The Key to Creating Remarkable Things. No one likes the feeling that other people are waiting – impatiently – for you to get back to them.At the beginning of the day, faced with an overflowing inbox, a list of messages on your voicemail, and the to-do list from your last meeting, it’s tempting to want to “clear the decks” before you start on your own most important work.
When you’re up-to-date, you tell yourself, your mind will be clear and it will be easier to focus on the task at hand. The trouble with this approach is that you end up spending the best part of the day on other people’s priorities, running their errands, and giving them what they need. By the time you finally settle down to your own work, it could be mid-afternoon, when your energy has dipped and it’s hard to focus on anything properly. “Oh well, maybe tomorrow will be better,” you tell yourself. But when tomorrow comes round there’s another pile of emails, phone messages, and to-do list items. Here are a few tips to help you make the switch: 99 Excuses For NOT Making Ideas Happen. There’s an old Yiddish proverb that goes, “If you don’t want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.”
In other words, if you’re NOT doing something, what does it matter why? We recently polled our friends on Twitter for a list of the most common excuses for NOT making ideas happen. Not surprisingly, the response was overwhelming. We can all make a list of excuses as long as our arm for why we’re not taking action. So what’s the point of us listing them out here? Common excuses for NOT making ideas happen: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. – 99. For the submission above, we thank: What’s Holding You Back?
What’s keeping you from taking action on your idea? The Top 5 Qualities of Productive Creatives (And How to Identify Them!) A recent BusinessWeek article reported that, “According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, CEOs identify ‘creativity’ as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.”
While the study’s results will come as no surprise to hard-working creative professionals, they do raise an important question: How do we identify – and hire for – the qualities that add up to creativity? By our lights, the notion of “creativity” can’t be separated from the skills required for creative execution. So our analysis of the characteristics crucial to creativity focuses particularly on the skills that facilitate putting ideas into action. Below, we outline five key qualities of particularly productive creatives, followed by some recommendations for how to uncover them in potential hires, co-workers, and collaborators. 1.
As Albert Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”