Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality Paperback – March 27, 2012

I appreciate the hard work that was dedicated to creating this book. It is a refreshing reminder of what we are capable of achieving. Once involved in a project where a quandary arises, it is easy to become derailed from the initial purpose for starting the project or journey. Making Ideas Happen is a book to be revisited often as a calibrating reference book to decide whether a project is worth sticking with or moving on in a different direction.

I will recommend Making Ideas Happen to all of my friend, family and fellow creatives to help them with their personal and professional quandaries.

When I started reading Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky, I had grand hopes. I wanted this book to single-handedly pick my ideas off the dusty shelf in my brain and turn them into million-dollar businesses (or something like that). Maybe that is a little extreme, but I was instantly drawn to this book because I have a hard time making my ideas happen. I suppose I was looking for inspiration and a hidden secret on how to turn any old idea into something of functioning brilliance.

Of course, no book can accomplish that. But Making Ideas Happen is probably going to change my life. Here's the thing. This book is not filled with flowery prose or motivational stories meant to get you off your butt. Instead, this is a college course in taking your idea somewhere. Belsky mines the experiences of a lot of visionary people who all have one thing in common, they were able to make their ideas happen.

If you are still in love with the idea of your idea, you are going to want to get over that pretty quickly. The idea is not the thing, Belsky argues, the execution is the thing. Ideas flow freely, while doing something about them takes a lot of hard work and focus. Making Ideas Happens spends most of its time talking about the nuts and bolts on exactly how you can bring your idea to reality. Warning, it is not easy. Things will stand in your way. Heck, you will get in your own way. You will need great passion and determination. If you can muster those things, then the tips in this book will serve you well. If you just want to be creative all day, well Belsky has advice for that to, get a partner who is a doer.

Scott Belsky argues that you need three things to make any idea happen. He says, "you just need to modify your organizational habits, engage a broader community, and develop your leadership capability."

Getting Organized

If you ever want to move your ideas forward, you need to figure out how to organize them and then how to manage the process of working on them. Belsky spends a lot of time talking about how to manage tasks better. His suggested system involves three main categories, Action Steps, References, and Backburners. One of the problems with ideas is that they hit you at the most inconvenient times. You need a place to store new ideas while you move ahead on current ones.

Belsky suggests that you take a project-based approach to making ideas happen. Each major idea should be a project. Each project should have action steps (the things you currently need to do to move the idea forward), references (the information that feeds the idea but is not necessarily action oriented), and backburners (things for future consideration). Belsky and his team at Behance have actually developed a task management system that incorporates these ideas. It is called the Action Method, and I am currently using it with great success. Look for a review on it soon.

Being organized is the first step toward execution. Creative people have a tendency to flit about from one thing to the next. When a new idea strikes, we leave off on an old one. With a project based approach and a way to organize and create action steps around an idea, you can stay focused and stay creative at the same time.

Collaboration

The next major piece of making ideas happen is collaboration. Belsky argues that all good ideas need a team to move them to completion. I am sure you can find examples where this was not true, but Belsky has great examples of when this was true. Teams make more progress than individuals.

In the book, Belsky spends a lot of time explaining the importance of collaboration. One of the surprising benefits he brings up is skepticism. Having someone on hand to thoroughly vet your idea, to poke it to see if it holds water, is actually a very good thing. One of the best things you can do to make ideas happen, it seems, is to kill the bad ideas quickly.

Of course, there is a lot more that collaboration can get you. When you can get more people than just you excited about your idea, you can take it places. Layer that on top of your ability to organize your idea into a linear project, and you will soon be moving quickly toward final execution on your idea.

Another thing that Belsky brings up is the dynamic of the dreamer and the doer. If you are the dreamer, it may be in your best interest to find a doer to partner with so you can take your idea to market. A dreamer is creative and challenges the status quo. A doer may not see the big picture as well, but they sure can see all the little details needed to get the job done. Gary Vaynerchuk shares similar advice, and this is something that I personally (as a dreamer) have been pondering for a while. Dreamers are sometimes afraid of doers, because they think that they will have to compromise their dream. However, without a doer, sometimes their dream will never see the light of day.

Be the Leader

Finally, to bring your ideas to fruition, you need to step up to the plate and lead. You lead yourself first, by getting organized. Then you create excitement around your idea and build a team. To keep that team motivated and moving your idea forward, you must learn how to work with them, to make them feel important to the process. In the last part of the book, Belsky gives a lot of advice (again, taken from people who have had great success) on how to lead.

There is one big twist in Belsky's advice on leadership. For the most part, this section of the book could be in any leadership or management manual. But Belsky always ties it back to the idea. The idea is the engine that makes everything else possible. So when you lead, you are not doing it as a fancy-pants CEO. You are doing it as the person with the idea, and you are instilling passion every step of the way. Earlier, I pointed out that execution is the thing, not ideas. This is true, but in the end, good execution needs a great idea.

This book is for you:

If you have a great idea (or ideas) but can't get it off the ground
If you are already working on your ideas and want to execute better
If you need to learn a better way to manage tasks and organize projects (read the first part of the book)
If you want to create a dynamic team that buys in to your idea 110%
If you want to enable your team to get more done and achieve more creative results

"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." -- Thomas Edison

I think the above quote summarizes the gist of this book.

In between the self-promotion, name dropping, and over-promotion of the author's company there is some good material here.

My favorite is when he points out that many creative types flutter from one idea to another, jumping to the latest inspiration and never getting anything finished. That is something that I have always struggled with. I know I'm guilty of it.

I liked the example of Walt Disney's three rooms. Room 1 for rampant brainstorming; room 2 to sort through the ideas from room one; and room 3 for critical review of the results from room 2. This seems like a good way to use space to keep the mind focused on the task at hand.

Summary: Despite it's flaws, it's not a bad book.

I really found value in the first section of the book, on organization and execution. The following two - on community and leadership - weren't quite as big on ideas and things for the reader to take away, though the section on community did have some thought-provoking ideas and material. The third section - on leadership - mostly felt like sage advice but not real ACTIONABLE, GAME-CHANGING information like the first section and part of the second. Even Belsky says in the third section that learning to lead best comes from experience.

I was so in love with this book when I started reading it.

"What is this amazing action method that is going to change my life and be the productivity method that finally suits me as a creative personality?"

But as I got into the action method, I discovered it's basically just David Allen's Getting Things Done. If you haven't read GTD, then you may find this book helpful as it's basically the same method adapted to the context of a creative life, but if you have studied GTD, and are looking for something else as far as I can tell this is basically the same thing.

It's a great book, down to earth, and with a extraordinary amount of "data" (experiences from others), comments and expertise of other great minds. I enjoy these series of books, because in a way, they are honest, realistic, and direct, but keeps you with a foot on the ground, an the head flying, it moves something inside, between the mind, soul and heart. Great for our ideas in order p, and to found the motivation to achieve them.