Methods of the Masters

A blog on the art & science of creative action.

Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Kill Ideas

What do you do when you realize the sheer volume of ideas required for a breakthrough? Steve Jobs advocated one unexpected tactic…

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Spark A Movement

The holy grail of venture building is to create “network effects” through “demand-side increasing returns.” You’ll be surprised that some consider a network to be the second-best form…

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Encourage Theft

Innovation is all about recombining existing elements in unexpected ways. Sometimes, that seems like theft. My belief is we need to normalize such acts of recombination by sharing our own!

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Disrupt Bias

How can a leader create an environment that’s hostile to bias, and one that cultivates the emergence of new ideas? Trier Bryant provides a simple framework to answer this very question.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Permission to be Curious

One of Google’s stratospheric successes might never have reached escape velocity if folks weren’t allowed to indulge pet projects. Here’s the inside scoop.

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Watch the Corners

Jon Beekman, Founder and CEO of ManCrates, shares an enlightened tactic for helping innovators find the breakthroughs they aren’t even looking for.

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Persist

A recurring theme on the road to creative mastery is how we (wrongly) perceive those who are successful as having never struggled. The truth is, they did. But they persisted, nonetheless.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Welcome Midnight Intrusions

An eccentric habit may shed light on how Harvard’s B.F. Skinner became one of the most influential psychologists of all time. He learned to value his midnight thoughts so much, he set a nightly alarm!

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Squint

What can leaders do to promote creativity and innovation in their organizations? According to bestselling author and innovation guru Tom Kelley, they should squint.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Play

Innovation is a numbers game, subject to considerable odds. IDEO’s Brendan Boyle says play is a key lever to drive risk taking and the broad experimentation required to ultimately succeed.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Singletask

Stanford Professor Clifford Nass studied hundreds of students, to explore what distinguished self-proclaimed “multitaskers” from the rest of us. His conclusions, and their implications, won’t surprise you.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Turn Info Into Knowledge

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Charles Duhigg explains how inefficient-seeming activities can alter how we make sense of information, and turn it into valuable knowledge.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Admit You Don’t Know

“I don’t know,” might be three of the hardest words to say, especially for a teacher. The teacher is the one who’s supposed to know. And yet, not knowing creates space for the unexpected to emerge…

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Learn for Yourself

The best creators are constantly learning. There’s immense value in doing something you’re not good at, specifically for the sake of seeing from a fresh perspective.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Keep A Bug List

Legendary Stanford professor Bob McKim used to give design students a simple assignment: keep a bug list. This was decades before computer programming gave the term the meaning it has today.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Endure the Pain of Becoming

It’s a grave mistake to assume that a spectacular outcome started out spectacularly. As Ed Catmull, Founder and CEO of Pixar says, “Our job is to take movies from suck to not suck.”

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Make Leaps Happen

Author, teacher, and artist Gary Zamchick writes, “In a time of rapid disruption, it’s more important than ever to live in the liquid space between building and dreaming — a place where conceptual, innovative, and transformational leaps drive innovation and change.”

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Community Relevance is the New Cultural Relevance

Gavin Guidry, Creative Director at R/GA, says, “If my experience has taught me one thing, it’s this: to get the results clients are looking for, they need to forget about cultural relevance, and focus on community relevance.”

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Imagine Alternatives

Whenever a student asked legendary Stanford Professor Bob McKim for feedback on a new design concept, he consistently gave the same response: “Show me three.” Those three words contain a remarkable depth of wisdom.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Reach Outside Your Team

“Would anyone be interested in staying after class tomorrow to brainstorm experiments?” This simple post is one of the most-engaged-with in all of LaunchPad12’s Slack messages. It illustrates a profound source of wisdom.

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