, he succeeded, winning the speed cards category
handily by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute and forty seconds. During
his training period, Foer studied with the British Grand Master of Memory, Ed
Cooke, and researched how top performers—from memory champs to athletes
to surgeons—acquire new skills. We chatted with Foer about why pushing
through the “OK Plateau” is essential to building expertise over time.

What are the stages of skill acquisition?

In the 1960s, psychologists identified three stages that we pass through in the acquisition of new
skills. We start in the “cognitive phase,” during which we’re intellectualizing the task, discovering
new strategies to perform better, and making lots of mistakes. We’re consciously focusing on what
we’re doing. Then we enter the “associative stage,” when we’re making fewer errors, and gradually
getting better. Finally, we arrive at the “autonomous stage,” when we turn on autopilot and move the
skill to the back of our proverbial mental filing cabinet and stop paying it conscious attention.

Can you explain the concept of the OK Plateau?

The OK Plateau is that point when we reach the autonomous stage and consciously or unconsciously
say to ourselves, “I am OK at how good I have gotten at this task,” and stop paying conscious
attention to our improvement. We all reach OK Plateaus in almost everything we do. We learn to
drive when we’re teenagers, and at first we improve rapidly, but eventually we are no longer a threat
to old ladies crossing the street, and we stop getting appreciably better.

There are some generalizable principles that all experts use to push beyond the OK
Plateau. Can you describe them?

Psychologists have studied experts in just about every possible field you can imagine, from athletics
to the arts to business. They’ve found a surprisingly generalizable set of principles that tend to be
used by experts in field after field. Those principles help explain why their practice results in their
achieving the degree of expertise that others don’t necessarily achieve. One of the essential things
they have found is that, if you want to get better at something, you cannot do it in that autonomous
stage. You can’t get better on autopilot. One thing that experts in field after field tend to do is use
strategies to keep themselves out of that autonomous stage and under their conscious direction. That’s
how you conquer those OK Plateaus.

So experts make sure they’re staying in that early learning phase all the time?

Something experts in all fields tend to do when they’re practicing is to operate outside of their
comfort zone and study themselves failing. The best figure skaters in the world spend more of their
practice time practicing jumps that they don’t land than lesser figure skaters do. The same is true of
musicians. When most musicians sit down to practice, they play the parts of pieces that they’re good
at. Of course they do: it’s fun to succeed. But expert musicians tend to focus on the parts that are hard,
the parts they haven’t yet mastered. The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just
beyond your limits.

How much time are these experts spending on practice? Is it about long hours? Or
more about focusing on the right stuff?

There’s no way to get good at anything without putting in the hours. But just as important as the
quantity of time is the quality of time. If you’re not being rigorous with your practice and focusing on
the hard parts, you will improve very slowly.

How have you focused on the “hard stuff” as a writer over the course of your
career?

I try to take on stories that really force me to push myself. For example, my current book project has
required me to spend large amounts of time living in the Congolese rain forest with Babenjele
pygmies. Every day out there is a challenge. But if you’re not pushing yourself, how do you expect to
grow?

What role does gathering feedback play?

Experts crave and thrive on immediate and constant feedback. One illustration of this can be found in
the field of medicine. You might think that the longer a doctor has been practicing, the better she’ll be.
But there’s one field of medicine where that seems not to be the case: mammography. Doctors who
conduct mammographic screenings for cancer don’t tend to make better predictions the longer they’ve
been practicing. Surgeons, on the other hand, tend to get better with time. The difference lies in the
feedback. With mammographic screenings, it might be weeks, months, or years before a doctor finds
out whether her diagnosis was accurate or she missed a tumor. A surgeon, on the other hand, gets
immediate and precise feedback: the patient either gets better or doesn’t. There’s a practical
suggestion here: doctors who do mammographic screenings should be regularly tested with old
screenings so that they can get that immediate feedback and learn from it.

What did you learn from your memory coach?

Ed Cooke has one of the best-trained memories in Europe. I couldn’t have become the United States
Memory Champion without him. He forced me to practice, and he gave me constant feedback about
how I could improve my performance.

Do you think that you can coach yourself equally well?

It’s hard to be your own coach, but not impossible. The key thing is to set up structures that provide
you with objective feedback—and to not be so blind that you can’t take that feedback and use it.

Sometimes a mentor or coach isn’t available. How do you set up feedback systems in
that situation?

When I was training my memory, I kept meticulous spreadsheets to track my performance. They
allowed me to see what was working and what wasn’t. Numbers don’t lie.

Continuously operating outside your comfort zone is a tall order. Any advice on how
to stay motivated to push yourself?

It helps to have a strong, clear vision of where you’re going. When things get hard, you need to be
able to see the reward that awaits at the end of all the struggle.

JOSHUA FOER is the author of the international bestseller Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art
and Science of Remembering Everything. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, National
Geographic, Esquire, the New York Times, and other publications. He is the co-founder of Atlas
Obscura and Sukkah City.

→ www.joshuafoer.com
REPROGRAMMING YOUR DAILY HABITS
–

Scott H. Young

What did you do yesterday? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably try to
answer that by focusing on the decisions you made. Maybe you decided to stay a
bit longer at work, or to knock off early. Maybe you decided to tackle a tricky
problem or confront your boss about a nagging issue. Conscious decisions like
these stick out in our minds because we put effort into making them.

But how did you decide what to eat for breakfast yesterday? Or which route to take to work? Chances
are, there wasn’t much of a decision at all. You ate the breakfast you normally eat. You commuted to
work the way you always do.
If you think hard about it, you’ll notice just how many “automatic” decisions you make each
day. But these habits aren’t always as trivial as what you eat for breakfast. Your health, your
productivity, and the growth of your career are all shaped by the things you do each day—most by
habit, not by choice.
Even the choices you do make consciously are heavily influenced by automatic patterns.
Researchers have found that our conscious mind is better understood as an explainer of our actions,
not the cause of them. Instead of triggering the action itself, our consciousness tries to explain why we
took the action after the fact, with varying degrees of success. This means that even the choices we do
appear to make intentionally are at least somewhat influenced by unconscious patterns.
Given this, what you do every day is best seen as an iceberg, with a small fraction of
conscious decision sitting atop a much larger foundation of habits and behaviors. But this view
doesn’t need to be pessimistic. Recognizing that most of our actions are controlled by habits can be
powerful. Once you know that patterns run much of your life, you can start figuring out how to change
them.

PROGRAMMING EFFECTIVENESS
About ten years ago, I noticed a problem in my life. I kept failing to keep the goals that I had set for
myself. I would want to work hard on a project that was necessary for my business, but I’d fail to
execute. Like most people, I blamed laziness or a lack of motivation for these failings.
 But then I learned about habits. It turns out willpower is a finite resource—something that gets
depleted with use. Roy Baumeister did the first experiments on this phenomenon, known as “ego
depletion,” showing that the exertion of willpower in one area makes it harder to exert it on another
task later.5
This corresponded with what I had observed in myself. Each time I would put more effort into
doing better at one task, I would fail with another. I felt like I was juggling all my activities and
constantly dropping the balls.
Creating habits held a powerful allure. If I could take the willpower-draining activities I was
failing to execute and gradually turn them into unconscious habits, I could then use the “tugboat” of my
conscious willpower to work on something else.

HOW TO CHANGE A HABIT

The key to changing a habit is to realize the ineffectiveness of willpower. It’s not that willpower is
unnecessary, but more that it’s a much less powerful tool than most of us assume. Because our
willpower is limited, it helps to be clever in how we establish new habits.
Given this, I’ve found that it makes the most sense to invest heavily in the early phase of
building a new habit so that, later, it will run automatically without calling on your resources of self-
discipline. I call this the principle of focus, and it goes against the normal method people use when
they want to change their behavior.

THE PRINCIPLE OF FOCUS

Focus means changing only one habit at a time. I’ve found it best to spend at least one month
exclusively on one habit before moving to the next. For example, let’s say you want to wake up
earlier, exercise more often, and introduce a new organizational system at work. You recognize that
your current habits for sleep, health, and work are slowing you down, and you want to make some
positive changes.
If you’re like most people, you’ll start by tackling all three at once. This might even work, for
a short time. But after a week or two, something will cause you to slip with one of these new
activities. In the beginning you’re relying entirely on willpower, so when a behavior slips, it goes
back to the default behavior you had been using before.
A smarter strategy is to implement each new habit successively, focusing on just one new habit
a month. The first month you focus on waking up earlier. The second month on regular exercise. The
third month on a new system for your work. Although thirty days may not be enough time to form a
new default habit (one study suggests sixty-six days as a median time for habituation6), it will at least
mean the habit requires less effort to pick back up in case of a setback.
Some people might see this approach as being prohibitively slow, but in practice, doing habits
one month at a time is fast. In one year you could:
 Wake up earlier
Exercise regularly
Eat properly
Set up a productivity system
Establish deliberate practice time for your craft
Become more organized
Read a book per month
Cut out wasteful Internet surfing
Keep your e-mail inbox empty
Cut down on television
Learn a new skill
Maintain a journal or diary

Even if you only accomplished a quarter of this list, my guess is you could make significant gains in
your life. The focus principle for habit change isn’t actually slow. In fact, it’s much faster than the
alternative.

THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSISTENCY

The next insight for changing habits is called classical conditioning. This is a basic psychological
principle first discovered by Ivan Pavlov through his famous experiment with dogs. Pavlov would
ring a bell and then bring his dogs food. Soon enough, the dogs would salivate after hearing the bell,
anticipating food. This salivation would continue even if the food never arrived, showing that the
dogs automatically associated the sound of the bell with a meal.7
You can also use classical conditioning to speed up the process of habit change. By making the
habit you’re working on extremely consistent, you speed up the time it takes to make the behavior
automatic.
This is the reason the dogs started to salivate when the bell was rung. Had Dr. Pavlov rang the
bell only some of the time, or brought food based on different triggers, the dogs may not have made
the association automatically.
Consistency means that you try to do a habit the same way each time. Imagine you wanted to
set up a deliberate practice routine, where you work on a tough skill you’re trying to master for your
career. Let’s say you want to commit to working on it for around three hours per week.
One way you could do this is to do one hour, three days per week, when you have time. Some
days you might do it before work, other days after; sometimes on weekdays and sometimes on
weekends. This may work, but it’s hardly consistent. As a result, the habit will take a lot longer to
become automatic.
Instead, imagine that you spent thirty-five minutes each day immediately after work on that
skill. Now the behavior is very consistent. It takes place on the same days, in the same conditions, in
exactly the same fashion. It won’t be long before doing your practice routine after work becomes an
automatic part of your day.
With focus and consistency you can change your habits. By changing your habits, you reprogram the
behaviors that control most of your life and ultimately determine your success.

SCOTT H. YOUNG has been studying the science of learning, habit change, and meaningful
productivity since he was seventeen. He has written numerous e-books, including Holistic
Learning, which is available on his website.

→ www.scotthyoung.com/blog
KEEPING A DIARY TO CATALYZE CREATIVITY
–

Teresa Amabile, Steven Kramer & Ela Ben-Ur

What does Andy Warhol have in common with World War II general George
Patton? And what do they both have in common with revolutionary Che
Guevara, design visionary Buckminster Fuller, and writer Virginia Woolf? All
kept a diary or personal journal.

Interestingly, although diaries have been written by people in a staggering array of occupations, a
disproportionate number of diarists were engaged in creative pursuits. Wikipedia lists 223 notable
diarists; the primary occupation of fully half is a creative one. These include not only writers, for
whom keeping a diary might seem a natural thing to do, but also painters, sculptors, scientists,
architects, designers, musicians, and more. The great American photographer Edward Weston made
regular entries in his Daybooks for nearly thirty years.
That’s no coincidence. A diary can serve as a source of solace and inspiration, insight into
emerging patterns, and motivation to reach new creative heights—if you know how to use it.

WHY KEEP A DIARY?

Creative people frequently work solo, without the benefit of colleagues who could help capture or
develop their ideas. But even teams and organizations rarely offer creatives the necessary time,
understanding, and patience to nurture their creative seedlings.
A diary can help fill the void. It can serve as a sounding board and an alter-ego companion—
one who will never forget what you say. What might otherwise have been isolated or passing thoughts
become permanent and potentially powerful ideas.
This sounding board can serve a number of functions, the simplest of which is planning. Many
entries in The Daybooks of Edward Weston reveal him focusing on future actions to capitalize on
emerging opportunities:

The excerpts from my daybook and photographs will be published in the August issue of
 Creative Art.… It seems my fortunes are to change for something better. Now I must spend
all my spare time in cutting and correcting my manuscript.
—Edward Weston, May 23, 1928

Of course, Weston could have used a simple calendar or to-do list to plan next steps. But notice his
remark that his luck seems to be changing. What a calendar cannot do, and a journal can, is help you
reflect on the big picture of your life and your creative work—where it is, what it means, and what
direction you want it to take.
Diaries can be particularly helpful tools for accurately capturing positive events. In his book,
Thinking, Fast and Slow, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between experience and
memory, noting that human memory of an experience can easily be altered. Kahneman describes a man
who was enjoying a concert immensely until the very end, when there was an obnoxious sound in the
concert hall. The man said that the noise ruined the entire concert for him. But it didn’t really, of
course; he had enjoyed the concert up until that moment. What it did ruin was his memory of the
concert.
By keeping a daily diary, you will reduce the chance that some later event will transform your
memory of the day’s experiences. So when you feel you have accomplished something, write it down
soon, before a client or critic has the opportunity to say something that diminishes that sense of
progress.
This is one of the most important reasons to keep a diary: it can make you more aware of your
own progress, thus becoming a wellspring of joy in your workday. In the following entry, Weston
remarks on how his photographic technique is improving, allowing him to create his art more
effectively and satisfyingly.

I believe I am not merely enthused in writing that these negatives are the most important I
have ever done.… My technique matched my vision—two or three slightly overtimed, but
printable without alteration.…
—Edward Weston, May 23, 1928

In our research into the diaries of more than two hundred professionals working on creative projects
inside organizations, we found that the single most important motivator is making progress in
meaningful work. On the days when these professionals saw themselves moving forward on
something they cared about—even if the progress was a seemingly incremental “small win”—they
were more likely to be happy and deeply engaged in their work. And, being happier and more deeply
engaged, they were more likely to come up with new ideas and solve problems creatively. That’s why
Weston was so elated to note that “my technique matched my vision.”
To hatch ideas big and small, and to make them happen, you need a mind clear of worry over
“small stuff,” a sense of progress and direction, and a broad perspective on your life as it unfolds. In
the Journaling Cycle figure on the next page, we have summarized these functions (and others) that a
diary can serve—if you really engage with it.

THE JOURNALING CYCLE

HOW TO USE YOUR DIARY

Your diary can only function as a sounding board if you speak to it regularly—and then listen to it.
For most of us, keeping a diary can be difficult, particularly at the start. Even some dedicated diarists,
like nineteenth-century Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, struggle to keep up with their entries:
 Having omitted to carry on my diary for two or three days, I lost heart to make it up, and
left it unfilled for many a month and day.…
—Sir Walter Scott, January 1, 1829

Establishing a simple journaling habit is the key; it gets easier and more self-motivating as you go. We
recommend that you start small. Rather than vowing to do it for the rest of your life, make a
commitment to write in your diary every single day for just one month. Skipping a day will make it
easier to skip the next day, as Scott learned to his dismay.
Pick a time when you are likely to have ten minutes to yourself. Ideally, this will be the same
time and place each day, to help build the habit. And create a memory trigger, so you won’t forget.
Some online journaling programs will send you a daily reminder. Or you might leave a diary
notebook and pen on your bedside table. The medium is unimportant, as long as it’s something you’ll
enjoy using.
Another obstacle is thinking of something to say. Sir Walter Scott continued the above diary
entry:

During this period nothing has happened worth particular notice. The same occupations,
the same amusements… I half grieve to take up my pen, and doubt if it is worth while to
record such an infinite quantity of nothing. But hang it! I hate to be beat so here goes for
better behavior!
—Sir Walter Scott, January 1, 1829

What should you write about, especially on those days that feel like “an infinite quantity of nothing”
has happened? Write about anything that stands out as you reflect back on the day; unless you were
unconscious the entire day, something happened.
There’s no magic formula, as evidenced by the staggering variety of what renowned diarists
focused on. But our research suggests that it can be particularly useful to reflect and write on any of
the following:

Progress, even a small step forward, in work you care about

Anyone or anything that helped or hindered your progress
Goals and plans, especially a plan for making progress tomorrow
Issues or “to-dos” that may be causing you stress as they swirl through your mind
Anything that brought you joy or pleasure, even if it lasted only a moment
Although the act of reflecting and writing, in itself, can be beneficial, you’ll multiply the power of
your diary if you review it regularly—if you listen to what your life has been telling you.
Periodically, maybe once a month, set aside time to get comfortable and read back through your
entries. And, on New Year’s Day, make an annual ritual of reading through the previous year. We
think you’ll be impressed by the insights you’ll get, particularly if you look for certain clues.
Be alert to emerging patterns, and jot them down as you see them. Was there a type of project
on which you seemed to make particularly steady progress or feel particularly engaged? Specifically,
try to identify the greatest sources of meaning in your work—the types of projects in which you felt
you were really making a difference. Those are clues about what motivates you most strongly and
where you should concentrate your energies going forward.
Was there an idea that looks promising—perhaps an idea that you had completely forgotten?
This could signal that what you’ve learned since having that idea, or what’s changed in the world
around you, now makes it more viable and valuable.
Track improvements in your personal or professional self, improvements that may have been
impossible to see from day to day. Seeing that progress can be powerfully motivating.
Look for recurring problems and hindrances, and plan to attack them. Focus on one short-term
action—something you can do the next day—and one longer-term action—something you can do in the
next month.
Finally, allow yourself a few moments to feel grateful for the skills you’ve developed and the
people who have helped you. Bask in the glow of your accomplishments. This is your life; savor it.
Hold on to the threads across days that, when woven together, reveal the rich tapestry of what you are
achieving and who you are becoming. The best part is that, seeing the story line appearing, you can
actively create what it—and you—will become.

TERESA AMABILE is a professor and director of research at Harvard Business School and
coauthor, with STEVEN KRAMER, of The Progress Principle. They are psychologists who
research what makes people happy, motivated, productive, and creative at work.

→ www.progressprinciple.com

ELA BEN-UR is a thirteen-year IDEO veteran and a professor at Olin College. Through her firm,
i2i Experience, she works as a human-centered design innovation coach and consultant.

→ www.i2iexperience.com
KEY TAKEAWAYS
–

Building Expertise

STOP TRYING TO “BE GOOD”

Give yourself permission to screw up. Once you stop trying to be good (and look smart), you can
focus on tackling the exciting challenges that will help you get better.

SPRINT TO SPEED UP MASTERY

Set aside time for regular “sprints” where you work intensively on a key project or skill without
distraction. Then reward yourself with a break.

AVOID THE “OK PLATEAU”

Focus on practicing the hard stuff when you’re developing new skills. As with weight lifting,
you know you’re making headway when you feel the burn.

HUNGER FOR FEEDBACK

Develop a method for gathering feedback—whether it’s tracking the numbers yourself or hiring a
coach. No factor is more essential to growth and learning.

MAKE BUILDING HABITS A HABIT

Try to change one key habit a month. If you can make the behaviors that help you excel automatic,
executing at the top of your game becomes significantly easier.

DAILY OBSERVATION DRIVES PROGRESS

Track your progress by journaling for a few minutes every day. The practice will help you
identify stumbling blocks, observe patterns, and document successes.

Get more insights and the desktop wallpaper at:

→ www.99u.com/expertise
As the poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” While we may
cherish the myth of the lonely creative genius, it is just that—a myth. In
truth, no individual (or idea) can flourish in a vacuum. Relationships,
camaraderie, and collaboration are the lifeblood of our personal well-
being and our professional success.
Put simply, opportunities flow through people. If you want a job, what you need is someone to hire
you. If you want capital to start a business, what you need is an investor. If you want to sell a product,
what you need is a customer. At every stage in our careers, whatever level of opportunity or growth
we seek, we depend on relationships to drive us forward.

To achieve all that we’re capable of, we must enlist a group of allies to accompany us on our journey,
empower our coworkers and clients to give us honest feedback, build collaborative teams with an eye
toward fresh perspectives, and tend to our network of acquaintances with generosity and authenticity.

In a world of collaborative creation, whom we surround ourselves with dictates how much we can
achieve.
ASKING FOR HELP ON YOUR JOURNEY
–

Steffen Landauer

Many creative people see their work as primarily an individual endeavor. They
consider the most valuable thing that others can do for them is to leave them
alone. At times, of course, most of us do feel that way. After all, only one person
can hold the pen or sit at the keyboard, and in the creative realm the best work
often reflects a strong individual vision rather than a collective one.

As Albert Einstein wrote, “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual
who can labor in freedom.” Many creatives follow this edict in pursuing their own projects. But if
this approach is followed too closely, we can miss out on valuable help that can advance our work.
Some years ago I signed up for a storytelling workshop led by Jay O’Callahan, a well-known
storyteller. I had recently completed several extended trips through Africa, Asia, and Patagonia and
was looking for help in how to shape these experiences into stories. A dozen people who didn’t know
one another showed up and spent a weekend working together on various small exercises or
“sparks”—two minutes spent describing a certain type of experience you’ve had—and also telling
stories we had prepared for the workshop. These stories ranged from personal narratives, such as my
travel experiences, to traditional stories from all over the world. There was a great chemistry in the
workshop and we decided to plan a reunion six months later. Another reunion followed and then
another, and to the amazement of everyone in this chance group, we have just marked our twentieth
anniversary with our fortieth meeting.
I am a rather unlikely member, as I have always felt leery of organized groups; I prefer
interacting with individuals, and I enjoy spending time on my own. In fact, the stories I was trying to
shape were based on three years of solo travel around the world. Reflecting on these twenty years of
the storytelling group, however, I am struck by how helpful the group has been to me and to the other
members.
This help has taken several different forms. On individual projects, usually stories, we have
gotten invaluable guidance—help in an area where we have been blocked, or simply encouragement
to continue where we have been struggling with something. Sometimes, however, the guidance is
more direct and specific. I still remember how I was struggling to shape a story about my travels in
Patagonia, and someone suggested that I was avoiding the most interesting aspect of my story, my own
sense of fear and insignificance amid the vast and barren landscape.
I left our most recent gathering, as I leave most of our meetings, energized by the workshop
and surprised by how much we are able to do for one another. Then I started wondering why more of
this does not happen through the normal course of life, particularly among people who have projects
they are passionate to pursue. Is it that we are simply not that interested in helping others in their
work? That we are not capable of help? Or that we are simply afraid to ask?
My own day-to-day work is in the corporate world, with responsibility for maximizing
learning for a large global company. In most ways the work is quite different from a storytelling
workshop, yet I have found a surprising number of parallels. In particular, there is one common
question of central importance: How can we best realize the value that others can add to the
development of our projects and ourselves?
In the corporate sphere, there is increasing appreciation for the role that others can play. One
sign of this is the proliferation of executive coaching, the basic premise of which is that others have a
critical role to play in helping us reach our potential. These others can either be professional coaches,
peer coaches, or simply anybody who can offer you useful feedback. The prevalence of 360-degree
feedback is one example, in which the company solicits those who work most closely with you to
offer advice in how you can reach your potential.
Many of those in the creative world, however, spend much of their time working on their own
and will never be assigned a coach or given regular feedback. For these individuals, here are a few
actions worth considering in order to enlist the help of others:

1. Seek fellow travelers. There was a strong hand of serendipity in how our storytelling group came
together, but there is no need to rely on chance in finding those who can help you. It may be that you
need to get over an obstacle on a particular project, in which case you will need to get as specific as
you can about the help you are looking for and who would be best positioned to offer it. It may also
be that you are looking for broader advice about exploring a new creative direction. Regardless of
your needs, there is one quality that is especially important in choosing fellow travelers: Will they
tell you the truth? There are many reasons why people may fail this test—the quality of your
relationship, their position in the organization, their personality traits—but many perfectly nice
individuals, with whom you could enjoy a drink or a dinner, may not be ideal helpers. Get very
concrete about the help you are seeking and learn to “audition” people until you find what you need.

2. Ask for help. This can be very difficult for people who see creative work as a solitary pursuit and
any request for assistance as some combination of laziness or cowardice. If you think along these
lines, and are able to overcome it, you are likely to encounter two surprises: first, people in general
will be willing to help and, second, that help will be far more useful than you might have imagined. In
any case, the first step is to ask. The worst that can happen is that someone will say no or will offer
suggestions that are not especially helpful and can be ignored.

3. Build a structure for collaboration. This can take care of itself if a single meeting serves your
needs. However, a broader engagement is often helpful. Our storytelling group developed a regular
twice-a-year meeting structure, which has worked well for us. Beyond that, several substructures
were also developed within the group. Two group members meet on a biweekly basis for ninety-
minute coaching sessions, split evenly so each individual can be coached by the other. This format
has survived for many years because each found it so helpful. For professional executive coaches, the
structure is often a regular monthly schedule of meetings. The point is that some regular structure for
the collaboration is often helpful, unless of course you are the type who simply cannot bear structure,
in which case a basic arrangement to “call when one of us could use a view or an ear” can also work
well.

4. Consider yourselves “accountability partners.” There are several important points here. First, it
requires a fellow traveler who is willing to hold you accountable, which means to help you establish
milestones in a project and remind you of them or help you reach them as needed. Second, it implies a
partnership, as the most enduring of these arrangements involve some reciprocity, though not
necessarily within a given meeting or even a given month. Finally, note that strong partnerships are
often based on contrasting rather than coinciding strengths, so you’ll want to avoid the comfortable
trap of seeking someone too similar to yourself. In Plato’s Republic, guards were taught by poets.
Views contrary to your own are always helpful, as sometimes you will see truth in them and effect
change, and, if not, you will be stress-testing and ultimately strengthening your own convictions.

5. Highlight and discuss strengths. Often the most helpful thing that can be expressed, as specifically
as possible, is what is strong and working well within a project. In our storytelling group, the first
feedback round is always framed as an “appreciation” and targeted only at what listeners liked best
about the piece. This format is designed to counter our tendency to focus initially on what needs to be
fixed or what could be better. Often the path toward optimization for a story, or a project, or—notably
—an individual is toward greater awareness and expansion of strengths.

One of the most powerful learnings I’ve had from twenty years of storytelling meetings spent shaping
and helping others shape their stories is the realization of one’s own power as a creator—not of a
story, or of any project, but of the narrative of one’s own creative life. The narratives of many
creative people position their work as exclusively an individual pursuit. To ensure that you are
optimizing your potential, consider recasting this narrative: Are you taking best advantage of the help
that others can offer, and, more important, are you offering to others all the help you are capable of
providing?

STEFFEN LANDAUER, when he is not telling stories, and sometimes when he is, serves as Chief
Learning Officer for Citigroup, based in New York. He has held similar roles focused on
leadership development for Hewlett-Packard and Goldman Sachs. His mission is to enable
learning.

→ www.linkedin.com/in/steffenlandauer
BUILDING RESILIENT RELATIONSHIPS
–

Michael Bungay Stanier

It always starts out so well. You’ve hired a new member of the team, you’ve
joined a new project group, you’ve started working with a supplier. New people,
new beginnings. And you’re both up for it. “This,” everyone’s sure, “is the start
of something cool/big/fun/productive… and above all, successful.”

But inevitably, things shift. The person you’ve hired isn’t as fast/smart/experienced as you’d
imagined. Your new boss reveals his or her obsessive/quirky/flawed character. The supplier starts
breaking the promises you’re sure they made. Whatever the situation, there are universal stumbling
blocks:

They misunderstand, you misunderstand

They do too much or too little, you do too much or too little
They overstep the boundaries, you overstep the boundaries
They fall into unproductive patterns, you fall into unproductive patterns
They go crazy, you go crazy

It’s not “if.” It’s only ever “when.” There’s never been a relationship that didn’t start off strongly and
that didn’t then run off the rails at some stage.
This is actually not the problem. This is just life. Success for you lies in managing these dips
when they occur. It’s not about having perfect relationships. That’s a fantasy. It’s about laying
foundations for resilient relationships from the very start.

THE HOW VS. THE WHAT

Your best chance of bouncing back, sorting it out, and getting things rocking again lies in the practice
of social contracting, a discipline that management thinker Peter Block introduced in his terrific book
Flawless Consulting.
 At the heart of social contracting is spending time up front talking about the How—the
relationship and how we’ll work together—rather than being seduced by the What, the excitement and
urgency of the content, what needs to be sorted out and solved.
Just understanding that you should talk about the How will immediately make a difference in
your working relationships. But to make it easier, here are five fundamental questions to ask and
answer. You don’t need to ask them all. I’m sure you’ll find your own best combination for the person
and the situation. Just make sure you ask some of them before things get rolling.
You’ll want to remember that any good contract is a mutual exchange. So don’t be fooled into
thinking that your job is just to ask the questions. You need to be willing to answer them as well, so
you and your collaborator both know where you each might stumble.

What do you want? (Here’s what I want.) This is a question that almost always stops people in
their tracks. It’s deceptively difficult to answer and incredibly powerful when you can define clearly
what exactly it is you want from this relationship.
Of course you’ll want to articulate the transactional nature of things: I want you to get this
done and get that completed. But see if you can go beyond that. What else do you want? (“I want this
to position me for my next promotion.”) What else would make this relationship one to truly value?
(“I want this to lay the foundations of future work together.”)

Where might you need help? (Here’s where I’ll need help.) This turns the “What do you want?”
question over and comes at it from a different angle. You might want to specify where you’ll trip
yourself up (bold), how you might fall short in the relationship (bolder), or even how you might get in
the way of success (boldest).
I’m forever telling people I’m going to need their help defining a better brief, not being a
bottleneck on decisions, and staying interested in the minutiae of a project.

When you had a really good working relationship in the past, what happened? (Here’s what
happened for me.) Tell a story of a time when you were in a working relationship similar to this one,
and it was good, really good. What did they do? What did you do? What else happened? What were
the key moments when the path divided and you took one road and not the other? What else
contributed to its success?
To take this to an even more courageous place, you can ask, “How do you feel about the
amount of control you have over what we’re trying to do here?” It’s a question that shines a light into
what is often a very dark corner: how control and power is working in the relationship.

When things go wrong, what does that look like on your end? How do you behave? (Here’s how
I behave.) Tell another story, this time of when a working relationship like this one failed to soar. It
might be when it all went hellishly wrong or it might be when it disintegrated into mediocrity. What
did you do and what did they do? Where were the missed opportunities? Where were the moments
when things got broken?
 Articulate, if you can, the unilateral actions you take when things start going wrong. Do you
retreat into silence? Rage on? Try to take control and start to micromanage? Dump and run?
See also if you can summarize your own “hot buttons.” What are the little things that can wind
you up? Is it not getting replies to your e-mails? When others are late to meetings? Not having a
regular check-in? Being given advice before you’ve got to the heart of the question? Spelling mistakes
and random apostrophes? We’ve all got our pet peeves. If they know yours and you know theirs,
things might be a little less frustrating.

When things go wrong—as they inevitably will—how shall we manage that? The power in this is
twofold. First, you’re acknowledging reality: Things will go wrong. Honeymoons end. Promises get
broken. Expectations don’t get met. By putting that on the table, you’re able now to discuss what the
plan will be when it does go wrong.
I’ve done everything from creating a code phrase (“I need to have an ‘off my chest’
conversation with you…”) to inventing a process (“I’m hitting the Mission Pause button”), to simply
agreeing that we have permission to talk about things when we feel we must.

QUESTIONS ARE MORE POWERFUL THAN ANSWERS

What you hear and what you’ll share will be interesting, insightful, and useful. But the irony is, the
actual answers aren’t the most important thing in this conversation. More powerful is the fact that by
asking these questions you now have permission to acknowledge the situation between you both when
things get off track (as they inevitably will). Talking about the How now allows you to talk about the
How later, when the What is starting to go wrong.
That said, this is not a conversation most people have. Because it’s not a conversation that just
naturally happens. Someone—that would be you—has to have the courage to stop the usual flow, step
aside for a moment, and begin this conversation. You may well pay the price of a slightly awkward
conversation, possibly a couple of awkward conversations.
If you’re just beginning a new working relationship, then you’re in the perfect place to build in
resilience through social contracting right now. And if, as is more likely, you’ve already got a number
of working relationships—with your boss, with your team, with your customer, with your suppliers—
you’re also in the perfect place to build in resilience. Step back for a moment from the What you’re
all absorbed with, and invite them to have a conversation with you about the How.

MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER is the senior partner and founder of Box of Crayons, a company
that helps organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. His books include Do More
Great Work and the philanthropic project, End Malaria.
→ www.boxofcrayons.biz
Q&A:

NETWORKING IN A CONNECTION ECONOMY

–

with Sunny Bates

Sunny Bates is the ultimate super-connector. For more than twenty-five years,
she has been a strategic adviser, curator, and connector for companies ranging
from Kickstarter and TechStars to GE and TED. If “the medium is the
message,” her medium is people. She believes that whom you surround yourself
with—and how you connect with them—is the single most important factor in
unlocking your growth potential. We spoke with Sunny about the key stumbling
blocks that keep people from making the right connections and how to approach
the delicate art of network cultivation with a mind-set of generosity rather than
obligation.

What do people struggle with the most when it comes to connecting with others and
building a network?

Asking. Nobody ever wants to ask—at every level, with every kind of person, from the CEO all the
way down. I think people get very narrow-minded, thinking that they can only reach out to people who
are already doing a similar type of job. But the underlying network science says that it’s all about
weak links. Those people who are the friend of a friend of a friend. That’s a much more likely place
for something important to happen to you than your inner circle of close friends and colleagues.

What do you tell people who are afraid to ask?

If you don’t ask, you’ll never get. Sure, you may only get a little bit at a time. But if you don’t ask, 100
percent of the time you won’t get. You’ve just got to get over yourself. We live in a connection
economy. If you can’t connect with people for them to understand what you have to offer, you’re
working in a vacuum and you’re going to lose out. You end up getting bitter in that situation, because
you see your peers are moving up and doing things, and you say, “I could be doing those things. Why
not me?”
It’s very easy to think that somebody knows you. And that if they know you, they will think
about calling you, or asking you, or wanting you for something. But people forget. I was a headhunter
for many years, and I was always amazed because easily 20 percent of the time, the final person who
was hired was well-known to the client. (They just hadn’t thought about them.) That means that, for
every five people you know, one is likely to have an impact on you or hire you—that should make you
want to expand your circle.

What would you say to people who think that networking is somehow disingenuous
or too transactional?

The underlying spirit of networking is generosity. If you engage with people in the spirit of generosity,
as opposed to tit for tat—“I gave you three things, now you give me three things”—you’ll go so much
farther. What’s more, the process can become joyful rather than an onerous task. Building a network is
like cultivating a botanical garden: You don’t want everyone in your network to be one color or one
species. You want a variety of ages and stages and professions and passions, and to tend them
carefully.

Do you have any particular strategies for reaching out to people?

Look at the people whom you admire most in your field. And literally map it out. Here are the four
people that are doing great work at the organizations I respect. And just reach out. If you decided to
contact one person a week, that would be fifty-two new people in a year. And it starts with that, just
reaching out to someone because you admire their work, or are inspired by it. I’ve never met a
person, no matter how well-known, who hasn’t been flattered by an authentic compliment.
Professional love letters work.

How do you maintain the relationship from there?

You always want to be specific about what you’re asking for. Are you asking for a relationship? Are
you asking for advice? Are you asking to follow up with them along the way, and occasionally reach
out with a question? I think the best gauge for what’s fair to ask is flipping the tables: How would you
feel if somebody approached you and asked this exact same thing? If you feel okay with it, then go
ahead and do it. If you feel a little uncomfortable, then try to tweak it in a way that makes you feel
okay about it.

What if I really want to get to know them, beyond just a cup of coffee?

Particularly when you’re thinking about creatives, there are a lot of people who have a day job at,
say, an advertising agency, but their side projects are really what they care about most. If you can
identify what that thing is, you have a chance to connect at the heart of what they care about.
Often, people try to connect in a more LinkedIn-type of scenario: “Oh, we have the same job”
or “We do the same thing, so we should know each other.” And the response that comes back is often:
“No, actually we don’t do the same thing and I hate my job.” [Laughs.]

What about giving back to the people who have helped you?

People have this notion that they should always ask, “Is there anything I can do to help you?” to
demonstrate a sort of reciprocity when they’re asking for a favor or a connection. And it’s very nice
for someone to ask that—it’s important—but you want to do it in an authentic way. I always
appreciate when people ask in a way that’s somehow embedded in the conversation rather than as an
add-on at the very end. Like, “Oh, you gave me this, and so I have to ask you.” It’s always good to try
to steer the exchange away from debt and obligation and more into the spirit of generosity.

Is there anything else to be aware of when you’re thinking about networking in the
creative world in particular?

In the creative world, there is a lot of love for the shiny penny. People are attracted to what’s new and
are quick to leave behind what’s tried-and-true in favor of what’s getting attention. I think that’s
interesting fodder for how you think about intentionally building your network for the long term. You
want to focus on pulling in people whom you respect, people who you believe will have your
interests in mind for the long haul, and also people across a wide enough range—so that you won’t
have to go back to the well over and over again with just a few people. If you build your network in a
smart way, you can build your entire career on the back of it.

SUNNY BATES operates wherever executives, thinkers, artists, creators, innovators,

entrepreneurs, educators, and philanthropists connect and collide around the globe. An expert in
human network development, she has a client roster that includes some of the world’s most
prominent organizations, from Kickstarter and TED to GE and Credit Suisse to MTV, the National
Academy of Sciences, the Guardian, and TechStars.

→ www.sunnybates.com
CREATING A KILLER COLLABORATIVE TEAM
–

David Burkus

In 1995, Kevin Dunbar set up a rather creative laboratory experiment. He

wanted to study how scientific breakthroughs happened. Dunbar, a psychologist
at McGill University, broke with the traditional methods of scientific inquiry used
in psychology and opted instead to emulate the field studies of anthropology and
ethnography. Instead of testing, he would use observation. He set up cameras
inside four prominent microbiology laboratories in order to study when and how
the scientists’ breakthrough insights occurred.8

Dunbar’s surprising discovery was that most insights didn’t actually occur when the researchers were
alone in the lab. In fact, the majority actually occurred during regularly scheduled lab meetings where
individual researchers revealed their latest findings and shared their most difficult setbacks with the
rest of the team.
In any research laboratory, most experiments are failures or at best yield unexpected results.
During these regular meetings, Dunbar observed that the researchers shared their results and also
developed analogies trying to describe what might be causing their problem. (Analogies are actually
quite common in scientific insight. Consider how Watson and Crick used the twisted ladder analogy
to describe the double-helix structure of DNA molecules.)
Dunbar noted that as the researchers developed analogies, and as other researchers built on
the ideas around those analogies, the solutions to their problems seemed to simply emerge.
Sometimes, a researcher would spend a week vexed by a problem, and the solution would seem to
present itself in just ten minutes of discussion with peers. Dunbar also found that the labs with more
diverse teams of individuals—people with different areas of expertise who were working on very
different types of projects—generated more creative insights and produced more significant research.
But just how diverse did a team need to be for optimal creativity? Dunbar’s research didn’t
answer this question. For that we have to move from the microbiology lab to the Broadway stage.
No Broadway production is created alone. Even so-called “one-man shows” require a crew
of people to help with writing, staging, lighting, and everything that goes into taking a production,
from the initial idea to opening night. This need for collaboration is what drew the attention of two
management professors, Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro. Uzzi and Spiro wanted to know how the
creativity and success of a Broadway musical was affected by the level of diversity among
collaborators. Many of the artists on Broadway work on more than one musical at a time; as such,
they develop relationships between members of their various teams. The two researchers designed a
study to examine if the strength or diversity of those relationships affected the success of their work.9
Together, Uzzi and Spiro analyzed almost every musical produced on Broadway from 1945 to
1989. The end result was a database of 474 musicals and 2,092 artists, including Broadway legends
from Cole Porter to Andrew Lloyd Webber. Once the database was built, the duo analyzed each show
to calculate the complex network of collaborations and working relationships between producers,
writers, actors, and choreographers. The researchers found that the world of Broadway musicals was
indeed a dense and interconnected web, with many individuals working together on a production, then
going their separate ways only to find themselves working with some of the same people years later
on a new production. This dynamic produced what is now called a “small world network,” a fertile
ground for teams to connect, collaborate, and disband as needed.
The researchers even found a way to measure the level of repeat collaboration in any given
production year, a value they called “small world quotient” or simply Q. The Q score was a
measurement of how diverse or homogenous the Broadway production teams from that year were.
When Q is high, the teams are densely interconnected; more artists know each other and are working
together on multiple projects. When Q is low, there isn’t as much familiarity and multiple
collaborations are seldom. Uzzi and Spiro then compared each year’s Q score to the level of financial
success and critical acclaim achieved by the shows that year.
Given what we know about teams, it would be logical to assume that those production crews
with a higher Q—those teams that had lots of experience working together in the past—would
perform better and would produce shows that were more creative and successful. Uzzi and Spiro’s
research found that this assumption held true, but only until a certain point. Instead of a straight line
rising in success as it rose in diversity, the trend line looked more like an inverted U. As the Q of a
production year went up, representing the diversity of the network structure, so did the year’s
financial and artistic successes until a certain optimal point, when higher Q actually led to a decrease
in the success measurements.
So why did the success start dropping off after a certain point? It turns out that the closeness of
a given team affects its performance: Total strangers forced to work together can have problems
exchanging ideas, but best friends aren’t that good for creativity, either. In the latter case, the
collaborators are often so close, and share such a common background, that they end up with the same
ideas—a kind of creative groupthink. Ultimately, Uzzi and Spiro found collaborations built from a
combination of close connections and fresh perspectives enhance the creative potential of everyone
involved. In this scenario, individuals can quickly establish norms for communicating and exchanging
ideas, but also benefit from the differing experiences and knowledge brought in by new team
members.
Uzzi and Spiro’s research also helps to explain the phenomenon in Dunbar’s laboratories,
where the more diverse teams yielded more creative insights and breakthroughs. If all the scientists
had been working on the same experiment and had the same professional backgrounds, they would all
think of the same potential explanations. However, in Dunbar’s study, the laboratories were running a
variety of experiments organized by people from different fields, which meant that everyone benefited
from the diverse knowledge of everyone else’s past experiences. (It’s worth noting that in Dunbar’s
case, the fact that these were all microbiology labs in particular kept the groups from becoming too
diverse).
Taken together, Dunbar’s and Uzzi and Spiro’s findings imply that the most successful creative
projects are generated by teams that include a healthy mix of pre-existing connections, shared
experiences, and totally new perspectives. If you’re looking to enhance your creative potential, then
being on a team helps. But it’s not enough to be on any old team. You have to be on a team with the
right blend of old and new collaborators.

Do you have a go-to roster of colleagues whom you collaborate with on every project? If so, you
might benefit from building a broader network and rotating in collaborators with different
perspectives and work experience. Conversely, if you regularly work alone or with a constantly
rotating cast of new faces, see if you can introduce an element of stability. Are there one or two
colleagues with whom you already have a kind of “creative shorthand”? If so, you might explore
integrating them into your projects more regularly to introduce a level of consistency that might be
beneficial.
As with anything, finding the right balance is key. Too much familiarity in your creative team
can lead to stagnation, while too little can mean you’re constantly out of sync and spinning your
wheels. The most important takeaway for you as an individual might well lie in understanding the
paramount importance of collaboration. If you really want your creative projects to take off, don’t go
it alone.

DAVID BURKUS is Assistant Professor of Management at the College of Business at Oral Roberts
University, where he teaches courses on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He is the
author of The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate
Great Ideas.

→ www.davidburkus.com
LEADING IN A WORLD OF CO-CREATION
–

Mark McGuinness

Who was the architect of Chartres Cathedral? Don’t worry if you don’t know
the answer. (And Wikipedia or Google won’t help.) It’s a trick question: there was
no architect. These days, we take it for granted that large buildings are
“designed” by a single person, the architect. The actual work of construction is
delegated to builders whose job it is to follow the plans and execute the
architect’s vision.

We don’t see Frank Gehry feeding the cement mixer or winching girders into place with a crane.
Neither do we see builders designing facades, nor initiating major alterations to a building halfway
through a project. But in the Middle Ages, sights like this would have been commonplace.
In his books The Contractors of Chartres and The Master Masons of Chartres, architect John
James argues convincingly that the cathedral was not designed by an architect and then delegated to
the builders.10 In fact, there was no such profession as architect in the modern sense. Instead, the role
of architect and chief builder were combined in the person of the Master Builder, who was a skilled
craftsman as well as draughtsman.
And just as the Master got his hands dirty with construction, so the other workers on the
ground (or up on the scaffold) took responsibility for shaping the big vision. Authority was clearly
defined, but the Master’s role was not to plan and micromanage everything down to the last pane of
glass; instead, he was responsible for shaping the overall vision and coordinating his team’s efforts
while allowing them freedom to improvise within the overall structure:

These buildings were constructed on a far more collective basis than is generally accepted
today.… The chief builder’s job was one of co-ordinating the workforce… in a form of
activity that was… more akin to jazz than to orchestral music.11

Realizing your full creative potential—and that of others—demands the skills of the Master Builder
rather than the architect, the jazz impresario rather than the conductor. Not just dreaming up visions,
but doing the work of execution; not just solo creation, but co-creation with others; not just issuing
commands, but collaborating with expert partners.

LEAD BY EXAMPLE, NOT JUST AUTHORITY

In the Middle Ages, the word “Master” had a very specific meaning: it meant someone who had
undergone rigorous formal training in a discipline such as masonry, carpentry, or painting. After an
apprenticeship, an aspirant had to produce a “masterpiece”—a piece of work judged good enough to
earn the title, authority, and responsibilities of Master and membership in a professional guild.
As Masters rose through the ranks, they did not retire to the corner office or a remote studio.
They kept working with their own hands, perfecting their craft and leading by example as well as by
authority.
In Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy wrote that even as the head of a busy
agency, he still took time to write occasional advertisements himself, to show his copywriters how it
was done. He was following the example of his old boss Monsieur Pitard, head chef of the Hotel
Majestic in Paris, who came out of his office once a week and cooked a dish that made it clear who
was the best chef in the kitchen.
Keep your “hand in,” even if you move into a management role. Doing this will have several
benefits: (1) on a personal level, you’ll derive satisfaction from doing the work yourself, (2) it will
deepen your understanding of the challenges faced by your team, and (3) since most creatives make
judgments based on talent and achievement, you’ll maintain the respect of your team.

EVERYTHING IS BUILT ON RELATIONSHIPS

Just as the Cathedral of Chartres is held up by a complex web of stresses and counter-stresses, so the
teams who built it were tied together by collaborative relationships—with a similarly delicate
balance of stresses. Authority played its part, as well as professional respect and what the builders
would have called “fellowship.”
If you’re working in an agency or studio, you’ll be familiar with this atmosphere and the need
to build strong relationships with your fellow workers. But even if you’re a freelancer or solo artist,
your creative production depends on all kinds of people—clients, contractors, suppliers, partners,
mentors, assistants, and your professional peers.
So hone your communication skills just as keenly as your craft. Learn to write clear e-mails
and compelling copy; to deliver persuasive presentations; to chair a productive meeting; to make
those “difficult” conversations go more smoothly. Invest time in networking and building strong
working relationships (not the same as friendships). When someone on your team needs help, offer it
—what goes around comes around.
IMPROVISE TOGETHER
Unlike modern architects, the cathedral builders did not start with a miniature drawing of the entire
building. Instead, they meticulously staked out the dimensions of the building, at full size, on the
actual construction site. The details of specific elements—such as the shape of columns, arches, and
windows—were worked out as the building progressed by specialist builders who took the lead in
different areas.
The basic structure was ordained and measured out by the Master. But at every stage of the
work, gaps were left to be filled in by the expertise and ingenuity of individual craftsmen. They paid
a lot of attention to detail, because the detail was left to them.
If it sounds incredible that so many interlocking elements of a complex structure could be
improvised by workers on the ground, think of Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is responsible
for the overall vision and structure of the site. But within this framework, thousands of writers are
free to improvise, by writing, editing, and discussing one another’s work.
The result is a sprawling yet coherent structure, where articles on the most obscure topics are
crafted to the same level of obsessive detail as the gargoyles up on the roof of Chartres, where no one
but God and the sculptor’s peers would see them.
When you take charge of a project, start by inspiring people with your vision. And make sure
all those involved are crystal clear about their responsibilities and non-negotiable deliverables. But
don’t micro-manage or insist they do everything your way. If you really want to get the best out of
them, leave plenty of gaps for them to fill with their creativity and initiative.

BUILD ON OTHERS’ WORK

Chartres was not built by a single master but by a succession of nine masters who came and went with
the ebb and flow of funding over the years. This meant there was no single comprehensive vision for
the cathedral’s design—each master built on the work of his predecessor, adapting and altering the
design as he saw fit and the work progressed.
One of the unwritten rules of cathedral construction described by James was that whenever a
new master started work, he left the previous master’s work intact. Instead of razing the stonework
and starting afresh, he incorporated its lines and themes in his new construction.
Start to listen to the conversations in your workplace: do people typically build on each
other’s ideas (“Yes, and…”) or block them (“Yes, but”) and try to replace them with their own?
How about you? When someone proposes a new idea, is your instinct to accept it and look for
ways to develop it, or to critique it and pull it to pieces? When you join a project that others have
started, do you look for ways to build on their foundation, or are you tempted to start over from
scratch?
From now on, make a conscious effort to build rather than block. Start by asking “What’s
already working? How can we build on it?” Look for opportunities to praise (sincerely). Say “Yes,
and” instead of “Yes, but”—and encourage others to do the same.
(Don’t worry, your critical faculty won’t disappear. It’s too well-built for that.)
WORK FIRST, EGO SECOND
We don’t know the names of the Masters of Chartres. According to James, their peers would have
recognized their “signature” in the distinctive details of the stonework they produced. This peer
recognition—plus their pay and pride in the work—would have been enough.
It was during the Renaissance that visionaries were elevated and put on pedestals, while
craftsmen were relegated to the status of hired labor. Artists and designers began to be revered as
divine geniuses. Their names became brands, commanding high prices from collectors. They started
signing their paintings. We began to learn the names of “architects.”
Status, credits, rewards, and awards are all very well. Your professional reputation is
important, and there’s a time and a place for securing it. But when it’s time to start work, put all this
out of your mind and focus on the task at hand.
Don’t be too proud to listen to others. Ask a lot of questions and pay attention to the answers,
not out of politeness but out of respect for their expertise and the knowledge that you can achieve
more together than alone. Give them credit and praise for their contributions.

“Co-creation” sounds like a touchy-feely expression, but the reality is that it can be downright scary.
Co-creation involves letting go of control, listening—really listening—to people around you, and
delegating responsibility to them. Most of all, it means building trust: earning the trust of others,
trusting them in return, and trusting that together you can build something bigger and more inspiring
than any of you could achieve on your own.

MARK MCGUINNESS is a coach for creative professionals. Based in London, he coaches clients
all over the world and consults for creative companies. He is the author of the book Resilience:
Facing Down Rejection and Criticism on the Road to Success, and a columnist for 99U.

→ www.LateralAction.com
KEY TAKEAWAYS
–

Cultivating Relationships

DON’T GO IT ALONE
Seek out fellow travelers—trusted colleagues and collaborators whom you can ask for help,
who will tell you the truth, and who will hold you accountable.

CREATE SOCIAL CONTRACTS

Address what could go wrong in a creative relationship up front. Then, when a conflict does
arise, you’ve created a comfortable space for talking about it.

TRUST IN GENEROSITY
Focus on how you can help others, and lasting connections will come. The true spirit of
networking should be generosity, not obligation.

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE

Asking always precedes connecting, and if you do it regularly, your network will thrive. Make a
weekly habit of reaching out to people whom you admire.

CROSS-POLLINATION BEGETS CREATIVITY

Try to assemble creative teams that include both veteran collaborators and newbies. Diversity
(in the right dosage) accelerates your creative potential.

ACT LIKE A MASTER BUILDER, NOT A MASTER MIND

Build on—and improvise with—others’ ideas and skill sets. If you let everyone shine in his or
her area of expertise, your projects will thrive.

Get more insights and the desktop wallpaper at:

→ www.99u.com/relationships
Nothing great has ever been achieved by sticking with the status quo.
If you want to create something new and different, risk-taking needs to
be part of your repertoire.
But that’s easier said than done when our brains are hardwired to avoid uncertainty and play it safe.
When we think about risks, we think about failure. When we think about failure, we start to get
scared. When we start to get scared, our brains send out signals to get the hell out of there.

So how can we overcome our natural tendency to run away from risk? We’ll look at the science
behind why we fear failure, explore how persistence can create positive outcomes in the face of
massive setbacks, and learn how to view our mistakes as valuable data rather than an opportunity to
beat ourselves up.

The upside of risk is that—no matter what the outcome—we act, we learn, and we grow. And when
tomorrow comes, we’re better equipped to face it.
DEMYSTIFYING THE FEAR FACTOR IN FAILURE
–

Michael Schwalbe

On the evening of June 28, 1976, after rehearsing in front of friends for weeks, a
twenty-two year-old Jerry Seinfeld walked up onstage at the Catch a Rising Star
comedy club in New York City to give his first public performance as a stand-up
comic. Seinfeld took the microphone, looked out into audience, and froze. When
he finally found his voice, all he could remember were the topics he had
prepared to talk about. He rattled them off (“the beach… cars…”) without
pausing and then hurried offstage. The entire performance lasted about ninety
seconds. As Seinfeld later recounted his first moments in the spotlight, “I
couldn’t even speak… I was so paralyzed in total fear.”12

Seinfeld’s ordeal is not unusual. Researchers are gathering a host of evidence showing that the more
we fear failure, the less we succeed. A recent study led by a team of neuroscientists at Caltech found
that when competing in a high-stakes computer game, participants performed worse the more they
were concerned about losing.13
But science is also revealing that these fears are not only counterproductive, they are
overblown. It turns out that humans have a strong tendency to overestimate both the pain of failure and
how negatively others perceive our mishaps. To explain why, let’s first take a look at why winning the
lottery isn’t as amazing as you would think.
Imagine that Morpheus from the Matrix films offers you a blue pill and a red pill. If you take
the blue pill, you wake up having won a two-million-dollar lottery. If you take the red pill, you wake
up paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of your life. You naturally choose the blue pill and
are pleased to find a large sum in your bank account the next morning. You could not think of many
things more depressing than being a paraplegic. Some might even think such a life was not worth
living. But they would be wrong.14
In a famous study on lottery winners and accident victims (including eighteen quadriplegics
and eleven paraplegics), within one year of winning the lottery or suffering an accident, something
odd occurred. The happiness of lottery winners returned to the same level as the control subjects who
did not win any money. Equally surprising, the happiness of accident victims returned to levels above
neutral, and a recent study out of Harvard found that paralyzed individuals were no less happy than
lottery winners over time.15 How did this happen?
 It’s more what didn’t happen. The high of winning the lottery didn’t sustain. Similarly, the
despair of becoming a paraplegic didn’t stick. Both lottery winners and paraplegics experienced what
psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the adaptation principle.16 We judge being a lottery winner (or
paraplegic) by what it is to become one. We often overlook, however, what it is like to actually be
one.
Humans quickly adapt to new situations. Novelty wears off faster than we expect. When we
imagine becoming a lottery winner, we envision only the wondrous things we’d do with our winnings.
We don’t anticipate the constant harassments of people wanting our money, the complexities of
managing it, or the new strains it causes on our social networks and family (so much so that lottery
winners actually set up support groups with one another).17 Nor do we expect, as a quadriplegic, that
so much joy could come from things we previously took for granted. As we re-learn even the most
basic tasks, we experience progress. And progress feels good.
This is not to say our conditions in life don’t matter. Painful changes are unpleasant and our
baseline levels of happiness can shift. The key finding is that when we’re faced with a small setback
or even a massive trauma (such as permanent spinal cord injury), we regularly misjudge the intensity
and duration of our emotional reactions. Ultimately, we recover better—and faster—than we expect.
Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson call this impact bias. Whether it’s failing an exam,
flunking an interview, or getting fired from a job, their studies have shown that people consistently
overestimate the negative impact of such events.18 And since we expect such failures to be more
painful and drawn out than they actually are, we fear them more than we should.
Gilbert and Wilson highlight two phenomena to explain this bias. The first is immune neglect.
Just as we have a physical immune system to fight threats to our body, we have a psychological
immune system to fight threats to our mental health. We identify silver linings, rationalize our actions,
and find meaning in our setbacks. We don’t realize how effective this immune system is, however,
because it operates largely beneath our conscious awareness.19 When we think about taking a risk, we
rarely consider how good we will be at reframing a disappointing outcome. In short, we
underestimate our resilience.
The second reason is focalism. When we contemplate failure from afar, according to Gilbert
and Wilson, we tend to overemphasize the focal event (i.e., failure) and overlook all the other
episodic details of daily life that help us move on and feel better.20 The threat of failure is so vivid
that it consumes our attention. This happens in part because the areas of the brain we use to perceive
the present are the same ones we employ to imagine the future. When we feel afraid of failing at a
new business or anxious about the shame of letting investors down and what our peers will think, it’s
hard to also imagine the pleasure we will get from our next venture and the other everyday activities
that are a necessary and enjoyable part of life.
We also overestimate how harshly others will judge us. Researchers Tom Gilovich and
Kenneth Savitsky call this the spotlight effect. In their numerous experiments of embarrassing
situations—such as flunking an intelligence test or having to wear a Barry Manilow T-shirt in front of
colleagues—participants regularly misjudge how negatively others perceive their behavior.21 We
expect others to focus intently on our shortcomings, but we neglect to consider the influence of key
peripheral factors, such as people’s positive memories of past interactions or how much others are
absorbed in their own worlds.
But you may still be wondering, what about the painful sting of regret? According to further
research by Gilovich and colleagues, we also miscalculate how long this sting lasts. It hurts at first,
but we deal with the pain of regrettable actions better than we think. Our psychological immune
system kicks in and helps us make sense of our setback. Failure gives us valuable feedback that we
use to address our regrettable actions and improve our situation in the future.
Studies consistently show that when we look back on our lives the most common regrets are
not the risks we took, but the ones we didn’t. Of the many regrets people describe, regrets of inaction
outnumber those of action by nearly two to one. Some of the most common include not pursuing more
education, not being more assertive, and failing to seize the moment. When people reflect later in life,
it is the things they did not do that generate the greatest despair.22
We are left with a paradox of inaction. On one hand we instinctively tend to stick with the
default, or go with the herd. Researchers call it the status quo bias.23 We feel safe in our comfort
zones, where we can avoid the sting of regret. And yet, at the same time, we regret most those actions
and risks we did not take.

Jerry Seinfeld took a few months to recover from his initial debacle. He got back up onstage a second
time late in the summer of 1976 at the Golden Lion Pub, a seedy bar in Times Square. Again, he was
visibly nervous and forgot to segue between jokes, but he barreled through and finished his routine.
Jerry continued to perform wherever he could throughout the city, getting increasingly comfortable
onstage until he finally landed a paid emcee gig at the newly opened Comic Strip club and became a
regular back at Catch a Rising Star.
Five years later, after painstakingly honing his material and reputation, on May 7, 1981, Jerry
debuted on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, followed by years of touring on the road, an
eventual HBO special, and finally, in 1989, the pilot for Seinfeld, which would go on to earn $2.7
billion from reruns alone and become one of America’s all-time favorite television sitcoms.
If Seinfeld hadn’t been brave enough to face the audience again after he bombed his first
performance, none of that would have happened. Caving to our fears of short-term regret is
shortsighted. Ultimately, we serve ourselves better by fearing a failure to act more than fearing failure
itself.

MICHAEL SCHWALBE is a PhD candidate in psychology at Stanford University. Previously,

Michael worked in investing and research in the finance industry for more than a decade. He has
written for 99U and OPEN Forum and consults for companies and NGOs on financial analytics as
well as organizational development. Follow him on Twitter @michaelschwalbe.

→ www.michaelschwalbe.com
UNDERSTANDING YOUR ROLE IN RISK
–

John Caddell

The ancient world was a forbidding, frightening place. Humans lived by their
wits, surrounded by mortal risks—predators, fires, enemy tribes, floods. No
wonder they looked to the gods and invented myths to explain the unknown and
protect them from harm. Thousands of years later, human learning and
invention has made the world much safer. Yet, we still retain the risk-averse
nature of our ancestors.

When we are confronted with situations in which we have to make a decision without all the
information we would like to have, we often err on the side of “wait and see,” using due diligence as
a way to put off risk, or to avoid it completely. What we forget is that even big mistakes can turn out
successfully in the end. Embracing risk is really just a function of adopting the right mind-set.

UNDERSTAND THE OPPORTUNITY

When evaluating whether to take a risk, it’s easy to see the early-stage pitfalls you could encounter.
Imagining the realization of the opportunity is much harder. But not making the attempt guarantees you
won’t realize the ultimate benefits. It is necessary to broaden the mind, see the bigger picture, and
know that with determination obstacles will be overcome.
Former Coca-Cola president Don Keough ran into this trap when his German management
team presented a plan to expand into East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Believing
the budget was too high, Keough vetoed the proposal. Frustrated by Keough’s summary rejection, the
management team threatened to resign. The head of German operations challenged Keough to look
more closely:
“You don’t know the potential of East Germany. You’ve never been there. You rejected it out
of hand without considering that this could be a great opportunity. At the very least, you should talk to
them again. But I’d like to ask you to do more. Come with me to see East Germany for yourself, first-
hand, and make up your own mind.” Keough ended up going with his team to East Germany and
seeing for himself. After the trip, he said, “My mind was completely changed. We assembled
everyone together, and I apologized for being so narrowly focused and so intransigent. Together, we
made plans then and there to buy several plants in the east.”24
Coke’s expansion into East Germany was not without missteps. Yet the opportunity was so
great, and the team’s determination to succeed so strong, they were able to work through the
disappointments and setbacks. East Germany became a fast-growing and profitable market for Coke.

ASSERT YOUR AGENCY

We are not powerless in the face of risk. After a decision has been made, we always have the ability
to affect our situations to increase the probability of success. This is agency, or the ability to take
actions that influence our destiny.
Future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning found himself without a team when the
Indianapolis Colts released him after fourteen seasons. For the first time in his career, Manning had to
find a team to play for. He auditioned for San Francisco 49ers, the Arizona Cardinals, and several
other teams before signing a three-year contract with the Denver Broncos. Manning said this about his
choice:

This decision was hard.… I had to pick one [team]. I wanted to go to all of ’em at one point.
But, like the other decisions I made in the past, I decided to make it and not look back. To go
from now and make it the right decision. I have to go to work to make it the right decision.

Rather than see his fate as linked to forces outside his control, Manning demonstrates a different view
—through hard work, he can make the decision a success. This sense of agency gives him a powerful
asset to drive the outcome he wants. If he fails, it will be in spite of his absolute best efforts to
succeed.

BE PERSISTENT
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they
gave up.” So said Thomas Edison. This can be hard to put into practice, however; just ask the
producers of the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
On February 7, 2011, reviewer Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote this after seeing a
preview of the show: “Spider-Man is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it
may also rank among the worst.… [It] is so grievously broken in every respect that it is beyond
repair.” The scathing review was only one of many calamities to befall the show, including the
injuries of several cast members in falls, and a preview in which Spider-Man himself was left
hanging helplessly above the audience when his flying harness malfunctioned.
 The producers, Jeremiah Harris and Michael Cohl, could have closed the show immediately
—standard procedure when a show is universally panned. By contrast, Harris and Cohl showed
agency, understanding of opportunity, and persistence in their response to the disasters plaguing the
show.
Harris and Cohl shut down Spider-Man temporarily. They sought out feedback from audience
members and put that feedback to use. They revised the script. The composers, Bono and the Edge of
U2, wrote new lyrics. The producers raised more money (on top of the record $60 million already
spent) to revamp the show. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark re-opened on June 14, 2011.
As the show re-opened, Cohl said this: “The bad news is that it was very expensive, and the
good news is that we will not quit and we will make this a success and that’s that.”
Within a few months, Spider-Man was among the highest grossing shows on Broadway and
had retained that status a year later. First Lady Michelle Obama and her two daughters had seen the
show, as had tens of thousands of others. A long Broadway run, and lucrative touring productions,
were assured.
The worst-case scenario in many of the risks we now face is not serious injury or death; it is a
financial setback, a blow to the reputation, a ding to the ego. Moreover, the increasing pace and
uncertainty of our economic lives increases the cost and risk of, paradoxically, avoiding risk in the
first place. Rather than trying to protect ourselves by avoiding decisions, then, wouldn’t it be better to
embrace the risks we take—and drive the outcome we desire?

JOHN CADDELL curates The Mistake Bank, which collects stories of business mistakes and
failures. He is an executive with more than twenty-five years’ experience in information
technology product development and sales. John is the author of The Mistake Bank: How to
Succeed by Forgiving Your Mistakes and Embracing Your Failures, available at Amazon.com.

→ www.mistakebank.com
Q&A:

RE-ENGINEERING THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT MISTAKES

–

with Tina Seelig

As an entrepreneur, a professor, a neuroscientist, and the executive director of

the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Tina Seelig is uniquely positioned to
understand, firsthand, how we think about risk-taking. For more than a decade,
Seelig has taught one of Stanford’s most popular courses on innovation, in which
she engages students in a series of radical creativity exercises that push them to
consider surprising problem-solving approaches and to understand their “risk
profile.” We talked to Seelig about how we can re-engineer our perspectives on
risk and why failure is often a precursor to our greatest achievements.

Is there any way to prepare for failure?

People who spend their time on creative endeavors know that failure is a natural part of the creative
process and are ready when it happens. As an example, Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing,
Handspring, and Numenta, gets worried when things go too smoothly, knowing that failure must be
lurking around the corner. When he was running Handspring, everything was going swimmingly for
the release of the original Visor, a new personal digital assistant. But Jeff kept warning his team that
something would happen. And it did. Within the first few days of the release of their first product,
they shipped about one hundred thousand units. It was remarkable. But the entire billing and shipping
system broke down. Some customers didn’t receive products they paid for, and others received three
or four times as many units as they ordered. This was a disaster, especially for a new business that
was trying to build its reputation.
That sounds like a nightmare. What did they do?

The entire team, including Jeff, buckled down and called each and every customer. They asked each
person what he or she had ordered, if they had received it, and whether they had been billed
correctly. If anything wasn’t perfect, the company corrected it on the spot. The key point is that Jeff
knew something would go wrong. He wasn’t sure what it would be, but he was prepared to deal with
anything that came their way. His experience had taught him that failure is inevitable, and that the key
to success is not dodging every bullet but being able to recover quickly.

So you think failure is universal? We can’t avoid it?

All of our paths are riddled with small and enormous failures. The key is being able to see these
experiences as experiments that yield valuable data and to learn what to do differently next time. For
most successful people, the bottom is lined with rubber as opposed to concrete. When they face a
failure, they hit bottom, sink in, and then bounce back, tapping into the energy of the impact to propel
them into another opportunity.
A great example is David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue. David initially started an airline
called Morris Air, which grew and prospered up until he sold it to Southwest Airlines for $130
million. He then became an employee of Southwest. After only five months, David was fired. He was
miserable working for them and, as he says, he was driving them crazy. As part of his contract, he had
a five-year non-compete agreement that prevented him from starting another airline. That seemed like
a lifetime to wait.
After taking time to recover from this blow, David decided to spend that time planning for his
next airline venture. He thought through all the details of the company, including the corporate values,
the complete customer experience, the type of people they would hire, as well as the details of how
they would train and compensate their employees. David says that getting fired and having to wait to
start another airline turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. When the non-compete
period was over, he was ready to hit the ground running. He was able to turn what seemed like a
terrible situation into a period of extreme productivity and creativity.

Do you think that certain types of people are better at taking risks than others?

Trying new things requires a willingness to take risks. However, risk-taking is not binary—you aren’t
a risk taker or not a risk taker. You’re likely comfortable taking some types of risks while finding
other types uncomfortable. You might not even see the risks that are comfortable for you to take,
discounting their riskiness, while you are likely to amplify the risk of things that make you anxious.
 For example, you might love flying down a ski slope at lightning speed or jumping out of
airplanes, and not even view these activities as risky. Or you might love giving public lectures or
taking on daunting intellectual challenges. The first group is drawn to physical risks, the second to
social risks, and the third to intellectual risks.
There are five primary types of risks: physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual. I
often ask people to map their own risk profile. With only a little bit of reflection, each person knows
which types of risks he or she is willing to take. They realize pretty quickly that risk-taking isn’t
uniform.

So how do you start to balance your risk profile? Or should you?

There isn’t a need to change your risk profile; however, it is useful to understand it and to pursue the
types of risks you feel comfortable taking and to avoid those that make you squirm. This insight
allows you to fill out your team with people with complementary risk profiles so that each person
plays to his or her strengths, taking on the types of challenges that match their profile. Additionally,
asking others to describe their risk profile is a valuable way to get to know what makes them tick and
how they can contribute to your organization.

Do you have any strategies for learning how to become more comfortable with
failure?

I require all my students to write a failure résumé. That is, to craft a résumé that summarizes all their
biggest screw-ups—personal, professional, and academic. For every failure, each student must
describe what he or she learned from that experience. Just imagine the looks of surprise this
assignment inspires in students who are so used to showcasing their successes. However, after they
finish their résumé, they realize that viewing experiences through the lens of failure forced them to
come to terms with their mistakes and to view them as a great source of data about what works and
what does not.

TINA SEELIG is the Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program as well as a
professor in the department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. She
teaches courses on creativity and entrepreneurship. Her newest books are inGenius: A Crash
Course on Creativity and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20.
→ Follow her on Twitter at @tseelig
LEANING INTO UNCERTAINTY
–

Jonathan Fields

Every creative endeavor, from writing a book to designing a brand to launching

a company, follows what’s known as an Uncertainty Curve. The beginning of a
project is defined by maximum freedom, very little constraint, and high levels of
uncertainty. Everything is possible; options, paths, ideas, variations, and
directions are all on the table. At the same time, nobody knows exactly what the
final output or outcome will be. And, at times, even whether it will be. Which is
exactly the way it should be.

Over time, the creators or teams begin to act. They spin all the crazy ideas in their heads onto the
page, the digital landscape, the canvas, the business. With each trial, they begin to see what’s working
and what’s not. Data and experience begin to replace intuition and leaps of faith. Freedom begins to
yield to constraint, the variables and possibilities that created great uncertainty begin to become fact,
creating more certainty about what the process will yield and whether it will succeed. The venture
and its outcome begin to take form.
Bumps along the way inevitably happen. Ideas that seemed to have great potential bomb,
sending the creative team back to the drawing board and ramping them back into higher states of
freedom, but also uncertainty.
Finally, through much experimentation, the deed is done. The book is written. The brand is
designed. The company is launched. The move made. Freedom, at least with regard to this phase of
the endeavor, is gone, consumed by structure and form. Uncertainty has given way to certainty. You
now know exactly what it looks and feels like, and whether you were capable of pulling it off.
The image on the facing page illustrates this move along the Uncertainty Curve. But, what may not be
so apparent is that the speed at which you move along the curve can either kill your ability to create
genius or fuel it.
Move too slowly and there’s no output. The process becomes consumed by inertia and either
suffers from paralysis or moves at a pace that’s so slow it all but ensures the endeavor is killed
before it ever yields meaningful output. We’ve all experienced that.
What may be less apparent, though, is that moving too quickly can get you faster to output, but
end up yielding something that’s far below what you’d have been capable of creating had you stayed
in the process longer.
Richard Wiseman actually conducted a fun experiment around this. He assembled two groups
of people who identified as either being very lucky or very unlucky. Each was given a newspaper and
told to count the number of pictures. The unlucky group took about two minutes. The lucky group took
about two seconds. Both came up with the right number. What gives?
Turns out, these were specially printed newspapers. On the inside front cover, above the fold
in two-inch block letters, was a message that read: “Stop counting. There are forty-three photographs
in this newspaper.” The people who identified themselves as unlucky were so focused on the task that
they completely ignored the much bigger prize. The people who identified themselves as lucky
remained open to the possibility that something outside the rigid instructions might come their way to
make the task better or easier.

UNCERTAINTY AS CREATIVE FUEL

A similar thing happens with the creative process. Those who are doggedly attached to the idea they
began with may well execute on that idea. And do it well and fast. But along the way, they often miss
so many unanticipated possibilities, options, alternatives, and paths that would’ve taken them away
from that linear focus on executing on the vision, and sent them back into a place of creative
dissidence and uncertainty, but also very likely yielded something orders of magnitude better.
All creators need to be able to live in the shade of the big questions long enough for truly
revolutionary ideas and insights to emerge. They need to stay and act in that place relentlessly through
the first, most obvious wave of ideas. Through the second, moving-toward-brutal phase. And then into
the revelation phase. But most don’t. They give up, backpedal, or settle for good enough when genius
lies just around the corner.
Which leaves us with a big question: Why?
Why do people move along the Uncertainty Curve either too slowly or too quickly, killing the
project or generating subpar outcomes? Part of the answer may lie in practicalities: team
dynamics/dysfunctions or flawed design execution. But a much bigger part of the puzzle lies in what
happens in a creator’s brain during the process of creation.
Most people are strongly wired to be intolerant of uncertainty. We experience it as pain, fear,
anxiety, and doubt. When faced with the need to coexist or, horror of horrors, act in the face of great
uncertainty, we recoil. The primal fear center in the brain, the amygdala, lights up, sending chemicals
coursing through our bodies that make us physically uneasy, emotionally uncomfortable, and, in short
order, spent.
We know the quest to create something from nothing requires us to go to that place. But we’re
so poorly equipped to handle it, we begin to make decisions based not on what’s best for the
endeavor, but on what will get us out of that painful place of uncertainty the fastest. For some, that
means backing down, becoming stalled or paralyzed. For others, it means rushing to just get it over
with. Either way, the end result is either nothing or something far below your true potential.
So how can we live in the shade of uncertainty long enough to birth genius? Three thoughts:
One, simply understanding the psychology of the process allows you to be more mindful of the
speed at which you move from freedom to constraint.
Two, when you reframe uncertainty as possibility, the above question changes. Nothing truly
innovative, nothing that has advanced art, business, design, or humanity, was ever created in the face
of genuine certainty or perfect information. Because the only way to be certain before you begin is if
the thing you seek to do has already been done. In which case, you’re no longer creating, you’re
replicating. And that’s not why we’re here. When you bring the possibility frame to the quest, you’ll
still feel the butterflies that accompany action in the face of uncertainty, but you’ll be better armed to
experience them as continuing evidence that what you’re working on matters.
Three, there is no universal formula that tells you how quickly to move along the uncertainty
curve. It will differ from project to project and be strongly influenced by your unique resources and
constraints, both internal and external. What’s more important is that you clearly define those
resources and constraints, cultivate the mind-set, workflow, environment, and lifestyle needed to fuel
action, then act. And elevate learning as a core metric. The enemy of creation is not uncertainty, it’s
inertia.

JONATHAN FIELDS is a dad, husband, author, speaker, and entrepreneur. His latest book,
Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel For Brilliance, was named the #1 personal
development book of 2011 by 800-CEO-READ. Fields blogs at JonathanFields.com, and runs the
media and education venture GoodLifeProject.com and book-marketing educational venture
TribalAuthor.com.

→ www.goodlifeproject.com
MAKING PURPOSEFUL BETS IN A RANDOM WORLD
–

Frans Johansson

At some point in the summer of 1907, Picasso completed what was to become
one of the most important paintings of his career, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Its
style was such a departure from the paintings before it, and it had such a
provocative theme—five prostitutes staring at the viewer—that the painting
simply demanded attention. It has since gone down in history as a cornerstone in
modernism.

On December 10, 2009, Rovio released the iPhone version of its game Angry Birds. After topping the
charts in a few European countries it quickly hit the United States with full force and changed the
world of casual games. Within two years it had been downloaded almost a billion times, and it is
now one of the most played games in history.
In March 2008, a young woman named Bethenny Frankel joined the cast of a new reality show
called The Real Housewives of New York City. The exposure allowed her to highlight a new product
of hers, Skinnygirl Margarita. It soon took off and became a sensation among women looking for a
low-calorie night out. She later sold the brand for $64 million.
Now, what do Picasso, Rovio, and Frankel all have in common? On the face of it, seemingly
nothing. But dig a little bit deeper and you will find one of the most fundamental truths about success
in design, business, and innovation generally. It comes down to this: none of these people or
organizations really had much of a clue as to exactly which one of their ideas was going to work. In
fact, the success garnered in each of these examples is the result of harnessing unexpected insights and
placing bets all with an unknown outcome. In other words, success is more serendipitous and random
than we think.
This may seem quite surprising. We are used to thinking that successful people and companies
have cracked some secret code, and when we retell the stories of how they did it we do so in order to
understand how we can do the same. Take Rovio, for instance. The Finnish company behind Angry
Birds was able to not only design an amazing game, but also to develop a killer marketing strategy for
it. Instead of focusing on the massive US market first, they focused on smaller European markets such
as Greece and the Czech Republic. Those markets had relatively few downloads, and Rovio figured
it would be pretty easy to reach the top spot on those lists, which they were able to do. With those
wins in hand they turned to the United Kingdom, where the game hit the number one spot virtually
overnight. After that, they decided they finally had enough momentum to go for the US market.
 Everything about this story suggests that Rovio has not only a firm grasp on winning game
design, but also on how to market games successfully. But if they had all that, why did they wait eight
years to use it? Because that was how long they had been around before releasing Angry Birds. It was
their fifty-second game. None of the games that came before it had even a fraction of Angry Bird’s
success. Instead, this one game brought the company back from the brink and has allowed it to build a
franchise that may last years. Soon after Angry Bird’s success, Rovio was valued at $1 billion.
Success, it turns out, has far less to do with figuring out exactly what the right next move is and
far more to do with serendipity and randomness. A rare few of us operate in a world where the rules
never or rarely change, such as chess or tennis or golf, and in such a world you can practice your way
to domination. Hard, consistent work brings you glory, since you know exactly what you have to do—
you just have to do it better than everyone else, often after having put more than ten thousand hours or
so of hard work behind it. This so-called ten-thousand-hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell,
does not apply in any other endeavor, however. Neither Reed Hastings nor Richard Branson had ten
thousand hours of practice when they became leaders in their various fields.
Not only that, we frequently see people and organizations we consider brilliant follow up
great success with mediocre or uninspiring fare. Phenomenal CEOs disappoint, kick-ass movie
directors leave us frustrated, and successful entrepreneurs fail to live up to their investors’
expectations. And sometimes they can go from a success to a failure without any real rhyme or reason.
Filmmaker Woody Allen is a prime example of this throughout his career. But so is virtually every
single innovator. Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, first created Blogger, which was a
great success. He then created Odeo, a podcasting company that did not really work out all that well.
But he followed that up with Twitter. This all suggests that success is far more random and
serendipitous than most of us would like to acknowledge. So a question immediately follows: Given
that, what should you do about it?

PLACE MANY BETS

If it is difficult to predict just what exactly is going to be successful, it follows that you have to keep
trying. The more times you try, the more likely that you will create successful designs, start-ups, or
pieces of art. If we look at the most successful innovators throughout history, we find that they have
all been stunningly productive. They keep trying over and over again. Pablo Picasso created
somewhere between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand works of art in his lifetime. He did not
have the ability to simply decide that any given piece of art was going to become a masterpiece, such
as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Instead, he set himself up for great success by rolling the dice over
and over. Many of his canvases have collected dust in cellars around the world, and with good
reason. They sucked. Picasso could not predict with any certainty which of his pieces would become
celebrated and which would be recycled. He was, in essence, placing a bet that a percentage of his
work would take hold. It therefore follows that Picasso’s output gave him an incredible edge in
becoming successful.
The same is true for Bethenny Frankel. What many people don’t realize is that her appearance
on Bravo’s reality show was part of a long list of bets she made for success. She never knew which
bet was going to work (although she most likely believed all of them would succeed at their
inception), but she attempted nearly everything and anything. First she started a party-planning
company, then a pashmina-import business, and followed it up with an unsuccessful health food store.
Next, she launched a health-conscious bakery and then applied for Donald Trump’s hit show The
Apprentice but was not selected. Soon after that, she landed a part on Martha Stewart’s ill-fated The
Apprentice: Martha Stewart and went on to launch a custom-meals business. She wrote a column for
Health magazine, which led to an endorsement deal with Pepperidge Farm. After eight bets she
joined the cast of Bravo’s new reality show, The Real Housewives of New York City, where she was
able to launch Skinnygirl, a cocktail mix that she then sold for $64 million. In other words, she gave
herself many chances to be successful. In an increasingly unpredictable world, you have to leverage
the statistical advantage of randomness by placing many bets.

MAKE THE BETS SMALL

If you should place many bets to increase your chances of success, then it also follows that you cannot
afford to do so if those bets are large. If just one of those large bets fails, you may not get a second
chance, since you will be out of resources. Unfortunately, we tend to believe that if we just had more
money or more resources we could increase our chances of success. The facts on the ground don’t
support such a view.
For instance, Apple spent $500 million developing a handheld computing device, the Newton,
during the late eighties and early nineties. It was a complete failure. Meanwhile, Palm Computing
spent $3 million developing the PalmPilot, the fastest selling computer product in the nineties. More
money did not make the difference. What did? Well, the Pilot was actually Palm’s second attempt at
getting it right. They had spent only $4 million creating a truly awful device called the Zoomer, which
allowed them enough money to try again. Apple, on the other hand, only tried once.
By limiting the resources behind bets, by placing what entrepreneur Peter Sims calls “little
bets,” we can place more of them. When Yngve Bergqvist created the Ice Hotel, in the town of
Jukkasjärvi in northern Sweden, it stunned people across the world. The entire hotel is made of ice—
walls, ceiling, beds, tables, everything. Most of us would have considered such an idea close to
impossible to come up with, and if we had thought of it, we would discard it as crazy. But Bergqvist
never started with the Ice Hotel in mind. Instead, he came up with many smaller ideas that, step by
step, led to the Ice Hotel.
First, he created a small ice exhibit by flying a group of ice sculptures over from Japan. It
gained some unexpected interest. The next winter he created a building made out of snow with an art
gallery exhibit inside. The year after that he created a building made out of ice that had interesting
exhibits inside, such as an ice bar and a movie screen made out snow. It was at that point that a team
of backpackers approached Bergqvist asking to sleep on a bed made out of ice and said they were
willing to pay for it. Who could have guessed it? The winter that followed marked the first time
Bergqvist actually created the Ice Hotel—a direct result of his having the resources to try something
over and over again.
The world is random and unpredictable, which means that it is close to impossible to outline
exactly what your next best move is. But you can explore it—by doing and trying. Just make sure you
don’t go all in before you’ve figured out that it works.
FRANS JOHANSSON lives in Brooklyn and is the author of The Click Moment and the
international bestseller The Medici Effect. He is the founder of the global innovation strategy firm
the Medici Group, which works with corporations, NGOs, and governments around the world to
break new ground in an uncertain world.

→ www.themedicigroup.com
KEY TAKEAWAYS
–

Taking Risks

APPRECIATE YOUR ADAPTABILITY

Be aware that when you fail, you will adapt to the new situation much more quickly than you
expect. Setbacks often have a silver lining.

TAKE ACTION TO AVOID REGRET

Fear a failure to act more than you fear failure itself. Most people’s biggest regrets are the
opportunities they did not act on, not those they did.

DON’T GO ALL IN
Try to make small bets for the initial test-runs of your project or idea. It’s hard to predict what
will take off, and this limits your exposure to risk.

MISTAKES ARE INFORMATION

Mine your “failures” for valuable data about what works and what doesn’t. As long as you learn
from the process, it’s not a mistake.

DIVE INTO UNCERTAINTY

Don’t be afraid to live in the shade of big questions. Uncertainty and ambiguity are a necessary
part of risk-taking and the creative process.

ACCEPT YOUR AGENCY

Embrace your power to make the outcome of any risk a success. Almost any situation can be
turned around with persistence and ingenuity.

Get more insights and the desktop wallpaper at:

→ www.99u.com/risk-taking
THE BETTER YOU
–

Jack Cheng

Someone is sitting at your desk. There is something familiar about this person.
From a distance, this person bears a striking resemblance to you: they have the
same frame, the same face, the same features as you. But as you get closer, you
begin to notice subtle differences between this person and yourself. They look
like they eat healthier and exercise a little more regularly. Their posture is slightly
better and their clothes have fewer wrinkles. This person is the Better You.

The Better You knows the same things you know. They’ve had the same successes you’ve had, and
they’ve made the same mistakes. They strive for the same virtues and falter to the same vices. The
Better You procrastinates, too. The Better You is not perfect. But the difference between you and the
Better You is that the latter reacts a little faster, with a little more willpower. They practice their
virtues a little more often and succumb to their vices a little less often. They rein in their
procrastination a little quicker. They start their work a little earlier. They know when to take a break
a little sooner.
The Better You knows, just as you know, that doing what you love is difficult but worthwhile.
They know, just as you know, that the difficulty is what makes it worthwhile in the first place. They
know, as you know, that if everything was easy, nothing would have significance, and you wouldn’t
need to adopt new metaphors or read new books about how to do the work you should be doing.
The Better You is your believable possible. Your believable possible is your potential in any
given moment, the person you know at your very core that you are capable of being at this instant.
Your believable possible exists at the edge of your perceived ability. Your believable possible is
frightening and uncomfortable, but not to the point of paralysis. Your believable possible is just
uncomfortable enough. We all have different believable possibles. Bruce Lee’s believable possible
was being the most dangerous man in the world. Muhammad Ali’s was being the greatest boxer of all
time. Your own believable possible may be slightly less ambitious. But only you know what your own
believable possible is.
The Better You is not a fixed, singular being. The Better You springs new from each moment,
is born and dies with each action you take. Each action creates a new set of possibilities. The Better
You is an alternate dynamic present, rather than a fixed, static past. Measuring yourself against the
Better You is no mere matter of racing to beat the person you were the day before. Instead, you’re
racing to keep up with the person you could be right now.
 The Better You wants you to meet them where they are. The Better You is the ant that has
strayed from the colony and discovered a source of food. The Better You knows the way. It says:
follow me. And even when there is no food in sight, you know where the trail will take you in the end.
The Better You will never lead you astray. So you follow the trail. You sit at the desk and place your
hands on your tools—on your keyboard and mouse, your notebook and pen, your palette and brush—
and you start on your way.
There are the rare moments of alignment, moments when you reunite with the Better You, when
you match the Better You move for move. They are sitting at the desk and working and writing and
sketching, and you are sitting at the same desk and working and writing and sketching. You and the
Better You are occupying the same physical space and the same mental space. You are completely
engaged in the work before you. And when you are doing the work you should be doing, the work the
Better You is doing, you become whole, fully there.
The joy of alignment makes alignment more frequent, and as alignment becomes more frequent,
something interesting happens: you begin to see a different person, a better Better You. The new
Better You is slightly out of reach, just as the old one was, because there is no limit to Better. Better
is the mechanized rabbit on the rail at a greyhound race. Better is propelled by motors and
microprocessors and magic and things our dog-brains cannot comprehend, our dog-bodies cannot
outrun.
But the Better You knows, just as you know, that the thrill is in the chase, that happiness is
motion, and that fulfillment is the constant striving for that which is just beyond our reach. The Better
You knows this is the way it has always been, and the way it always will be. And you know it, too.

JACK CHENG is a writer, designer, and entrepreneur based in Brooklyn. He is the author of These
Days, a novel about the human side of technology, published in spring 2013.

→ www.jackcheng.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
–

My heartiest thanks must go to our absolutely incredible brain trust of contributors: Teresa Amabile,
Sunny Bates, Scott Belsky, Ela Ben-Ur, Michael Bungay Stanier, David Burkus, John Caddell, Ben
Casnocha, Jack Cheng, Jonathan Fields, Joshua Foer, Heidi Grant Halvorson, Frans Johansson,
Steven Kramer, Steffen Landauer, Mark McGuinness, Cal Newport, Bob Safian, Michael Schwalbe,
Tony Schwartz, Tina Seelig, and Scott H. Young. This book would not exist without your insights and
expertise. Thank you so much for your time, energy, and generosity.

I owe many thanks for the beautiful cover design and interior layout of this book to the vision of
Behance co-founder and chief of design Matias Corea—one of my absolute favorite creative
collaborators—and to the excellent eye of our talented designer Raewyn Brandon.

I am also indebted to Katie Salisbury for her enthusiasm and editorial guidance, to Courtney Dodson
for shepherding this book gracefully through production, to 99U managing editor Sean Blanda for
great feedback on drafts, and to the entire Behance and Amazon teams for their incredible support,
talent, and tenacity.

Last, I must extend much, much appreciation to Scott Belsky for his invaluable input on shaping this
book series, and—more important—for believing in me. Having the chance to lead 99U as part of
Behance’s mission to empower the creative world has been—and will continue to be—an incredible
and invigorating opportunity for which I am deeply grateful.

— JOCELYN K. GLEI, editor-in-chief, 99U

ABOUT 99U
–

99U is Behance’s effort to deliver the “missing curriculum” that you didn’t get in school, highlighting
best practices for making ideas happen. We do this through interviews, articles, and videos on our
Webby Award–winning website at 99u.com, our annual 99U Conference in New York City, our
bestselling book Making Ideas Happen, and our ongoing 99U book series, which includes Manage
Your Day-to-Day and this book, Maximize Your Potential.

→ www.99u.com
ABOUT BEHANCE
–

Behance, the leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work, is on a mission to
empower the creative world. Creatives from across industries use Behance to gain exposure,
attribution, and opportunity. Behance also powers portfolio display for thousands of other websites
around the web, including AdWeek, RISD, and the National Design Awards. Companies and
enthusiasts around the globe use Behance to track and engage top talent.

As an extension of our mission, we created 99U to foster new research and education on best
practices for making ideas happen. Since its founding in 2009, 99U has grown to encompass a
popular annual conference, a Webby Award-winning website, and this ongoing book series.

Behance is a proud member of the Adobe family.

→ www.behance.com
ABOUT THE EDITOR
–

As editor-in-chief and director, Jocelyn K. Glei leads the 99U in its mission to provide the “missing
curriculum” on making ideas happen. She oversees the 99u.com website—which has won two Webby
Awards for Best Cultural Blog—and leads the curation and execution of the popular 99U Conference,
which has presented talks from visionary creatives including Jack Dorsey, Beth Comstock, John
Maeda, Jonathan Adler, Stefan Sagmeister, Jad Abumrad, and many more. She is also the editor of the
99U book series, which includes Manage Your Day-to-Day and this book, Maximize Your Potential.

Prior to joining Behance and 99U, Jocelyn was the global managing editor at the online media
company Flavorpill, leading development of new editorial products. She has also consulted with
dozens of brands and agencies, from Herman Miller to PSFK to Huge Inc, on content strategy and
web launches. She is passionate about creating content-driven products that people love.

→ www.jkglei.com
ENDNOTES
–

1. Kevin Kelly, “Techno Life Skills,” The Technium, April 28, 2009.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/04/techno_life_ski.php.

2. Thomas Friedman, “The Start-Up of You,” New York Times, July 12, 2011.

3. Tina Seelig, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (New York: HarperOne, 2009) 122.

4. Mueller, C. M. and Dweck, C. S. “Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children’s Motivation
and Performance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 1 (1998): 33-52.

5. Baumeister, Roy F.; Bratslavsky, Ellen; Muraven, Mark; Tice, Dianne M. “Ego Depletion: Is the
Active Self a Limited Resource?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 5
(May 1998): 1252–1265.

6. Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, Jane Wardle. “How Are Habits
Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World.” European Journal of Social
Psychology 40, no. 6 (Oct 2010): 998–1109.

7. Ivan P. Pavlov, “Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the

Cerebral Cortex,” Classics in the History of Psychology, accessed March 4, 2013,
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Pavlov.

8. Kevin Dunbar, “How Scientists Really Reason: Scientific Reasoning in Real-World Laboratories,”
in Mechanisms of Insight, edited by Robert J. Sternberg and Janet Davidson (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1995), 365–395.

9. Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro, “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem,” American
Journal of Sociology 111, no. 2 (2005): 447–504.

10. John James, The Contractors of Chartres. 2 volumes. (Wyong, Australia: West Grinstead
Publishing, 1979–81); John James, The Master Masons of Chartres (London, New York,
Chartres, and Sydney: West Grinstead Publications, 1990).

11. Roger Coleman, The Art of Work (London: Pluto Press, 1988) 15.
12. Jerry Oppenheimer, Seinfeld: The Making of American Icon (New York: HarperCollins
Publishers, 2002), 116–120; Kathleen Tracy, Jerry Seinfeld: The Entire Domain (Toronto:
Carol Publishing, 1998) 19–20.

13. V. S. Chib et al., “Neural Mechanisms Underlying Paradoxical Performance for Monetary
Incentives Are Driven by Loss Aversion,” Neuron 74, no. 3 (May 2012): 582–594.

14. K. Gerhart, J. Koziol-McLain, S.R. Lowenstein, G.G. Whiteneck, “Quality of Life Following
Spinal Cord Injury: Knowledge and Attitudes of Emergency Care Providers,” Annals of
Emergency Medicine 23 no. 4 (May 1994): 807–812.

15. P. Brichman, D. Coates, and R. Janoff-Bulman, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is
Happiness Relative?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 no. 8 (1978): 917–
927; H. Hayward, Lottery Winners and Accident Survivors: Happiness Is Relative. Poster
presented at the fourteenth annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology,
New Orleans (2013).

16. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006) 82–86.

17. H. R. Kaplan, Lottery Winners: How They Won and How Winning Changed Their Lives (New
York: Harper and Row, 1978).

18. T. D. Wilson and D. T. Gilbert, “Affective Forecasting,” Advances in Experimental Social

Psychology 35 (2003): 345–411.

19. D. T. Gilbert et al., “Immune Neglect: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 3 (1998): 617–638.

20. T. D. Wilson et al., “Focalism: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 78, no. 5 (2000): 821–836.

21. K. Savitsky, N. Epley, and T. Gilovich, “Do Others Judge Us as Harshly as We Think?
Overestimating the Impact of Our failures, Shortcomings, and Mishaps,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 81, no. 1 (Jul 2001): 44–56; T. Gilovich, V. H. Medvec, and K. Savitsky,
“The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment: An Egocentric Bias in Estimates of the Salience of
One’s Own Actions and Appearance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, no. 2
(Feb 2000): 211–222.

22. N. J. Roese and A. T. Summerville, “What We Regret Most… and Why,” Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin 31, no. 9 (Sep 2005): 1273–1285; T. Gilovich, V. H. Medvec, and D.
Kahneman, “Varieties of Regret: A Debate and Partial Resolution,” Psychological Review 105,
 no. 3 (1998): 602–605; T. Gilovich and V. H. Medvec, “The Experience of Regret: What, When,
and Why,” Psychological Review 102, no. 2 (1995): 379–395.

23. W. Samuelson and R. Zeckhauser, “Status Quo Bias in Decision Making,” Journal of Risk and
Uncertainty 1 (1988): 7–59.

24. Donald R. Keough, “The Ten Commandments of Business Failure,” Portfolio (2008): 63-64.
INDEX
–

A
accountability partners, 135
adaptability, 39–40, 46–47
making your own luck and, 53–59
adaptation principle, 188–189
Adler, Alfred, 203
agency, 199–200
Ali, Muhammad, 238
alignment, 239
Allen, Woody, 228
Amabile, Teresa, 115–123
Amazon, 38
Angry Birds, 225–227
anxiety, 79
Apple, 41, 230
The Apprentice, 229
The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, 229
authority, 173–174

B
Basic Rest Activity cycle, 86–87
Bates, Sunny, 151–156
Baumeister, Roy, 106–107
beliefs, examining, 81
believable possible, 238
Belsky, Scott, 17–20, 63–67
Ben-Ur, Ela, 115–123
Bergqvist, Yngve, 230–231
Berle, Milton, 10
beta phase, permanent, 38–39
bets, little, 229–230
The Better You, 237–240
Bezos, Jeff, 38
Block, Peter, 142
Blogger, 228
Bono, 201
Branson, Richard, 227
Brantley, Ben, 200
Broadway musicals
collaboration in, 162–165
risk in, 200–201
bureaucracy, 19
Burkus, David, 161–166

C
Caddell, John, 197–201
career paths, 10–11
continuous re-imagination of, 45–48
craft before passion in, 27–32
entrepreneurship in, 37–41
finding your sweet spot and, 63–67
making your own luck and, 53–59
myths about, 46
proactivity in, 24–25
Casnocha, Ben, 37–41
change
building skills and, 72–73
making your own luck and, 53–59
Chartres Cathedral, 171–177
Cheng, Jack, 237–240
classical conditioning, 109–110
coaching, 99–100
Coca-Cola, 198–199
Cohl, Michael, 200–201
collaboration, 128
building structure for, 135
creating teams for, 161–166
collaborative relationships, 11
comfort zone, living outside your, 95–100
communication skills, 174
competition, as motivator, 20
competitive advantage, 39
conditioning, classical, 109–110
Confessions of an Advertising Man (Ogilvy), 173
consistency, 109–110
The Contractors of Chartres (James), 172
contracts, social, 142
Cooke, Ed, 95, 99
Cosby, Bill, 243
creativity
collaborative teams and, 161–166
diaries for, 115–123
leading and co-creation in, 171–178
networking and, 155–156
solitude and, 131–135
uncertainty and, 218
criticism, self-, 75–81

D
The Daybooks of Edward Weston, 116–118
decision making
habits in, 105–111
risk averse, 197–201
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso), 225, 228–229
diaries, 115–123
discipline, 87
diversity, 163–166
Donne, John, 128
Drucker, Peter, 43
Dunbar, Kevin, 161–162
Dweck, Carol, 76–77

E
Eames, Charles, 158–159
Edge of U2, 201
Edison, Thomas, 9, 200
Einstein, Albert, 50-51
effectiveness, programming, 106–111
effort, 76–77
ego, 176–177
ego depletion, 106–107
Einstein, Albert, 131
empowerment, 17–18
The End of Nature (McKibben), 28–29, 30
engagement, 17–18, 118
focusing on mission and, 47–48, 54–55
 working with intention and, 63–67
entrepreneurial instinct, 37–41
Erickson, Milton, 113
Ericsson, K. Anders, 85–87
example, leading by, 173–174
experience, 117
expertise, 11, 72–73. See also skills
comfort zone vs., 95–100
through deliberate practice, 85–91

F
failure
changing how you think about, 205–210
fear of, 79, 185, 187–192
as learning opportunity, 18–19, 207–208, 209–210
permission for, 79
preparation for, 206
universality of, 207–208
Fast Company, 45
fear, 79, 185, 187–192
feedback, 76–77, 98–100, 133
praise for effort vs. intelligence, 76–77, 78
in resilient relationships, 145–146
fellow travelers, 134
Fields, Jonathan, 215–220
flexibility, 39–40
focalism, 190
focus, 87, 88, 89. See also practice
in changing habits, 107–109
diaries and, 116–117
on mission, 54–55
Foer, Joshua, 95–100
Frankel, Bethenny, 226, 229
Free Radicals, 17–20
Friedman, Thomas, 56
Fuller, Buckminster, 115

G
Generation Flux, 45–48
generosity, 56, 151–156
Gilbert, Daniel, 189–190
Gilovich, Tom, 190–191
Gladwell, Malcolm, 86, 227
Glei, Jocelyn K., 53–59
Gmail, 38
Guevara, Che, 115

H
habits
diaries and, 119–121
reprogramming, 105–111
Haidt, Jonathan, 188–189
Halvorson, Heidi Grant, 75–81
Handspring, 206–207
Harris, Jeremiah, 200–201
Hastings, Reed, 227
Hawkins, Jeff, 206–207
help, asking for, 80, 131–137
Hoffer, Eric, 102–103
hot buttons, 145
Hubbard, Elbert, 82-83

I
Ice Hotel, 230–231
ideas. See also creativity
building on others’, 175–176
generating vs. executing, 9
impact bias, 189–190
improvisation, 174–175
intention, working with, 63–67
interests. See also passion
discovering your, 64–65
intersection of with skills and opportunity, 66–67
ISO intersection, 66–67

J
James, John, 172, 176
JetBlue, 207–208
Jobs, Steve, 41
job satisfaction, 17–20
 craft before passion and, 27–32
finding your sweet spot and, 63–67
lifestyle traits and, 29–30
Johansson, Frans, 225–231
Johnson, Steven, 194–195
Journaling Cycle, 118–120. See also diaries
judgment of others, 190–191
Jung, Carl, 149

K
Kahneman, Daniel, 117
Kelley, David, 212–213
Kelly, Kevin, 55
Keough, Don, 198–199
Kramer, Steven, 115–123

L
Landauer, Steffen, 131–137
leading, 171–178
Lee, Bruce, 238
lifestyle, job satisfaction and, 29–30
lottery winners, 188–189
luck, making your own, 53–59, 226–227

M
Manning, Peyton, 199–200
markets and marketing, 25
The Master Masons of Chartres (James), 172
McGuinness, Mark, 171–178
McKibben, Bill, 28–32
meaning, 47–48, 122
memorization, 95
memory, 117
mentors, 99–100
meritocracy, 20
mind-set
about change, 47
be good vs. get better, 72–73, 75–81
of constant growth, 73
 for embracing risk, 198
permanent beta, 38–39
mission, 47–48, 54–55
mistakes, how to think about, 205–210
Morris Air, 207
motivation, 90, 100, 118
Mueller, Claudia, 76–77

N
Neeleman, David, 207–208
networking, 19–20, 127–179
in a connection economy, 151–156
entrepreneurial, 40
generosity and, 56, 151, 153
opportunity stream and, 65–66
reciprocity in, 155
Newport, Cal, 27–32
99U, 9

O
Obama, Michelle, 201
obstacles, 122
O’Callahan, Jay, 132
Odeo, 228
Ogilvy, David, 173
OK Plateau, 95–100
openness, 57–58
open source technology, 19
opportunities, 10–11
craft before passion in, 27–32
creating, 23–69
entrepreneurial instinct for, 37–41
finding your stream of, 65–66
finding your sweet spot and, 63–67
intersection of with interest and skills, 64–65
for learning, 46–47
making your own luck and, 53–59
in risk, 198–199
takeaways on, 68–69
Outliers (Gladwell), 86
P
Palm Computing, 230
PalmPilot, 230
passion, 20
as compass, 47–48
cultivating craft before, 27–32
finding your, 64–65
patterns. See also habits
noting in diaries, 122
reprogramming, 105–111
Patton, George, 115
Pavlov, Ivan, 109–110
paying it forward, 19
performance
being good vs. getting better mind-set and, 75–81
deliberate practice and, 85–91
fear and, 187–188
feedback and, 98–100
OK Plateau in, 95–100
tracking, 100
persistence, 200–201
Picasso, Pablo, 225, 228–229
Pitard, Monsieur, 173
pitches, 56–57
planning, 39–40
diaries in, 121–122
what’s next, 58
Plato, 135
Porter, Cole, 163
potential, 237–240
practice
beyond your comfort zone, 97–99
deliberate, 85–91
praise, for effort vs. intelligence, 76–77, 78
proactivity, 10, 56–57
progress, 80, 118, 122, 189

Q
Q scores, 163–165

R
randomness, 226–227
The Real Housewives of New York, 226, 229
relationships, 127–181
asking for help, 131–137
building resilient, 141–146
collaborative, 11
collaborative teams, 161–166
connections in, 151–156
leading, co-creation and, 171–178
opportunity stream from, 65–66, 128–127
takeaways on, 180–181
The Republic (Plato), 135
resilience, 141–146
rest, importance of, 88, 90
risk, 11, 183–229
fear of failure and, 79, 185, 187–192
how we think about mistakes and, 205–210
intelligent, 40–41
leaning into uncertainty and, 215–220
permission to fail and, 79
purposeful, 225–231
takeaways on, 232–233
understanding your role in, 197–201
value of, 184–185
willingness to take, 208
risk profile, 205, 208–209
ritual, 87, 88–90
Rovio, 225–227

S
Safian, Robert, 45–48
Savitsky, Kenneth, 190–191
Schumacher, E. F., 93
Schwalbe, Michael, 187–192
Schwartz, Tony, 85–91
Scott, Sir Walter, 119–121
Seelig, Tina, 57–58, 205–210
Seinfeld, Jerry, 187, 191–192
Seneca, 61
serendipity, 226–227
Shawn, William, 28
Sims, Peter, 230
Sinek, Simon, 56
skills
being good at vs. getting better at, 75–81
building, 71–127
communication, 174
creativity, 115–123
daily habits and, 105–111
deliberate practice of, 85–91
entrepreneurial, 37–41
finding your key, 65
gaining new, 46–47
intersection of with interests and opportunity, 64–65
outside your comfort zone, 95–100
passion before, 30–31
stages of acquisition of, 96
takeaways on, 124–125
technology and, 55
Skinnygirl Margarita, 226, 229
sleep, 88, 90
small wins, 118
small world quotient, 163–165
social contracting, 142–145
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, 200–201
Spiro, Jarrett, 162–165
spotlight effect, 190–191
Stanier, Michael Bungay, 141–146
status quo, 19, 184
Stewart, Martha, 229
strengths, highlighting, 136

T
teams, collaborative, 161–166
technology, 19, 53, 55
ten-thousand-hour rule, 227
Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 117
Trump, Donald, 229
trust, 177
truthfulness, 134
Twitter, 228

U
uncertainty, 215–220, 222–223
 making your own luck and, 53–59
Uncertainty Curve, 215–220
Uzzi, Brian, 162–165

V
Voltaire, 222–223

W
Warhol, Andy, 115
Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 163
Weston, Edward, 115, 116–118
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (Seelig), 57–58
Wikipedia, 175
Williams, Evan, 228
willpower, 87, 106–107
Wilson, Timothy, 189–190
wins, small, 118
Wiseman, Richard, 217
Woolf, Virginia, 115

Y
Young, Scott H., 105–111
Yunus, Muhammad, 37

Z
Zola, Émile, 34–35
Zoomer, 230