Making Ideas Happen

Oct 2, 2024 4:37 PM

Author:Scott Belsky

Making Ideas Happen

Thomas Edison famously said that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Every day new solutions, revolutionary cures, and artistic breakthroughs are conceived and squandered by smart people. Along with the gift of creativity come the obstacles to making ideas happen: lack of organisation, lack of accountability and a lack of community support.

Scott Belsky has interviewsed hundreds of the most productive creative people and teams in the world, revealing one common trait: a carefully trained capacity for executing ideas. Implementing your ideas is a skill that can be taught, and Belshy distills the core principles in this book.

While many of us obsess about discovering great new ideas, Belsky shows why it is better to develop the capacity to make ideas happen - using old-fashioned passion and perspiration. Making Ideas Happen reveals the practical yet counterintuitive techniques of 'serial creatives' - those few who make their visions a reality.

Reviews

If you care about your art, your job or your market, you really have no choice but to read this book

—— Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and Linchpin

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. This book helps you with the hard part

—— Guy Kawasaki, former Apple guru and author of The Art of the Start

This book is like a Swiss Army knife for ideas

—— Ji Lee, Creative Director at Google Creative Lab

This is a book about execution, and when it comes to going from an idea to a real business, execution is everything

—— John Battelle, co-founder of WIRED and BoingBoing

If your creative team or organization struggles to implement their best ideas, or if you find that your own creative projects languish unfinished, you need Making Ideas Happen

—— Teresa Amabile, Director of Research, Harvard Business School

There are techniques in this book that can turn disorganised creative prima donnas into organised creative prima donnas

—— Chuck Porter, co-chairman, Crispin Porter + Bogusky

Belsky offers an illustrated map to get to the destination of your great ideas

—— Scott Thomas, Design Director, Obama Presidential Campaign

Fascinating ... exciting ... The book is packed with interviews from all the key players, including Zuckerberg and Moskovitz. Kirkpatrick's subjects open up about everything

—— Associated Press

This fast paced narrative captures the excitement of the startup world and reminds me of the early days of Wikipedia when I realized we were onto something big. A big revelation is how Mark Zuckerberg's idealism led him to focus on product improvements rather than short-term revenue gains, and how critical this was to the company's success

—— Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia

Facebook is becoming the dominant social networking tool, facilitating our online and offline worlds. The Facebook Effect effectively shows its rapid evolution, where it is going, and how it will increasingly affect our lives

—— Craig Newmark, Founder, Craigslist

Mr. Kirkpatrick doesn't coddle his subject, yet he presents Mr. Zuckerberg's point of view much more comprehensibly than we have seen it before ... The author lets you get inside Mr. Zuckerberg's head

—— Wall Street Journal

Mr. Kirkpatrick ... was encouraged by Mr. Zuckerberg to write this book and was granted extensive access to him and his associates ... [Kirkpatrick] gives the reader a detailed understanding ... [and] still does an animated job of evoking the collegiate atmosphere that reigned at the company

—— New York Times

A carefully reported book that should change the way you think about a very unusual enterprise ... does the best job yet of making sense of Facebook's founder, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg

—— Forbes

Kirkpatrick's amazing reporting details what happens when a hacker culture turns into a multi-billion-dollar firm. Mark Zuckerberg sought to maintain that hacker energy, and it's fascinating to hear what resulted

—— Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail

Engrossing. . . . A detailed and scrupulously fair history of [Facebook]

—— Rich Jaroslovsky , Bloomberg Businessweek

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