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Hace poco leí "creativity is not just an opportunity, it's a responsability to unleashing our full potential" #behanceteam #supermodified #gestalten

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Bill Belichick: Quiet People Are Often the Best Leaders

via 99U

As the longtime coach of the New England Patriots, Bill Belichick has been to five Super Bowls. He’s won three of them, tops among active coaches and tied for second all time. In a keynote address at an NFL event, he spoke about a wide range of topics including the personalities that make the best leaders. Belichick highlighted Troy Brown, a soft-spoken wide receiver as one of the best leaders he’s ever coached:

We’ve had [great] players that would never say a word, [like] Troy Brown. He is never going to say a word.

…

He would never be one to stand up before a game and give some big team speech. That just wasn’t his style. But nobody had more leadership than Troy Brown did. So it’s not about giving a team speech, it’s not about having some big presentation or anything. Leadership is about doing your job and putting the team first. When Troy Brown played for us, he returned kicks, he covered kicks, he caught a lot of passes in the slot, he blocked and when we needed him in some very critical situations he went over and played defense against some very good teams and very good players. Was it always perfect? No, but he competed as hard as he could.

He did the very best he could for the team and that’s all you could ask for; it didn’t matter what it was. Here is an example of a guy who was as good of a leader as I’ve ever coached who said probably less than any player of his stature that I’ve ever coached. So it’s not about volume or who’s the most talkative guy. It’s the guy who does his job and puts the best interests of the team and organization in the lead.

(via farnamstreetblog)

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via 99U

We’ve covered Structured Procrastination here before and it was not without some controversy. Structured Procrastination is the practice of not keeping a schedule and instead allowing your natural motivations to guide you. For some, this can lead to a black hole of YouTube videos and social media. For others, it’s a surefire way to keep motivation high.

Marc Andreessen, legendary investor and founder of Netscape, describes how adopting Structured Procrastination changed his life:

There is nothing more liberating than looking at your calendar and seeing nothing but free time for weeks ahead to work on the most important things in whatever order you want.

I’ve been trying this tactic as an experiment in 2007, as those of you who have emailed me to suggest we get together or that I go to a conference or to a meeting will attest. And I am so much happier, I can’t even tell you. I get so much more time to focus on the things that really matter — in my case, my two companies, my nonprofit boards, and my lovely wife.

The other great thing about this tactic is that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing — there are quite a few things that still sneak onto my calendar that I really can’t get out of. But one is still able to draw the line between “must do” and “sounds interesting but I’m not keeping a schedule.”

The rest of the post contains tons of productivity advice from Andreessen, including his anti-todo list.

via iDoneThis

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via 99U

Louis C.K. is arguably the most successful standup comedian working today. Not just because of his sitcom or standup specials, but because of his do-it-yourself mentality. He famously produced, shot, edited, and distributed his standup special Live at the Beacon Theater. This self-distribution model was quickly adapted by others.

In an interview with the New York Times Louis C.K. asserts that such creative freedom didn’t happen over night (the bold questions are the Times reporter).

Does it matter that what you’ve achieved, with your online special, and your tour can’t be replicated by other performers who don’t have the visibility or fan base that you do?

Why do you think those people don’t have the same resources that I have, the same visibility or relationship? What’s different between me and them?

You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.

So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

At this point you’ve put in the time.

There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Read the entire interview here.

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via 99U

The story of the Nest Learning Thermostat begins as most innovation does: with a ticked off engineer.

Former Apple Senior Vice President Tony Fadell was building a high-end energy efficient home where no expense was spared. The home included cutting edge technology like solar panels and geothermal heating. However, the best thermostat available was still just a poorly constructed white plastic box. With all of the innovation in home appliances, why hadn’t the thermostat kept up?

Fadell quickly recruited some old friends, including engineer Matt Rogers, to help explore the reinvention of the thermostat.

Rogers rose from an intern to a software engineer on the iPod and eventually was on the first iPhone team. After being approached by Fadell, the two dived into the often-archaic world of home thermostats, sensed an opportunity, and founded Nest.

“It started as our frustration and the more we talked to other people, the more we heard their frustration,” Rogers says. “That was the tipping point.”

So what happens when you take the DNA of Apple and design items for the home? We spoke with Rogers about how Nest learns from Apple’s mistakes and the creative benefit of completely changing industries.

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How important, creatively, is it to tap into dormant frustrations and solve them?

Sometimes you look at a problem and think: “Actually, I don’t think we could do better than somebody else.” Then it doesn’t make sense. In this case, we knew we could do better. We knew we could innovate. About 10 million thermostats are sold every year, so it’s an enormous market. But there’s this kind of higher cause: people can save energy, save money, and we do something good for the environment.

Was it intimidating to tackle an entirely new industry? You guys had a background in consumer electronics, not home hardware. That had to be intimidating. 

We brought in experts, interviewed contractors, and conducted meticulous research. We traveled and took pictures of people’s homes, their thermostat, and how it was installed. We built a library of ugly thermostats around the country.

Matt Rogers -

So on one of your hard drives, there are files and files of pictures of thermostats on walls?

Exactly. One of the things that I did very early with another Nest colleague is install a new thermostat at home every week. We installed every thermostat we could at our own homes to learn the frustrations that people have, the installation experience, everything.

It sounds like you viewed your lack of knowledge as an asset.

Absolutely.  Thermostats today have these switches on them that read “heat/cool/auto/off” and “fan/auto/on.”  What does “fan/auto” versus “fan/on” even mean? How does a normal consumer understand these things?

It’s similar to the cell phone environment five or six years ago before the iPhone: some people had smartphones that were Blackberrys and they didn’t really work. It was more for a business crowd and consumers found them really hard to use. Now, that entire world has shifted. I think the exact shift happened with thermostats.

But if an iPod doesn’t play my song, I’m a little mad. If my thermostat doesn’t heat my home, I’m ripping it out of my wall. Do those stakes make it hard to ship?

We need to do a lot of early work. It takes weeks or even multiple months to get a design made, so you have to plan ahead.  We do a lot of models to make sure we’re happy with what we’re getting. We’re very strong believers that you can’t look at design on a TV. The effect of looking at something 10 feet away versus the actual size is totally different. For any one design, we often do between 50 and 100 models.

How do you avoid getting overwhelmed by all the details? The materials, the texture, the software? 

We have a great team.  By the time, Tony [Fadell] and I are looking at things the team has already gone through every little detail and they’ve double and tripled checked it.  It’s kind of a cultural thing where the entire organization is looking at all the details to make sure everything looks great.

What about the process at Nest would surprise people if they heard it?

When rubber meets road, the hard part is doing the actual work and executing on it.  The design is probably 5 percent of our time and 95 percent of our time is execution and getting it done.

How has your process changed going from a huge company like Apple to a startup like Nest?

We don’t have the clandestine, cloak and dagger mentality within the company that Apple does.  Design at Apple is behind closed doors and behind lock and key and it’s not something that is discussed with other teams.

We don’t have time to waste, and if we spend all our time behind closed doors looking at designs, and if the engineers realize that what we designed is not buildable, that will be a huge waste of time for us.

The design is probably 5 percent of our time and 95 percent of our time is execution and getting it done.

As Nest grows, do you plan on implementing some of that Apple-like security?

I think culturally, transparency is very important within a company. It is core to our DNA. When you have secrecy and cloak and dagger, it creates mistrust between teams. “Is that guy authorized to know what’s going on in this program?” There is team rivalry and that breaks down the creative process.

Is there anything you learned from Apple that you are keeping at Nest?

The priority of design. At Apple we used to move mountains for design and to build products. When we were getting started with one of the iPod Nanos, we needed to build more, and the demand was even higher than we thought. So we literally had to move a mountain. There was a mountain next to the factory that inhibited our growth so we had to move it.

You mean Apple used dynamite to move a bunch of rocks and build something there?

It was not a bunch of rocks, it was a mountain.  We moved the mountain to build more capacity for iPods and iPhones.

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via 99U

Elon Musk -

We often hear of the benefits of working less: our body is naturally wired to work in short bursts and when we give our mind room to breathe we generate new ideas and connections. We are not always measured by the widgets we can make, so does it make sense that our working hours are more inspired by the industrial age than the information age?

Every week we come across blog posts and essays from workers who have claimed to dramatically cut their hours. Metalab founder Andrew Wilkinson writes in Pando Daily about making the transition from working 80-hour days to less than 40:

Paradoxically, the more I let go, the more things seemed to take off. Short workdays forced me to focus on the important stuff instead of dicking around in my inbox, and I quickly learned to delegate the day-to-day. I started working smart instead of working hard.

Developer and entrepreneur Kyle Bragger wrote about a similar effect:

What did The Hustle™ accomplish? I gained weight. I wasn’t spending enough time with my (now) wife. I felt like shit. I began to resent my work, and the work I was producing clearly wasn’t my best. I started cutting corners. I went from a mindset of shipping with quality and integrity to “when is this going to be over?”

Nowadays, I’m working 4-day weeks, and doing no more than an hour or two of intense work at a time. I take a lot of walks. I’ve lost weight. I’m happier. My wife is happier. I’m more present. And most importantly:

I’m doing the best work of my life.

Yet we still come across other entrepreneurs or creatives that pride themselves as overworked. Not everyone who works long hours is a trail blazer. But it can seem like every trail blazer works long hours. A 2012 profile of Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk offers a glimpse into this mindset:

Freeing mankind from the scourge of carbon, not to mention its terrestrial shackles, has taken a toll on Musk’s personal life. In August he finalized his divorce from his second wife, the actress Talulah Riley. He’s had one vacation in four years. This summer he took his five boys—twins and triplets—to Maui with his family. “I think the time allocated to the businesses and the kids is going fine,” says Musk. “I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours?”

To truly change the world do we need to put in vacation-less years like Musk? Or should we concentrate all of our work in 35-hour weeks like the developers above?

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via 99U

Sometimes, it makes sense to quit a creative project, but other times, that’s not an option. Maybe you need to turn in your thesis to complete your degree program, or finish a client project to maintain your professional reputation, or put up your portfolio so you can apply for jobs. You want to cut your losses and move on—maybe even pretend it never happened.

But in reality, you can’t move forward professionally until you get out of your head and into action.

If you find yourself feeling like a victim to a creative project, follow these steps to empower yourself. I’ve seen them work with time coaching clients around the world, and I believe they can help you break the inertia and see real progress—starting now.

Take ownership, and stop the blame game

When you feel like the victim of your circumstances, you spend copious amounts of time blaming everything and everyone around you. Although it may feel good to vent about your stupid computer or annoying degree requirements, this attitude won’t get you anywhere.

Instead, you need to go back to the point at which you did make a choice such as when you signed up for the masters program, took on the client project, or decided to pursue an artistic career. Then accept the fact that whatever project you need to finish now is a natural consequence of your decisions, not some unreasonable burden placed upon you. (Except for a few instances of extreme familial pressure, almost everyone can trace back their current situation to some point at which they did make an autonomous choice.) After you’ve come to terms with the fact that you are responsible for where you find yourself now, you can stop brooding and replace the thought, “Woe is me!” with the question, “What can I do to move forward?”

Acknowledge avoidance and focus on moving forward

Once you’ve shifted your mindset from that of a victim to that of a self-determining individual, you need to do something about your actions. People operating in the victim mode have a tendency to fill their schedules with everything but what they say is most important. This avoidance through busyness allows them to justify their lack of progress.

Common traps include seemingly “productive” activities like maintaining a spotless inbox that gives you a surface-level feeling of control and some quick positive feedback but is a thinly veiled cover up for the fact that you have huge gaps in your effectiveness. If this sounds like you, get honest about how you spend your hours so that you “don’t have time” for what you actually need to do. Then start to either eliminate or limit the time investment you make in these less essential activities so you have space for the important.

Chunk your tasks into smaller steps

If you’ve attempted to avoid a project for months or even years, thinking in detail about the entire scope of the project can leave you discouraged instead of encouraged. Here’s how one of my time coaching clients described it: “If I look at the end goal, it’s the equivalent of staring at a mountain’s summit. Instead, I need to look at the few next steps ahead.”

Let’s say the dreaded project involves completing your portfolio so you can apply for new jobs. Your next few baby steps could include: Finding the slides you’ve already made, gathering your other work, and looking over the projects to pick which ones you’ll include. Once you’ve done these three steps, the next few will become evident. Focus on small, easy wins to keep the project from feeling insurmountable.

Enlist cheerleaders

The initial process of accumulating even small, easy wins will require a great deal of courage because you’ll likely need to break through a thick wall of guilt, fear, and regret. One of the best ways to make it to the other side is to enlist people who will give you loads of positive feedback for any action steps in the right direction. This affirmation along the way will increase your motivation to progress toward your goal even if the final completion and the accompanying rewards still stand a long way off.

De-prioritize results and acknowledge progress

Once you’ve taken ownership and begun to make meaningful progress toward your goal, you may still face some internal resistance. This often stems from the fact that despite all of your rhetoric to the contrary, you do care very deeply about this project and really want it to turn out well. When you start to notice yourself worrying about what people will think about your finished product, you can tell yourself these truths:

Doing something is better than doing nothing.

This is only a draft—I can always come back and edit it.

I can’t know whether or not people will be happy, but I can focus on doing what I know how to do well.

By focusing on the process instead of the results, you’ll create a safe environment for gradual progress toward your ultimate goal.

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How about you?

Have you found yourself stuck on a must-do project?

How did you breakthrough the inertia?

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via 99U

In her book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg shares one of the best pieces of career advice she’s ever received.

When debating her next career move, Sandberg made a spreadsheet comparing the roles and responsibilities that would come with each position and company she was considering. Google was on her list (a relatively unknown company in 2001), and ranked lower than all of the other options in categories like security, salary and responsibilities, but when Sandberg presented her dilemma to Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time, he managed to change her mind with this simple piece of advice:

“[Eric] covered my spreadsheet with his hand and told me not to be an idiot (also a great piece of advice). Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job—fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow more slowly or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to be doing them. Politics and stagnation set in, and everyone falters. He told me, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

Sandberg made up her mind that instant and joined Google, which as we all know was one of the fastest flying rocket ships ever created.