Jonathan Adler: Keep Other People's Opinions Out Of Your Creative Process. Jonathan Adler is now synonymous with the irreverent designs — pottery, housewares, furniture and beyond — that he sells around the world, but it all started with a college professor who didn’t believe in him.
After receiving discouraging feedback about his ambitions to be a potter, Adler wandered around New York City doing odd jobs that usually ended with him getting fired. After some soul-searching, Adler returned to his true love, pottery, and learned the value of ignoring the expectations of others and following your dream. Here, he injects his trademark wit while sharing how he found his underlying message of “irreverent luxury” as his business evolved from pottery to pillows to rooms.Adler preaches that we should keep other people’s opinions out of our creative process and attributes his success to his disdain of focus groups and feedback.
Seventeen years ago, a little-known potter named Jonathan Adler was thrilled to receive his first order from Barneys New York. Teresa Amabile: Track Your Small Wins to Motivate Big Accomplishments. It turns out that taking just five minutes a day to document your work progress and feelings can have a powerful impact.
After analyzing over 238 diaries from happy workers, Teresa Amabile shares key takeaways for staying motivated at work, including the importance of measuring progress, documenting challenges, and taking time to reflect. Teresa Amabile is a professor and director of research at Harvard Business School, and coauthor of The Progress Principle. A psychologist, Teresa studies how everyday work life can influence people and their performance. Her research encompasses creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life — the confluence of emotions, perceptions, and motivation that people experience as they react to events at work. Based on research into nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from over 200 professionals inside organizations, The Progress Principle illuminates how everyday events at work can impact employee well-being and performance.
2010 99% Conference: Stop Dreaming & Start Doing. From the live experience at the Times Center to behind-the-scenes nuggets of insight, our partners at Cool Hunting condense the 2010 99U conference into a 3-minute primer on putting ideas into action.
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it 999 times: It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. We all have projects we’ve been meaning to complete – the start of a novel in a desk drawer, a new business idea we haven’t done anything about. When inspiration strikes, ideas flow freely. But seeing those ideas through to completion is another thing entirely. As Thomas Edison famously said, “Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.” 99U.com/conference. Andrew Zuckerman: On Curiosity, Rigor, and Learning As You Go. Photographer and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman shares the lessons learned from his iconic WISDOM project, in which he interviewed “elders” around the world, including Chuck Close, Bill Withers, Jane Goodall, Frank Gehry, Massimo Vignelli, and many more.
Zuckerman talks about the anxiety we feel as we start a new projects, how fear can help us get things done, and the importance of honesty and good, old-fashioned hard work. Andrew Zuckerman is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker. In 2006, he produced and directed the critically acclaimed short film “High Falls”, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to win for best short narrative at the Woodstock Film Festival. In 2007, the Forma International Center of Photography featured a solo exhibition of Andrew’s work from “Creature”. Andrew has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors for both his photographs and films. www.andrewzuckerman.comwww.wisdombook.org.