If you’re somebody who has a lot of ideas, it can be pretty easy to get overwhelmed and/or distracted by all of the possibilities. It’s also worse when you’re an optimist and you believe it can all be done. I am definitely guilty of this. It is one of my weaknesses.
We all have a finite amount of time to work with and so saying no to the stuff that isn’t core is critical. I believe I am getting better at this, but every now and then I find myself having to do some pruning. And once I do that, boy does it feel great.
Seth Godin has a fantastic blog post on this topic that I love called, No is essential. Here it is in its entirety (it’s a short post):
“If you believe that you must keep your promises, overdeliver and treat every commitment as though it’s an opportunity for a transformation, the only way you can do this is to turn down most opportunities.
No I can’t meet with you, no I can’t sell it to you at this price, no I can’t do this job justice, no I can’t come to your party, no I can’t help you. I’m sorry, but no, I can’t. Not if I want to do the very things that people value my work for.
No is the foundation that we can build our yes on.”
To drive the point home even further, let’s shift gears and talk about wine. (For all of you fellow wine drinkers.)
In viticulture, overall yield – usually measured in hectoliters per hectare of vineyard – is often seen as an important indicator of quality. The idea being that low yields produce better wines because the flavors get concentrated over fewer grapes.
Part of what drives this is the leaf to fruit ratio. Too much fruit and not enough leaves, means the grapes won’t ripen properly.
The parallel to this conversation is that leaves are much like time. There’s only so much of it. And while many of us are constantly trying to maximum yield – I know I am – there are limits to the kind and quality of grapes we can produce when we do that.
I know this in principle. And more and more, I know this in practice. I am learning to say no.
Image from Flickr
“Great ideas alter the power balance in relationships. That’s why great ideas are initially resisted.” -Hugh Macleod
I have been following the work and writing of designer Tobias van Scheider for quite some time now. If you don’t subscribe to his newsletter and you end up liking this post, you should consider signing up.
Recently I stumbled upon something he published back in October called “Ignore Everybody”, where he argues that when you’re exploring something new – that could potentially fail – one of the best things you can do is ignore everybody.
And that’s because:
“We have to understand that ideas are by nature very fragile. They’re like little naked babies, unable to protect themselves. If we really believe in a new idea, we have to protect her with great effort. This is difficult, because oftentimes the greatest ideas get killed by the people around us. Executing on a great idea is by nature a lonely path. If everyone would agree with you, the idea is probably not that great anyway.”
I am incredibly interested in how new things get started and how new ideas thrive. Fostering innovation has become a critical component of city building in today’s world. But sometimes I feel as if we’re thinking too top-down, as opposed to bottom-up.
As Tobias rightly points out in his article, lots of great ideas started as stupid little projects. Who would have thought that a teen sexting app with disappearing messages (Snapchat) would become a company worth many billions of dollars?
It’s for this same reason that Sam Altman of Y Combinator recently wrote that sometimes its better to call your new company a project, rather than a business. When you call it a business you impose all kinds of biases onto it in terms of viable business models, and so on. But when you keep it a “project”, it becomes more acceptable to be experimental.
As an example of all this, I was fascinated to learn this past weekend about a Toronto-based ad agency called OneMethod. Because as part of their agency they have a division called the MethLab, where the goal is to simply experiment with “absurd ideas.”
One of those absurd ideas was a social media campaign slash pop-up taco restaurant – remember, they are an ad agency not restauranteurs. It was so grassroots that they ended up having to sell original art work that happened to come with a “free” taco in order to get around all the legal requirements for serving food. Brilliant.
The idea was so well received that it has grown into a fully fledged restaurant called La Carnita, which today operates across 3 permanent locations and happens to be one of the most popular taco restaurants in Toronto.
But let me ask you this, if they had instead gone out to investors – as an ad agency wanting to get into the taco business – would they have been able to raise the money for their first physical restaurant? I can imagine this being a lot more difficult.
On a larger scale, this is exactly what Google is doing with Alphabet. The company was reorganized and rebranded so that they could continue to work on absurd ideas outside of the Google cash cow. If the idea/project takes off, then it becomes a fully fledged company. If it doesn’t, then it gets shut down and something else is tried.
This is what people and companies are doing today to stay relevant in the innovation race.
But in some ways it feels like a battle to allow the absurd to survive. That’s why the best approach might be to just ignore everybody. There’s value in the absurd but maybe you’re the only one who sees it right now.
I often get asked about the methodology behind my blogging. (Though I have written a few posts about it already.)
Most people seem to assume that I sit down on the weekends. Draft a content calendar. Write a bunch of posts. And then queue them up for the coming weeks.
I don’t do any of that (besides sit down).
Instead, I get up every morning and I write something. Sometimes I wake up with an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head and sometimes I wake up with no idea what I’m going to write about.
In the latter case I just start reading the internet over breakfast until something interesting catches my attention. But in both cases, what you are reading about is what I am thinking about at that moment in time.
Because in addition to a blog about cities, this blog is about a discipline and a habit. It is about taking time every day to step away from tasks, sort through my thoughts, and write something. It’s one thing to think about something; it’s another thing to write about it.
And so as much as I hope you all get value out of this blog, it also very much about the personal benefits I receive from doing this same thing over and over and over again.
Now, in terms of the content, the focus is obviously on city building. But I’m more specifically interested in the following 3 areas and their overlap:
If you’re a regular reader you know this.
I didn’t set out to focus in this way, but it just happened over time. This is what I’m passionate about and so I naturally started applying it to our discussion on cities and city building.
And finally, in terms of writing style, I’ve found myself adopting a particular structure.
I often start with a personal note – almost as if this were purely a personal blog. Then I dig into a particular city building issue and try to uncover one particular way of looking at it. And then I end with a decisive position. I’ve seen this format on other blogs and I really like it.
Obviously I don’t always follow this structure. For example, sometimes I haven’t made up my mind on a particular issue. But I try to. I lean towards the belief that a decisive wrong answer is better than a wishy washy right answer. So I push myself to take stances and have an opinion.
But in the end, the goal of every post is simply to present one idea for all of us to think about and then discuss. I’d like to believe that it keeps us all sharp. Hopefully it’s working for you.