
Methods of the Masters
A blog on the art & science of creative action.
Care Deeply
In our quest for breakthrough outcomes, we can often neglect something as simple as care. Yet it’s the problems we actually care about that get the brain’s extra special attention.
Make Strategic Withdrawals
Ever wonder where Amazon’s famous organizational innovation, the “two pizza team,” came from? The fly-wheel inducing innovation didn’t come from a brainstorm…
Schedule A Week Unplugged
Innovators ranging from Lin-Manuel Miranda to Jeff Bezos have made good use of down time. For all our connectedness, being unplugged has never been more important.
Leverage Sick Days
We see sick days as days we can’t work. As a few classic examples of transformation demonstrate, perhaps we should see them as a gift — an opportunity to receive a new vision of the future.
Preserve Your Perspective
With graduation looming, lots of fresh perspectives are pouring into the job market. I’d like to implore graduates to preserve their “outsider’s perspective,” as they begin their careers.
Deprive Your Senses
For breakthroughs to happen, we need fresh inputs to drive new connections. These connections aren’t just the function of new input, though; we’ve got to create space to realize new connections.
Search For Inspiration
Frustrated by what he considered to be inadequate design, Steve Jobs left his desk. He didn’t do it absent-mindedly, but deliberately, looking for something that would unlock the riddle.
Refine Your Process
In design, HOW you’re working — speed, reflection, iteration, and all — is every bit as important as WHAT you’re working on. Perhaps even more so.
Kill Ideas
What do you do when you realize the sheer volume of ideas required for a breakthrough? Steve Jobs advocated one unexpected tactic…
Spark A Movement
The holy grail of venture building is to create “network effects” through “demand-side increasing returns.” You’ll be surprised that some consider a network to be the second-best form…
Encourage Theft
Innovation is all about recombining existing elements in unexpected ways. Sometimes, that seems like theft. My belief is we need to normalize such acts of recombination by sharing our own!
Disrupt Bias
How can a leader create an environment that’s hostile to bias, and one that cultivates the emergence of new ideas? Trier Bryant provides a simple framework to answer this very question.
Permission to be Curious
One of Google’s stratospheric successes might never have reached escape velocity if folks weren’t allowed to indulge pet projects. Here’s the inside scoop.
Watch the Corners
Jon Beekman, Founder and CEO of ManCrates, shares an enlightened tactic for helping innovators find the breakthroughs they aren’t even looking for.
Welcome Midnight Intrusions
An eccentric habit may shed light on how Harvard’s B.F. Skinner became one of the most influential psychologists of all time. He learned to value his midnight thoughts so much, he set a nightly alarm!
Singletask
Stanford Professor Clifford Nass studied hundreds of students, to explore what distinguished self-proclaimed “multitaskers” from the rest of us. His conclusions, and their implications, won’t surprise you.
Turn Info Into Knowledge
Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Charles Duhigg explains how inefficient-seeming activities can alter how we make sense of information, and turn it into valuable knowledge.