Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind – Biz Stone
Creative lessons from the co-founder of Twitter.
Visualizing Our Goals
A useful exercise with any problem or idea is to visualize what you want to see happen for yourself over the next two years.
The goal isn’t to solve anything. If you take an idea and just hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward that goal. The practice is what helps you to manufacture your own opportunities. In essence it builds confidence. Furthermore, this confidence helps you seize opportunities or create your own so that you can achieve what you desire.
Limits Make You More Creative
A limit automatically forces you to be creative because now you have to come up with a way to get around it.
Limits can be financial, biological, social, or even made up.
When Steven Spielberg shot Jaws, he wanted to get an animatronic shark, but it was too expensive at the time. To get around this limit, he decided to film from the shark’s point of view, making the movie scarier than it could ever have been with some mechanical model. Ultimately, this is what made the movie a big hit and sparked a whole new point-of-view genre in horror movies.
The true promise of a connected society is enabling our dormant potential for empathy.
Get The Raw Idea Out
Ideas rarely enter the world fully formed and ready to go. That’s why he always remains open to changes, even after the idea has been released.
For example, most of Twitter’s main features were user suggestions. People initially copied tweets they liked to share, so Twitter introduced the “retweet.” When one user wanted to bundle together all the tweets about the South by Southwest Festival, he added #sxsw to his tweets, and voilà, the hashtag was born.
If you make the opportunity. you’ll be the first in the position to take advantage of it
Solve Your Own Problem
Frustration is a great source of motivation.
You can’t stop at building a solution. You have to use it too. If you’re not the most ecstatic advocate and power user of your own product, you’ll never be able to build it to a point where enough people use it to make it profitable.
this is the core of entrepreneurship – being the person who makes something happen for yourself.
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