"Making Ideas Happen"

Yesterday I finished Making Ideas Happen a book by the founder of the Behance network, Scott Belsky. As the title states it's somewhat of a users manual for us creative people who struggle with turning our ideas into reality.

It arrived at my desk last Friday after been held up for several days by a certain volcano I'm not even going to attempt to spell. The next morning myself and Eve grabbed our respective literature and headed down to the local coffee shop for a long day of reading and drinking. Skip to several hours and to many lattes later and I'm already halfway through the book.

In his introduction Scott uses the famous Edison quote: "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." to explain how most of the worlds greatest ideas never happen. We're more focused on inspiration than we are perspiration. The creative mind is effectively addicted to coming up with new ideas. When we reach the "project plateau" we satisfy our craving for a new idea by moving on and abandoning the previous one. We need to adopt a method that takes us through the perspiration in short manageable steps and keeps our wandering minds interested right up to the completion of the project.

The method suggested by the book is the Action Method. It was developed by talking to many leaders of the creative world including Bob Greenberg, Creative Director and founder of R/GA and Ji Lee, creative director of Google. You begin by turning everything in your life into a project. Each project is then broken down into "Action Steps"; short, manageable and executionable notes that nudge us along the path towards a projects completion. They are captured daily or hourly depending on the project and they act as a creative to-do list. Have a look at the action method site for a full break-down of how the system works.

This week I used the Action Method for the first time. It's to early to tell it's affect on my work but it did give me a sense of progress and purpose I've never really had. I've made more progress on personal projects than ever before, this post has been proactively written all week in the downtime between projects, and work is suspiciously less stressful. This may well be down to coincidence or a honeymoon period but what matters for now is, it's working.

I'd recommend the book to anyone working in the creative industry. If people like Bob Greenberg and Ji Lee subscribe to a method of organisation maybe the only way to realise your full potential is by doing so also.

Next up The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda.