Key ideas from Dance of the Possible:

Discipline

  • Creative work is harder than all other work
    • There will always be easier things to do do
    • Dont take the bait
  • Sacrifice is required to make great things possible
    • If there is no sacrifice, there is no discipline
    • If there is no discipline, there is no progress

Gaps of: Effort, Skill, Quality

  • Effort Gap
    • No matter how great your idea, there will be a lot of hard and mundane work ahead of you
    • Great idea does not eliminate effort
  • Skills gap
    • You may not have the skills your idea needs
    • Nobody is born with any skills … we all have to learn them
    • Get busy filling the skills gap rather than complaining
    • Steven Furtick Said: The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel
    • Ira Glass: Everyone has skills gap to begin with. The only solution is:
      • Do a lot of work
      • DO a huge volume of work
      • Huge volume will allow you to close the gap
  • Quality Gap
    • When you finish a project, you will see it differently from where you started.
    • You may never be satisfied with the final work
    • But you have to ship it

Ideas in the shower

  • In order to get your best ideas, you need to let the conscious mind go to idle
  • When conscious has less to do, then the sub-conscious can actually be heard
  • Shower works because
    • It forces us to slow down our conscious mind
    • There is nothing to do
  • Find your shower
    • Yoga
    • Workout
    • Run
    • Hike
    • Drive
  • Make time for your conscious to go IDLE
    • Pleasurable and relaxing activities

Divergence v/s Convergence

  • Constant War between
    • Divergence = Coming up with a lot of ideas
    • Convergence = Focusing on a few important ones
  • Finishing usually means that an idea has converged
  • It is a not a straight line from a lot of ideas to one idea
  • It is more of a process of Divergence -> convergence -> Divergence -> convergence … till you finally converge
    • Embrace this process
    • This is the dance of the possible

Important Links

 

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