Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

Scott Belsky

Apr 2010 · Penguin

About this ebook

How the world's leading innovators push their ideas to fruition again and again

Edison famously said that genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. Ideas for new businesses, solutions to the world's problems, and artistic breakthroughs are common, but great execution is rare.

According to Scott Belsky, the capacity to make ideas happen can be developed by anyone willing to develop their organizational habits and leadership capability. That's why he founded Behance, a company that helps creative people and teams across industries develop these skills.

Belsky has spent six years studying the habits of creative people and teams that are especially productive-the ones who make their ideas happen time and time again. After interviewing hundreds of successful creatives, he has compiled their most powerful-and often counterintuitive-practices, such as:

•Generate ideas in moderation and kill ideas liberally
•Prioritize through nagging
•Encourage fighting within your team

While many of us obsess about discovering great new ideas, Belsky shows why it's better to develop the capacity to make ideas happen-a capacity that endures over time.

Ratings and reviews

I bought this book after reading "Anything you want" by Derek Sivers. That book and this one both deal, for the most part, with getting distractions out of the way and turning an idea into something real. The Sivers book is written from the point of view of someone who started a company and watched it grow into a thriving business, and I liked it a lot. It was very straightforward and to the point, and I can relate to what the author was saying. I think I would be friends with Derek Sivers if I knew him personally. This book has a relatively high-handed tone, and reads like a sales pitch. If this were a physical book with pages, I would half expect a coupon for the "12-CD Seminar Package" to fall into my lap from between two of the pages as I turned them. I've grown somewhat weary of buzzwords over the years, and this book is a hailstorm of them: "We've developed a framework of actionable process elements that you can leverage to organize your workflows moving forward and actualize your paradigms while partnering with a backburner of references." Ugh. That's not a direct quote, it's a distillation of buzzwords I saw on two consecutive pages. One reason I occasionally read books like this is to validate my own approach and see if I'm missing something. Almost all books like this have pretty much the same point, which is this: Once you've thought an idea through to the point where you think it's pretty good (or at least a good starting point for something), act on it. Don't get distracted, and execute your idea efficiently. This book, like others of its type, makes that point effectively enough. Another reason I read books like this is to get inspired. For me, this book fails big-time in that regard. The buzzwords wear me out, and it contains page after page of prescriptive advice that seems pretty obvious to me. Things like: "If you have a new idea while you're working on the original idea, don't stop working on the first one. Instead, write the new idea down someplace where you'll remember to look at it. I know a guy who uses Microsoft Word for this, and puts his ideas in a list. Once a month on a Sunday, he prints out the list and marks through the crap ideas with a pen while he drinks beer." Really? Wow! My success would be all but assured if I could only figure out how to get my pen marks into the copy of the list I have stored in Microsoft Word. Wow! I think of myself as a creative type, but I've also spent many years being accountable for getting things done, so I have the execution part of "idea->reality" fairly well in hand. This book may be written for the "other" kind of creative type, one who apparently can't slap their own rear end without the aid of an instruction manual. If you're better off than that type of person, you may be able to get by without this book.

In my opinion, this is one of the greatest books written for creative types like myself. I found the last few chapters particularly informative and useful. While I have never been a fan of "to do list" or complicated formulas to get work done, I must say this book certainly has changed my mind about being organized and productive.This is a must read for young creative types.

Not as good as everyone said it was, though definitely worth the read. I really liked the idea of being biased towards action. The concept that you "fail your way to success" makes a lot of sense. It wasn't necessarily life changing but it was inspirational to get started on some ideas. I wasn't a huge fan of their method for tracking ideas (action, reference, back burner) because it seemed broad and not very easy to navigate.

About the author

Scott Belsky is a speaker, writer, and an entrepreneur with a focus on the creative industries. As the founder and CEO of Behance, he oversees the Behance Network, the world's leading platform for creative professionals, with millions of visitors every month, and the annual 99% Conference, devoted to execution in creative teams.