I finished this book in September 2024. I recommend this book 5/10.
Why you should read this book:
This book will give you the tools to carve out some creativity across your business and life. I it will show you how to step up in the lighthouse for the big picture and move down in the weeds to get the work done. If you are looking to add some creativity to your life, this book will show you that you never starting from a blank canvas; you are already on your way.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
We need art thinking to develop new things.
Go from the lighthouse to the weeds and back again—often.
We never start from a blank canvas. Don't just write the letter; also design the envelope.
📝 My notes and thoughts
P59. Brene Brown said, "I live by the saying 'Nothing is wasted,' Your studies and that internship—combined with your passion—will serve you if you squeeze every ounce of learning from them. I may be a researcher, but I attribute a lot of my success to my years of bartending, waiting tables, and working the night shift in customer service, and to stints as a social worker and a teacher. These jobs taught me about empathy and human behavior."
P63. Harvard Business School professor Leslie A. Perlow and a research assistant, Jessica L. Porter, conducted a multiyear initiative with workers at the Boston Consulting Group and published their results in 2009. The experiments were designed for five management consultants, not just rest, but predictably scheduled rest. In one group of consultants, each team member would take a day off in the middle of the work week. On another team, each person would agree not to check email or otherwise engage with work after six o'clock on a designated evening. After the initial anxiety—one of the teams had been intentionally chosen because they were in the middle of a high-stress, post-merger reorganization—the employees reported back feeling refreshed and better able to perform. The experiment also leads to enhanced communication and trust. As of 2014, BCG had implemented "predictable time off" across thousands of project teams in more than seventy-five of BCG's offices around the world. Many modern office settings spiral into 24/7 commitments in which workers are not needed all the time, but the possibility that you might be needed on short notice for some of the items keeps you plugged into checking email and generally being on call. Perlow's experiment showed the importance of the ritualized, predictable break. In 2014, Perlow followed up her study concerning the effect of breaks on individual performance and happiness with another study concerning the effect of coordinated breaks on the productivity and well-being of whole teams. In global corporations where the sun never sets on an operating company, and in day-to-day cultures of meetings and interruptions, she found that people were taking work home with them, even in cultures that only expected them to keep 9-to-6 hours. If the teams could sync up and take time off at the same time—in what Perlow called "enhanced productivity days"—the change for coordinated rest improved the team's overall productivity significantly. The fact that these initiatives led to happier teams and employee retention indicates that taking a break nurtures and perhaps even repairs something fundamental to the humming engine of the brain.
P69. The second mindset of art thinking follows from this difference between the weeds and the aerial view. To inhabit the weeds of making something, you have to make friends with the creative vulnerability of not being done yet. If you are trying to do anything for the first time—bravely trying to switch jobs, find a spouse, start a company, pivot an idea, or even write a book—your experience is much more aligned with "sit[ting] down before a typewriter with [your] feet fixed firmly on the floor," as Harper Lee once joked when asked to describe her writing process, than with winning awards, as she did after the fact. Reorienting your perspective to being comfortable and ultimately productive in the weeds requires three tools that all focus on the process instead of the outcome. First, you have to change how you think about judgment. You have to trade the judgment of a critic for the discernment of a maker. To embrace discernment, you will need to consciously defer judgment for periods of time as to whether the work is good or bad and instead ask yourself what is working and what could be better. Second, you need to become slightly philosophical and skeptical about your own sense of what is good or bad. In actual fact, our judgment shape-shift over longer periods of time. What looks like success or failure now may seem like the opposite later or turn out to have been a step along a path. Third, you have to build out a very immediate attentiveness to the present moment, a process that has similarities to mindfulness meditation. That focus on attentiveness will help you to stay in the headspace of simply making the work.
P72. It's easy to confuse beginnings and endings and to forget the false starts and mistakes along the way. When you see someone else's finished work, it is easy to want to compare it to your own work in progress. When you do that, it is almost impossible to start. You compare the song you are trying to write with the Beatles's finished album, not with the moment they, too, were scrawling lyrics on the back of a napkin. Recognizing the gap—between process and outcome, between the weeds of working on something and the aerial view of seeing its completion—helps you remember that the beginnings of most things are more likely to be clunky, scrappy, or seemingly unimportant. You can often tell a coherent story after the fact, but that story is usually a construction.
P77. In the short term, the engine that will take you out of the tire spin of defensiveness or paralysis is curiosity. As long as you are working hard, try to give yourself permission to be more curious than absolutely correct at any point in time. How to set up that kind of culture is a theme we will return to later in this book. One way to ask yourself if you are judging or discerning is to picture yourself as a painter. If you are at an easel, you can either stand close enough to put a brush on the canvas or back up far enough away to see what the whole picture looks like. There is usually no way to do both at the same time. Most artists' studios have an ancient armchair somewhere. You can sit there and take in the work, or you can be making it. Both are important. Sitting in the armchair helps you discern what is working. But if you sit in the chair too much, you won't get anything done.
P147. Imagine that the economy is a vast body of water. To stay afloat in it, you will need a boat. To consider whether to invest in an early-stage lighthouse project, you have to ask if your boat can stay in balance. The balance question is one of portfolio thinking. Portfolio thinking will govern whether and how you can afford to invest in your lighthouse questions. You will need to balance income portfolio in the short term and investment portfolio in the longer term. The investment portfolio depends on ownership stakes. If, indeed, you can afford to work on a creative project without capsizing the boat, then that means you are protected against the risk that the project won't go well. Your income portfolio has kept you in balance while you have been working. If it fails, your boat will not sink. But what if your project succeeds? If your project does well, you will need a bigger boat. Here you need the tools of ownership. If you can own a part of what you are making—if as an investor of time and effort you are an owner of a financial stake in it—then the boat will grow with you.
P155. Although the chart was invented to describe business, it can pose helpful questions in the design of your life too. You can start by asking the general question: Which skills have I already built, and which are new and growing? Of your new skills, if they are well received, you are a star. If you don't know yet if they will be, you have a question mark. Of your older skills, if some support you, they are the cash cow. If they have stopped being of service to you, they are the dog. To generalize the questions of the growth-share matrix:
Which project is your cash cow—spinning out money that supports your life but in a relatively established and staid way?
Which project is a dog—taking all your energy and effort with very little to show for it? (There may be personal and noneconomic reasons to keep doing some of these things.)
Which project is question mark—something you are working on that might go very well but that is not yet known?
Which project is a star—growing and succeeding at the same time? Whenever you see an opportunity to turn a question mark into a star, you create your point-B world.
P183. At the beginning of the first day of painting class, Ed would give a talk about judgment. He would say that, especially if we were just starting out, it would be easy to say things were "good" or "bad." If we said we weren't very good at something or were bad at it, what we were really doing was giving up responsibility for our work. Instead, he wanted us to be "critically self-aware." He wanted us to be able to observe what was working, to see what strengths to build on, and what areas needed help. What Ed did in that classroom was to create a space and a conversation in which we could bring ourselves to our work. He knew the vulnerability of making things and scaled up his ability to shepherd a lot of us through that, individually and as a group.
P195. Sol had influenced Eva too. On April 14, 1965, he sent her a handwritten note responding to a letter she had sent him—from Germany, where she was living with her husband—confiding her insecurities as an artist. He wrote back:
I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work. The worst you can think of and see what happens, but mainly relax and let everything go to hell. You are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT.
P223. Project Oxygen revealed that most managers at Google were doing okay and that many factors affected worker happiness and productivity. But it also found that the jump from good to great in managers led to similarly steep gains in productivity and worker happiness. They distilled good manager success into eight attributes and can thereby setting vision and goals, seeing each individual on the team, and capture the teams work in a container:
Is a good coach
Empowers the team and does not micromanage
Expresses interest in and concern for team members' success and personal well-being
Is productive and results-oriented
Is a good communicator—listens and shares information
Helps with career development
Has a clear vision and strategy for the team
Has key technical skills that help him or her advise the team
P230. There are two kinds of creativity: writing the letter and designing the envelope. Writing a letter is like making an object—a painting, a book, a computer, or, in the case we are about to see, a pair of classes. Designing the envelope is creating the system in which the object can exist—the company's business model, the artist's day job. The design of business models is the art form of the envelope maker. Those containers are not so anonymous after all but the sheltering house in which everything else unfolds. It turns out that designing those vessels requires material resourcefulness with the tools of the market—engaging with the possibilities and limitations of capitalism as a design medium itself.
P235. In business terms, material resourcefulness is the basis of letter and envelope design. The resourcefulness is in noticing, as in the case of Warby Parker, where an industry contains pockets of an almost stagnant surplus. And then it is the process of designing the new business model itself. You are looking for ways to disassemble bulky business models to squeeze more efficiency out of them, to build them more nimbly and flexibly, and, more and more, to build a sense of community and purpose that is sustainable and expansive.
P263. The world we live in—our whole societies, our families, our workplaces—is all already like the half-finished painting. We rarely have blank canvases. We are almost always building what we hope for in the midst of what we have. We build the point-B world not from scratch but in the point-A world we inhabit. Therefore, all of us have to grapple with what will likely fall short of perfection. we may want to make a perpetual motion machine, but then we are constrained by the laws of physics. We have to accept that aiming for perfection, at its best, just maps a trajectory toward the good and the whole. Our work never exists in the vacuum where absolute perfection is possible. It takes shape in conversation with the constraints of the materials we are working on and with each other.
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