I’ve realized I need a habit of documenting the problems for which I’m prone to seek closure. Just like we advise folks to keep a “Bug List” of potential problems in the world worth solving, I need to keep a “Shrug List” of all the problems I’ve kicked down the road.

From education reformer Kwaku Aning, “Do I go deeper on a specific topic or do I learn something entirely new? Part of me is a proud generalist, but another part is an aspiring ‘expert.’ I’m at peace with the struggle.”

Uncertainty is one of the most psychologically distressing phenomena we experience as human beings. For this reason, we long for what social psychologist Arie Kruglanski called “cognitive closure.” But this is NOT a helpful tendency when solving novel problems.

From Richard Wilding, Founder of WMW. “Believing that the client is always right, at the expense of the mission you’ve set out to achieve, means that you create all sorts of headaches…”

Dr. Anja Svetina Nabergoj writes, “Once you know your energy curve, you can derive WHEN to do WHAT. Seek alignment between what your brain is best primed to do at any given time and the task you will engage in.”

Historic inventors, artists, and innovators hack their baser impulses with an output regimen. I’ve noticed in my own life that it’s impossible to overstate the power of a commitment to output, even one that few people are watching.

It’s easy to neglect learning, or allow it to be pushed off the plate in the midst of a busy week. Even if you’ve blocked time for learning on your calendar, it’s easy to fudge when you’re only stealing time from yourself. Simple hack: invite someone else to the learning moment! Another learner is MUCH harder for me to blow off than I am.

The single-most enjoyable hour of work each week is the hour I deliberately shed the “teacher’s” cap and put on the student’s. Instead of showing up to talk, I show up to listen. But boy does it take intention to protect that time.

Examples from Google X, Amazon, and even 3M all demonstrate that public ceremony reinforces organizational values, especially when those values run contrary to conventional business rules.

This post is from Kelly Garrett Zeigler, VP of Consumer Data and Insights at Vans, a VF Company. “Creativity isn’t a privilege or luxury reserved for an elite few, and it’s not a monolithic ideal with a narrow manifestation via the arts. It’s a capacity and responsibility that lives in all of us.”

“On August 5, 2010, 700,000 tons of some of the hardest rock in the world collapsed in Chile’s century-old San Jose mine. The collapse buried 33 miners at a depth almost twice the height of the Empire State Building — over 600 meters (2,000 feet) below ground. Never had a recovery been attempted at such depths…”

I had the privilege of sitting in on a series of lectures given by the fantastic Amy Edmonson of Harvard Business School, who literally wrote the book on psychological safety. Here are a few notes I took about how to promote it in organizations.

It’s summer. And while vacation might seem like a counterintuitive tactic for increasing creative output, it is not, necessarily... As David Ogilvy said, some people “get more out of them than all the rest of the year put together.”

“Jeff Bezos believed that if Amazon didn't lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. The responsibility given to the Kindle: ‘Your job is to kill (our biggest) business. I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.’”

One of the prime directives of an innovation leader is to make experiments cheaper to run. Sometimes this has to do with technology; but often, it has to do with the institutional norms driving would-be-innovators’ assumptions and expectations.

An all-too-typical email from an earnest founder (“How do I know which of my ideas will get the highest valuation…”) reminded me of Steve Jobs’s explanation of why Apple triumphed over Microsoft’s Zune with the iPod. His words about motivation shed light on an oft-overlooked factor in the age of entrepreneurship.

Our chronotypes dictate our prime time, or the time of the day when we are most focused, most creative, and most likely to experience flow. If you want to be most effective in your creative practice, you need to be in sync with yours!

Lin-Manuel Miranda recently shared a key insight derived from the process of writing Hamilton: "Life is always going to present distractions. The best idea (the idea to make a musical of Hamilton) actually happened when we were on vacation -- on a pool float with a margarita in hand -- in a moment when your brain could kind of unplug from your day-to-day concerns…”

World class athletes spend 80-90% of their time in practice, and only about 10-20% performing under the lights, in front of the crowd, cameras on. The proportion is completely flipped for most business professionals. In a sense, the cameras are always on. The pressure of quarterly earnings, market expectations, etc seems to dictate that there’s no room for practice. And yet, should this be?

There’s not nearly enough airspace afforded the opposition that innovation faces inside of established organizations. While folks generally acknowledge that “the organizational antibodies attack” when they try to do something new, it seems that few are prepared to face resistance to their new ideas.