Jason Womack

Being creative…on accident!

It really ISN'T an accident…Being creative is purposeful!

I just wanted to let you know about a book I read recently called: The Accidental Creative. I wrote a review here...If you'd like to see.

FBR (Friday Book Review): Uprising by Scott Goodson

 

Reminder: Sayings are called "sayings," cause they are usually true. So, you've heard this one...right? "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."

The same week that I committed to creating, producing and publishing a "TV Show" (as a Facebook community) for interviews called: "The Better Series," I received an email from Scott Goodson. (FULL DISCLOSURE: We exchanged books...I love doing this with other authors.)

I "just" finished reading it today, and I absolutely HAVE to share some of the things I learned from this great book. I'm scoring it a 5 as much for how well it's put together AND for the fact that I know that reading this book has changed my thinking. If you're facing an opportunity in the foreseeable future where you see change coming your way, Get This Book! I have 6 pages of notes in my journal, as well as a few pages marked up in the book. (FYI: the pages that JUMPED out to me were: 15, 18, 22, 33, 48, 56, 75, 77, 86, 90, 115, 125, 159, 190, 224.)

Can I share an example of how my thinking has changed? Ok, start here: Think about what the company you work with "does" for the community. (And, if you work for yourself, think about what YOU do for the community.) I define "the community" as the people I connect with in the day-to-day of my busy-ness. Ok, now that you have that, flip it around and ask: "What is the community worried about?"

This "flip" of focus has given me a solid idea on what I can do to change one of the marketing programs we're just about to launch on three continents!

Before you go, here are THREE reasons I recommend this book:

1. The case studies are FASCINATING. What Scott has done to share with us the actual, tactical, ground-level-and-up thinking and acting that went behind the movement-making that he was a part of is genius. Just reading the case studies has made me look at newspapers, movie advertisements, keynote speeches...almost everything a little bit differently. It's great to see what other people have done.

2. Talk about checklists... As I was reading, I started a list of what I can do to increase MY OWN company's engagement (our staff, our vendors, our clients...) in our purpose. As you read Uprising, keep a pen and notebook nearby, then...put into action what you do write down.

3. The "game changer" of the book came to me at page 125 (of the hardback version). There is a diagram (ok, he calls it a figure) titled, "Find the Truth in Your Brand." Then, Scott shares some fundamental questions that I'm making it a mission to answer. Here are two of them:

+ In what ways does your company actually affect people's lives?
+ What does the company believe in?

Finally, let me leave you with the part that got me wanting to read this in the first place; it was the last line of the Acknowledgments: "Here's to all the passionate souls out there who are sparking movements big and small and making a difference in the world."

That's YOU!

FBR (Friday Book Review): Poke the Box by Seth Godin

Title: Poke the Box
Author: Seth Godin

Website / blog / Facebook

How I got the book: I ordered it from Amazon.com the "moment" I heard about it being available. It shipped a few weeks later.
How long it took to read: 45 minutes / 1 reading session
Read cover to cover: YES
Favorite quotes (Page # and line):

2: Imagine that the world had no middlemen, no publishers, no bosses, no HR folks, no one telling you what you couldn't do. If you lived in that world, what would you do?

7: Here's what's needed to make something happen: an idea, people to work on it, a place to build or organize it, raw materials, distribution, money, marketing.

9: "What do you do here?"

11: In fact, people within organizations are perfectly situated to start something.

19: Isaac Asimov wrote and published more than 400 (!) books by typing nonstop from 6am to noon, every day for forty years.

23: When in doubt...Look for the fear. That's almost always the source of your doubt.

My Take-Away:

My big thought reading this book was: How am I solving my own puzzles? Find a process I can use (and reuse) to engage with, test and ship a next product or share a next idea. While reading Poke the Box, I wrote down a few of the things I can do:

Identify
Start
Experiment
Assess
Debrief
Discuss
Prototype

I enjoyed reading this book, and feel confident in passing it on to a business colleague of mine that he will get an idea or two as well!

FBR (Friday Book Review): Theodor Seuss Geisel by Donald E. Pease

Thank you, Professor Pease. I found this book on a shelf of a local hotel while I was visiting Dartmouth, speaking for the MBA class at The Tuck School of Business. I didn't know much about "Dr. Seuss" before I read your book; and, boy am I happy you wrote it!

Growing up in the 70's, I know we had Dr. Seuss books around, though I don't think I would have been able to rattle off more titles than "The Cat in the Hat," and maybe "Green Eggs and Ham."

I am very glad I had the opportunity to read more about "the good doctor" (and, if you didn't know about HOW Ted Geisel took the name "Dr. Seuss" you've simply GOT to read this book!). With just 5 chapters and right about 150 pages, you'll find all kinds of surprises about Ted's academic, professional and personal life. But, more than all of that, you'll get a good, solid dose of the creative process.

I'm walking away from reading this book with a renewed sense of the process of creativity. Of course, we often talk about the "stroke of insight" or the "sudden" epiphany...what I realized in reading this book by Professor Pease was that the process Dr. Seuss went through was just as tedious, labor intensive and stressful as any management position in a major corporation. And, as a writer, Ted wasn't as Self Employed as one might think...he was writing for a public who was voting with their dollars.

There are some important things to note while reading through this biography...things that are very general to the process many people go through as they create, mature and live up to their own self-identify:

1. Words create.
Throughout his life, Ted said things out loud. He asked for help, he told people what he was working on, and wrote...every day. In fact, when he moved to California, he had a special room where he would go to just to write; sometimes for hours a day (even overnight) as he continued creating with the words he used to tell a story. He said he'd write dozens, or even hundreds of line, looking for the perfect one that would make the story.

2. The past is present.
Like many of us, Ted had a childhood full of hardship, negative experiences and "change moments." With a German background, and a family who was prominent in the local business community, Ted had to deal with the pre-judgments that people made as he was growing up. He shared specific incidences where the way he was treated proFOUNDly affected who and how he was.

The past is always right here with us. What we do, how we act and who we are is inextricably tied to what has happened over time. Want things to be different a year or 10 from now? So, do something different today!

3. Change is constant.

Is it too cliche to add that to a blog post about someone famous? His life changed, over and over again. From selling "dozens" of royalty-dollars' worth of books a year to selling well over a million books a year by the time he passed away, Mr. Geisel definitely saw things change. For the good, for the bad...it just happened that way.

Looking at your own next 1 or 3 or 10 years, what do YOU anticipate coming your way? Or, perhaps it's easier to look backward...1, 3 or even 10 years ago, what were you doing that has an ever-present effect on how you are, what you do, and where you're going today?

A thought-provoking book, I highly recommend this impactful and engaging history about someone who I now know was much more complex than a story about a cat...in a hat.

FBR (Friday Book Review): Ayn Rand, by Jeff Britting

Title: Ayn Rand

Author: Jeff Britting

 

Web site / Facebook / LinkedIn

How I got the book: I was sent a gift copy by the VP of Academic Programs at the Ayn Rand Institute

How long it took to read: 65 minutes / 1 reading session

Read cover-to-cover: YES / no

 

Favorite quotes (Page # and line):

 

4: Rand described her earliest approach to life as being an "enormous series" of questions aimed at understanding the things around her.

 

8: I could summon no interest or enthusiasm for "people as they are" - when I had in my mind a blinding picture of people as they could be.

 

17: Rand discovered that she enjoyed the process of breaking down complex issues and explaining the answers.

 

19: I suddenly had the concrete sense of how many large cities there were in the world...

 

39: The secret of life: You must be nothing but will. Know what you want and do it. Know what you are doing and why you are doing it, every minute of the day.

 

44: It is not important if your success is interrupted with stops.

 

44: What is important is to be in love with life; to strongly believe in yourself; it is always important to remember that the road of great people is difficult and uneven.

 

79: What would happen if every creative person went on strike...?

 

92: In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is...

 

92: ...he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy.

 

 

 

My Take Away:

I was given a copy of the book Atlas Shrugged in 1995. It took me about a year just to open up the first page. Well, I brought the book with me when I went away one summer (1996) to work at a school in South America, and started reading... I can say this book profoundly addressed my own philosophy.

 

Years later, I was introduced to the VP of Academic Programs at the ARI, and a few days after our phone conversation, I received a box of books in the mail. Again, it took me a while to read this one, an OVERLOOK ILLUSTRATED LIVES biography on Ayn Rand.

 

Of course, I picked out and have re-read the lines above. Page 44 was especially powerful for me. I look back over the past two decades and realize just how much I've learned from, failed in and tried ... all the things that have gotten me here.

 

In that recent interview with Dan Pink, we talked about the importance of writing things down to figure them out, as well as being focused and intent on the project at hand. Walking away from reading this short biography, I'm even more committed to focusing on the MITs ... those Most Important Things in life and at work.

 

FBR (Friday Book Review): Drive, by Daniel Pink

Title: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Author: Daniel H. Pink
Web site / Videos / Twitter

How I got the book: Amazon.com

How long it took to read: 170 minutes / 4 reading sessions

Read cover-to-cover: yes / NO

Favorite quotes (Page # and line):

28: As Frey writes, “Intrinsic motivation is of great importance for all economic activities. It is inconceivable that people are motivated solely or even mainly by external incentives.”

51: Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations to do narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.

64: Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary. A job that’s not inherently interesting can become more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, if it’s part of a larger purpose.

*67: First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci’s original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that “positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation.”

78: Type I behavior is made, not born. These behavioral patterns aren’t fixed traits. They are proclivities that emerge from circumstance, experience, and context.

79: Type I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts. Alas, that’s not always true in the short term.

104: Whatever your place in the birth order, consider what it’s like to be the third child in a family. You don’t get a say in choosing the people around you. They’re there when you arrive. Worse, one or two of them might not be so glad to see you.

133: In other words, in America alone, one hundred boomers turn sixty every thirteen minutes.

159: Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance.

 

My Take Away: What does drive us, really, to want to engage, improve and be our best? This is what Dan and I talked about a while back (video here). In his book, written in 3 parts, he outlines some of the things that might surprise you about motivation.

So, in the comments below: What's YOUR motivation? (The first question I asked Dan in the interview!)

 

PS: If you haven’t yet, I HIGHLY recommend you watch this video.

FBR: The Wealthy Freelancer (Friday Book Review )

FBR: Friday Book Review

Title: The Wealthy Freelancer
Authors: Steve Slaunwhite, Pete Savage, and Ed Gandia
Web site / blog / Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn

How I got the book: I met Ed Gandia the morning of the Atlanta Marathon some time after he and Steve and Pete had had the book published

How long it took to read: 150 minutes / 4 reading sessions

Read cover-to-cover: yes / NO

Favorite quotes (Page # and line):

69: Publication editors are always interested in good information on hot topics.

77: Don’t just attend the [community organizations] meetings. Join the board. Get involved in some of the committees. Volunteer and help out in any way possible.

115: And being sincere in your desire to stay in touch with longer-term leads is absolutely critical to a successful nurturing strategy.

149: The fastest path toward a focused freelance practice is to leverage the contacts, knowledge, and experience you’ve already accumulated in your career and build your business on top of this existing “structure.”

159: “What do you do?” “For home do you do it?” “What makes you different?”

My Take Away: I’m reminded of the book I read a long time ago by Napoleon Hill called, “Think and Grow Rich.” What the co-authors of The Wealthy Freelancer do so well is to remind us that “wealth” is only a “bit” about cash; it’s much more about an overall well-being.

On all levels (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual) it’s possible and important to study our wealth. As an entrepreneur reading this book, I walked away with ideas I could begin implementing right away; not just for my business, but for my involvement in volunteer organizations and athletics. And, so many of the activities apply to me in my own life as a community member, homeowner, friend and triathlete! In the chapter on Secret 1, Pete Savage gives a very practical experiment you can use to make goal-setting much easier.

Check it out!

FBR: The Music Lesson, by Victor L. Wooten

Title: The Music Lesson

Author: Victor L. Wooten
Web site / Twitter / Facebook

How I got the book: A mentor of mine gave it to me a couple of weeks ago

How long it took to read: 75 minutes / 1 reading session

Read cover-to-cover: YES / no

Favorite lines: (Page # and line)

40. Very good. Now, we have ten different but equal parts of Music: notes, articulation, technique, feel, dynamics, rhythm, tone, phrasing, space, and listening.

82. They [children] may not realize what they’re doing, but by opening their minds to all the information available to them, their power of imagination and creation becomes limitless, which means their potential is limitless. You don’t get an imagination like that through concentration.

91. Through practice and repetition, could it be that you are just convincing yoru muscles and your mind that they already know what to do? Maybe that’s the primary function of practicing. My Take Away: Question for ya: where do you learn more, from

Success?

or from Failure?

Before you make a quick decision, consider where you learn the most.

Sure, we can look back on success and realize how well we did, how things worked in our favor. "Success leaves clues," you've probably heard that before...and, it's true. Upon completion of a successful event (or week, or project, or day!) it helps to stop, turn back and process that. What happened and what lead to success?

Failure, likewise, holds lessons. I can look back on things that I did that did NOT pan out the way that I had planned and I can learn all kinds of things. The real trick is to NOT go negative. Instead of "wishing things were different," look back on what happened and study the aspects of it that you could imagine presenting themselves again in the future.

Then, see yourself "doing it the way you would want to do it" in your mind.

Victor's book, The Music Lesson gave me a good overview "success." But, there was an underlying theme (not exactly overt...) that made me think something like, "I've got to be on the edge, ready to fail 'cause I'm so engaged and involved." That can mean a lot of things to different people...

FBR: El Manager al Minuto (The One Minute Manager)

Title: El Manager al Minuto

Author: Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

Web site / blog / Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn

How I got the book: Bought it at DFW airport

How long it took to read: 95 minutes / 4 reading sessions

Read cover-to-cover: YES / no

Favorite lines: (Page # and line)
9. Qué manager podia tener tanto tiempo disponable?
12. Qué objeto tendría la ewunion si no fuese de esta manera?
13. Cómo diablos podria obtener resultados si no fuera gracias a mi pesonal.
27. La previsión de Objetivos...
35. Digame lo que pasa en términos medibles y observables.
87. Cuanto mejor se comprende por qué funciona, más dispuesto se halla uno a usarlo.
98. La reconsideracion critica de los resultados es el desayuno de los campeones.
149. Las consecuencias refuerza esos compartamientos.
167. Haga partícipes a los demás.

My (loose) translations - that is, the way I understand it!
9. What kind of manager has that kind of free time?
12. What would be the objective of a meeting if it wasn’t run that way?
13. How in the world would we achieve results if it wasn’t thanks to people?
27. See it..Before you see it.
35. Tell me what’s happening in measurable and objective terms.
87. The better you understand how it works, the more inclined you are to do/use it.
98. The debrief/review is the breakfast of champions.
149. Consequences [positive or negative] reinforce behaviors.
167. Share this with the people you know.

My Take Away:

This month marks the 15th January in a row (yup, 15 times!) I have read a copy of The One Minute Manager. Every time, I read something a new way, think of something anew and enjoy the process. This is the second time I’ve read it in Spanish...

I feel best about my work when it seems like I’ve made a contribution. Of course, it’s easy to say how many seminar I’ve presented, clients I’ve coached or articles I’ve had published. But, what of the quality of that work? Have they (the seminars or the articles) actually added value to people’s lives? That is what I need to spend time thinking about.

Oh, that makes me think of this: What is it you do a LOT of? Really, what takes up time during your day? Commuting? Email? Meetings? Interruptions? Delegation? Redelegation? If there is something (or some things) that you do a LOT of, get really, really good at those!

Of course, take a look at your long-term goals, your yearly objectives. Remember how your time gets eaten away during each day. If you’re going to work on those BIG things, you’re going to need long(er) blocks of free(er) time.

As I read the book this time, I realized (again) that productivity is not just about effective time management; it’s really about focus management. What this book calls the “previsión do objetos” is exactly that a pre vision of objectives. It is really about seeing it...before you see it.

My ultimate realization from this time through the book:

If you know that something would be helpful, why on earth are you not doing it?

And, some questions for you to consider:

DO you know your promises?
Are you keeping them?
Do you know when you win?
Do you know how to use your tools?
Can you separate the person from the behavior?
and, finally: You are working. But, is how you’re working...working?

FBR: Jack and the Team That Couldn't See by Tony Wilson

Title: Jack and the Team That Couldn't See

Author: Tony Wilson Website / Blog / Twitter

Where I got it: Just last week, I received his book in the mail. You see, we traded books: I sent him mine, he sent me his. My theme for 2011: Community.

How long it took to read: 80 minutes / 4 sessions

Read cover to cover: YES / no

Favorite lines:
Page 69: "One thing that always worked for me was making sure the team had a common goal."
Page 86: "So, you're saying that if I don't listen to all of them, then they won't all have ownership, and we wont have common goals?"
Page 148: "I only said that people want to be heard, Jack. They don't need to be indulged."
Page 200: "Because they had ownership over it. It was simple. It was theirs. And it was in their language, which made it easier for them to get it. I've learned a few things during our conversations."
Page 221: "...we spend relatively little time developing leaders and teams - possible our greatest competitive advantage."
Page 278: "Deliver on promises. Make the changes you say you're going to make."

My takeaway: When a group works together, things work better. Whether at home or at work, get those around you around you. It's all just easier when there is a common, agreed upon and objective common goal.

Common: occurring, found, or done often; prevalent
Goal: the object of a person's ambition or effort; an aim or desired result