Every night I hear what sounds like chains rattling around outside,
either up and down my street as if being drug by a car, or as if
someone is wrapping heavy chains around my front porch. The sounds
stop when the furnace stops pumping hot water through the pipes, but
still...what if they didn't?
You ever been wrong? Then you know why. If you have ever been wrong then you can be wrong again and you know what happens then, right? You fuck shit up. No, in order to get anything down right you can't just trust your own instincts and judgment, you need to have people around you sign off on your ideas. How many truly original thinkers do you know who have actually been successful? None, that's because original ideas aren't ever very good. They are like Kool-Aid in the packet, they need watering down or they taste horrible.
The problem is that everybody is flawed, we all have a blind-spot. Your original concept has a problem that anybody else but you can see and if you never actually share it with other people you won't ever find out. You have to let people dilute it to where it is palatable.
Had Timothy McVeigh run his idea by a bunch of other people his idea might have been diluted to some kind of Glenn Beck/Teabagger type of protest, instead he went ahead with the full-strength product and got his ass executed. The same thing went with Son of Sam and Ted Bundy. Success is about conformism. If McDonald's decided to put forth original, healthy, flavorful food they would be bankrupt in a couple of weeks. The ideas in your head have to be blanded out, have to be made into something with less flavor, less of your thinking and more everybody else's. They have to be dumbed down, simplified.
Ordinariness is your salvation
Anything else is to suppose humanity to be smarter and better than they ever are. "Success" and popularity are always the same thing whatever people tell you. In the end only the completely gray and common will win.
Trying to juice up your next ad campaign? Develop a clever new product strategy? Research shows that adding an outsider to the mix can improve the thinking of your team and produce better results. According to a study published in thePersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Better decisions come from teams that include a “socially distinct newcomer.” That’s psychology-speak for someone who is different enough to bump other team members out of their comfort zones… Researchers noticed this effect after conducting a traditional group problem-solving experiment. The twist was that a newcomer was added to each group about five minutes into their deliberations. And when the newcomer was a social outsider, teams were more likely to solve the problem successfully. [From Kellog School of Management News - Embracing the ‘socially distinct’ outsider.] The good news is that the “outsider” doesn’t have to be an expensive consultant or an external facilitator. The important thing is that the newcomer is distinct in some way from other group members. Beyond such obvious social distinctions as race and gender, the study’s author, Katherine Phillips of Northwestern University, suggests other examples that might work: – One employee from accounting working on a team in which everyone else is from sales The outsiders in the study weren’t necessarily vocal or opinionated; their mere presence seemed to be sufficient to make the group think harder. According to Phillips, this research is one justification for maintaining an emphasis on workplace diversity: a diverse team (whatever the elements of diversity might be) will produce better results. So, when you are pulling together the next team or task force, add all of the “obvious” team members, and then throw an outsider into the mix. You’ll be glad you did. Found this via Barking up the wrong tree and Neuroscience marketing .com
– An employee of a company that has just been bought out finding herself on a team of people from the acquiring firm
– An out-of-stater finding himself on a team full of natives of the company’s home state
I would like to make it a goal to self-publish two books a year. If I could write one in two months and edit in the same amount of time, it doesn't seem so unreasonable.
Then I stop dreaming and get back to work.
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I had the opportunity to work with him a long time from now.
This very smart architect is working on TV now and just wrote his second book !
Full of good ideas to live happily in a small space !
Visit the site for TEDx Copenhagen, one of the most interesting conferences I've been in quite some time. Why? Cause it was all about passion for ideas.
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