Scott Berkun Quotes

Look for smart ways around a problem or faster ways to resolve them. Make effective use of the people around you instead of assuming you have to do everything yourself.

to call someone an artist means that they have a sense of higher purpose beyond commerce. Not that they don't profit from their work, or promote themselves, but that the work itself has spiritual, philosophical, emotional or experiential attributes as central goals.

The love of new ideas is a myth: we prefer ideas only after others have tested them.

diligence wins battles.

If you lead an active intellectual and emotional life, your ideas will grow with you.

No one has died from giving a bad presentation. Well, at least one person did, President William Henry Harrison, but he developed pneumonia after giving the longest inaugural address in U.S. history. The easy lesson from his story: keep it short, or you might die.

People who truly have control over time always have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. A sense of priorities drives their use of time and it can shift away from the ordinary work that's easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify. They protect their time from trivia and idiocy; these people are time rich. They provide themselves with a surplus of time. They might seem to idle, or relax more often than the rest, but that just might be a sign of their mastery, not their incompetence.

Without change and the occasional struggle, we can't learn or grow.

Most people listening to presentations around the world right now are hoping their speakers will end soon. That's all they want.

The best lesson from the myths of Newton and Archimedes is to work passionately but to take breaks. Sitting under trees and relaxing in baths lets the mind wander and frees the subconscious to do work on our behalf. Freeman Dyson, a world-class physi- cist and author, agrees: "I think it's very important to be idle...people who keep themselves busy all the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle.

The way you find the answers to your problems will be unique to you.

Experiment is the expected failure to deliberately learn something.

It's natural for people to protect what they know instead of leaping into the unknown, and managers are no exception. Managers might even be worse, as the politics they rely on to survive can make them more entrenched and defensive.

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong... Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate, they're never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas.

Self-discovery is the process of learning about who you are as an individual, independent from your friends, family, employer, or nation.

Increasing creativeness doesn't require anything more than increasing your observations: become more aware of possible combinations.

People tell me this is obvious. But it's ok to be obvious. Knowing and doing are different. Many people know many obvious things they completely fail to do, despite their knowledge.

Politics is a kind of problem solving. No matter what organizational challenge you face, and how frustrating it might be, it's just another kind of problem to solve.

There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn't one.

Imparting trust, the real meaning of delegation, is a powerful thing.

It's rare for people to genuinely try to understand what others are trying to say.

Staying curious and open is what makes growth
possible, and it requires practice to maintain that mindset. To keep learning, we have to avoid the temptation to slide into narrow, safe views of what we do.

Progress won't be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go.

Big thoughts are fun to romanticize, but it's many small insights coming together that bring big ideas into the world.

The temptation many creative people I know have is to strive for popularity. To make, do, and say things that other people like in the hopes of pleasing them. This motivation is nice. And sometimes the end result is good. But often what happens in trying so hard to please other people, especially many other people, the result is mediocre.

Innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their merits; they're rejected because of how they make people feel. If you forget people's concerns and feelings when you present an innovation, or neglect to understand their perspectives in your design, you're setting yourself up to fail.

Innovation is significant positive change.

Commit yourself to taking enough risks that you will fail some of the time. If you're not failing, we're not doing something sufficiently difficult or creative.

The Greeks were so committed to ideas as supernatural forces that they created an entire group of goddesses (not one but nine) to represent creative power; the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with calls to them. These nine goddesses, or muses, were the recipients of prayers from writers, engineers, and musicians. Even the great minds of the time, like Socrates and Plato, built shrines and visited temples dedicated to their particular muse (or muses, for those who hedged their bets). Right now, under our very secular noses, we honor these beliefs in our language, as the etymology of words like museum ("place of the muses") and music ("art of the muses") come from the Greek heritage of ideas as superhuman forces.

For centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don't have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we're satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong.

The inability to scale is one of the stupidest arguments against a possibly great idea: greatness rarely scales, and that's part of what made it great in the first place.

Einstein said, " Imagination is more important than knowledge," but you'd be hard-pressed to find schools or corporations that invest in people with those priorities. The systems of education and professional life, similar by design, push the idea-finding habits of fun and play to the corners of our minds, training us out of our creativity.[117] We reward conformance of mind, not independent thought, in our systems - from school to college to the workplace to the home - yet we wonder why so few are willing to take creative risks.

Anyone can criticize or accept praise, but initiating a positive exchange is a hallmark of a difference maker.

It seems that bad advice that's fun will always be better known than than good advice that's dull-no matter how useless that fun advice is.

As a rule, if you insist on speaking your mind, you will inevitably find yourself somewhere where everyone hates you.

We develop ulcers, high blood pressure, headaches, and other physical problems in part because our stress systems aren't designed to handle the "dangers" of our brave new world: computer crashes, micromanaging bosses, 12-way conference calls, and long commutes in rush-hour traffic.

It's only through effort that we learn what an idea actually is, and if our passion for it will last or fade. There is no shame in failure - all makers fail. But it's hard to respect someone who never tries, even once, to do something good that's always on their mind. If you're worried about how good your idea is, you're worrying about the wrong thing.

an idea is a combination of other ideas.

All great tasks test our motivation. It's easy to court ideas over beers and change the world with napkin sketches, but like most things taken home from bars, new challenges arise the next day. It's in the morning light when work begins, and grand ideas (or barroom conquests) lose their luster. To do interesting things requires work and it's no surprise we abandon demanding passions for simpler, easier, more predictable things.

Effective PMs simply consider more alternatives before giving up than other people do.

It's safe to assume that no matter where you stand, someone would be happy to be in your shoes, just as you'd be happy to be in someone else's.