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wesbaker's review against another edition
2.0
While this book has plenty of good points (taking responsibility, using your time wisely, improving teams) I feel that it's more of a rehash or a summary of recent rediscoveries. It's worth a read if you've been out of touch with productivity, time management and team dynamics, but if you've been paying attention, I wouldn't take the time to read this book.
anilkbhat's review against another edition
3.0
Some tips from this book:
Action Method for creative projects - involves organizing the project into Action Steps, References and Backburner items.
List down all your projects based on the level of energy that it requires - Extreme, High, Medium, Low, Idle. Projects placed at the Extreme end should be the most important for the time being.
- keep 2 lists for action steps, one for urgent and one for important and preserve different periods of time to focus on these
- choose 5 projects that matter the most, family being one of them
- make a daily focus area - grab 5 action steps that you want to focus on today
- don't hoard urgent items
- create windows of time for uninterrupted focus
Always keep the ball moving forward.
Have a "keep shipping" mentality.
Keep relentlessly following up.
Walt Disney - 3 different rooms to foster ideas and assess them. Room one: idea generation without restraints, room two: Aggregate and organize, room three: critically review the project without restraint.
Setup "challenge" meetings (called "thrashings") periodically where only one in the team can ask critical questions.
Use progress as a motivational force by having "Done Walls" with completed action steps.
Share Ideas Liberally (through blogs or circles). Shared ideas and feedback received leads to incremental innovation.
Feedback: solicit feedback from team in terms of what they need to START, STOP, CONTINUE doing.
Harnessing the forces around you to make things happen
- Transparency boosts communal forces
- Seek competition to keep challenging yourself
- Commit yourself in order to commit others
- Create systems for accountability
- Create a pressure of being in the spotlight
- Seek simulation from serendipity by reading or reviewing subjects that are not related
Community
- Overcome stigma of self-marketing
- "respect-based" self-marketing
* identify differentiating attributes
* develop a communications strategy
* execute communications strategy
-find your own frequency, and tune in to engage others
Leadership Capabilities
- be willing to go without "success" in the eyes of others
- trick yourself to stay engaged by creating a set of incremental rewards for long-term pursuits
- do not hoard ownership of successes
Creative Team
- probe candidates for their true interests and extent to which the candidate has pursued those interests
- Create a "T" team - people with general breadth of skills that support collaboration and deep expertise in a single area
- Foster an immune system that kills ideas
- create environment so that teams are comfortable fighting out their disagreements and diverse points of view, but they share conviction after the meeting. Recognize that purpose of disagreement is to fully explore the options
- share collective ownership of ideas
- leaders should talk last
- judge leadership capability of peers, superiors during conflict situations
- during crisis, encourage teams to step back and regain perspective, quit blaming and start brainstorming solutions
- develop others through power of appreciation
- ask people where they go for help - identify these hot spots - then listen to them and empower them
Self-Leadership
- self-awareness in a safe atmosphere
- develop tolerance to ambiguity
- During failure, document
* what external conditions explain the failure
* what internal factors have compromised judgement
* are there any gems in the unintended outcome?
- think "contrarianism" - act of purposely thinking against then grain when approaching problems and brainstroming new ideas
- Be willing to be deviant (unpopular, misunderstood and even shunned during creative pursuits)
- Have a backward clock (if you were told the exact day your life would end, would you manage your time and energy differently?)
- Have an enduring love for idea or interest to push you past obstacles and allows you to continue practising the craft because they love the process more than the outcome
Book: The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (Ollie Johnson)
Action Method for creative projects - involves organizing the project into Action Steps, References and Backburner items.
List down all your projects based on the level of energy that it requires - Extreme, High, Medium, Low, Idle. Projects placed at the Extreme end should be the most important for the time being.
- keep 2 lists for action steps, one for urgent and one for important and preserve different periods of time to focus on these
- choose 5 projects that matter the most, family being one of them
- make a daily focus area - grab 5 action steps that you want to focus on today
- don't hoard urgent items
- create windows of time for uninterrupted focus
Always keep the ball moving forward.
Have a "keep shipping" mentality.
Keep relentlessly following up.
Walt Disney - 3 different rooms to foster ideas and assess them. Room one: idea generation without restraints, room two: Aggregate and organize, room three: critically review the project without restraint.
Setup "challenge" meetings (called "thrashings") periodically where only one in the team can ask critical questions.
Use progress as a motivational force by having "Done Walls" with completed action steps.
Share Ideas Liberally (through blogs or circles). Shared ideas and feedback received leads to incremental innovation.
Feedback: solicit feedback from team in terms of what they need to START, STOP, CONTINUE doing.
Harnessing the forces around you to make things happen
- Transparency boosts communal forces
- Seek competition to keep challenging yourself
- Commit yourself in order to commit others
- Create systems for accountability
- Create a pressure of being in the spotlight
- Seek simulation from serendipity by reading or reviewing subjects that are not related
Community
- Overcome stigma of self-marketing
- "respect-based" self-marketing
* identify differentiating attributes
* develop a communications strategy
* execute communications strategy
-find your own frequency, and tune in to engage others
Leadership Capabilities
- be willing to go without "success" in the eyes of others
- trick yourself to stay engaged by creating a set of incremental rewards for long-term pursuits
- do not hoard ownership of successes
Creative Team
- probe candidates for their true interests and extent to which the candidate has pursued those interests
- Create a "T" team - people with general breadth of skills that support collaboration and deep expertise in a single area
- Foster an immune system that kills ideas
- create environment so that teams are comfortable fighting out their disagreements and diverse points of view, but they share conviction after the meeting. Recognize that purpose of disagreement is to fully explore the options
- share collective ownership of ideas
- leaders should talk last
- judge leadership capability of peers, superiors during conflict situations
- during crisis, encourage teams to step back and regain perspective, quit blaming and start brainstorming solutions
- develop others through power of appreciation
- ask people where they go for help - identify these hot spots - then listen to them and empower them
Self-Leadership
- self-awareness in a safe atmosphere
- develop tolerance to ambiguity
- During failure, document
* what external conditions explain the failure
* what internal factors have compromised judgement
* are there any gems in the unintended outcome?
- think "contrarianism" - act of purposely thinking against then grain when approaching problems and brainstroming new ideas
- Be willing to be deviant (unpopular, misunderstood and even shunned during creative pursuits)
- Have a backward clock (if you were told the exact day your life would end, would you manage your time and energy differently?)
- Have an enduring love for idea or interest to push you past obstacles and allows you to continue practising the craft because they love the process more than the outcome
Book: The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (Ollie Johnson)
chefannette's review against another edition
4.0
I'll take as much inspiration to keep creating and moving forward as I can get!
lanceschaubert's review against another edition
4.0
Here's the thing: Belsky has great ideas in the book, but he makes them happen with bad examples. Thomas Kinkaide and James Patterson aren't the best examples when you want to impress artists.
There are workhorses who do. Stephen King's a machine, but not a hack. Piccasso cranked them out. We could make a list, I'm sure.
But if making ideas happen means making them happen even when they should die, it's not worth it.
The practical suggestions in this book you can find anywhere, but its interest is in the applicability to artists. Belsky does a good enough job there that the book's worth four stars.
There are workhorses who do. Stephen King's a machine, but not a hack. Piccasso cranked them out. We could make a list, I'm sure.
But if making ideas happen means making them happen even when they should die, it's not worth it.
The practical suggestions in this book you can find anywhere, but its interest is in the applicability to artists. Belsky does a good enough job there that the book's worth four stars.
gemmamilne's review against another edition
3.0
Liked the first section on organisation, felt the community and leadership sections were a bit 'heard that already' and dragged on a little
bechols's review against another edition
3.0
Some good (familiar) examples of mistakes and tactics, but mostly filler.
kkellymsu's review against another edition
5.0
I thought this book was very well written and I appreciated the ideas behind it. I will admit that I was using the Action Method app system before reading this, so that may color my opinion of the book itself a bit. That being said, I like the ideas and I agree with the plan and the way it can be executed. The first half of the book was best - the leadership elements went beyond what I had hoped to get from the reading. I think the book does a good job of explaining how to get the most out of the Action Method system, or how to create one on your own. As with all productivity systems/books, you really have to find the one that works for you. This may not work for everyone, but I appreciated the book nonetheless.
davemmett's review against another edition
4.0
I really enjoyed this book. In a way, I feel like it was written just me for me: I have tons of 'great' ideas, but I very rarely act on them because it's easier to just think I'm a genius and go about my day. The challenge, as this book points out, is to commit to, and execute your ideas. Coming up with ideas is easy, and ultimately it's not really all that valuable if ideas aren't executed.
I was thinking about this when I watched The Social Network: the brothers who 'came up' with Facebook (which was really just a clone of MySpace but for Harvard) got 65 million, but Mark Zuckerberg is worth $1 billion. He's the one who executed the ideas, so in the end it doesn't matter who had the original idea; he acted on it, so he gets the reward.
Back to this book, it's a bit like Getting Things Done, but less focused on methodology (though there is method in it), and more focused on the environment and attitude that can promote acting on ideas. I loved this quote: "The great challenge is to balance idea generation with relentless focus." Coming up with ideas is sexy and easy, so the value is in doing, not in thinking.
There's also an emphasis in this book placed on committing to ideas. I think this is the area where I personally struggle the most, and it's the area where I'm going to be working on the most in the future. You can have an amazing idea every day, but you can only act on so many things each day.
I was thinking about this when I watched The Social Network: the brothers who 'came up' with Facebook (which was really just a clone of MySpace but for Harvard) got 65 million, but Mark Zuckerberg is worth $1 billion. He's the one who executed the ideas, so in the end it doesn't matter who had the original idea; he acted on it, so he gets the reward.
Back to this book, it's a bit like Getting Things Done, but less focused on methodology (though there is method in it), and more focused on the environment and attitude that can promote acting on ideas. I loved this quote: "The great challenge is to balance idea generation with relentless focus." Coming up with ideas is sexy and easy, so the value is in doing, not in thinking.
There's also an emphasis in this book placed on committing to ideas. I think this is the area where I personally struggle the most, and it's the area where I'm going to be working on the most in the future. You can have an amazing idea every day, but you can only act on so many things each day.
jenn_stark's review against another edition
3.0
Started out strong, but I got a bit bogged down by the middle/end.