Tag Archives: inspiration

Blowing up the garage with my chem set (and other curiosities)

7 Feb 4273225057_bcd1baf329_z

My friend has a sign in her office that has been top-of-mind for me this week: “Asking questions is a mark of success.”

Cool. So what does that mean?

Taken one way, it might mean that once you’ve risen to a point of being successful, once you’ve arrived, you now have permission to ask anything. And often this will go unchallenged—I know one tricky CEO who likes to ask stupid questions just to see if his staff is willing to challenge him! He calls it his “BS barometer.” I like that.

Taken another way, asking questions may be the pathway to success. Today, I got a call about something I’ve been preparing to do, and I asked several questions to try to be ready for a meeting about it later this week. The question I really wanted to ask:

“What do I not know now that I’m going to wish I knew six months from now?”

That is, what high-impact piece of information am I missing? And this leads me into further questions about whether the bridge to get this information is long (e.g. you must learn Russian) or short (you must learn the secret handshake).

So I started thinking of the questions I like to keep in my back pocket, the kind that automatically spring to my thirsty, curious mind.

One of the things I’ve disciplined myself to do is to compartmentalize my questions into three groups:

  • Thinking questions – These questions start with where, who, when, and how. They’re about facts that you can prove or disprove, and can measure objectively.
  • Feeling questions – These questions start with what, and they dig into experiences and personal assessments and perspectives. Don’t merely equate feeling with emotion; consider that a feeling question is a person’s subjective sense of the external world.
  • Knowing questions – These questions start with why, and they are about your core beliefs and intuition. They don’t rely on external perceptions—you know in your gut whether something is right or wrong, true or false.

I credit Shirlaws Coaching for teaching me this unique approach to questioning during a coaching skills workshop several years ago. They guide you to approach asking questions in this order, which allows a answerer to gradually move from answering from the head (logic) to the heart (feeling) to the gut (intuition).

I watched this questioning process conducted on a fellow coach and it was startling the degree biology came into play—the questioner probed with thinking, feeling and finally knowing questions, and when the answerer was done, he was just done. You could physically see the change in his body.

How do you approach questioning? Do you have a system to uncover the information you need? I find asking too many “why” questions in business up front can often put someone on the defensive, so that’s one more reason I try to use this system.

Consider testing a new product, for example. Let’s say you’d never even heard of the iPad. Here’s one way to organize your approach to learning more:

  1. Who is this for? How do you turn it on? How do you navigate? Who made it? Where can I get one? How can I use it? When do I need to charge it? When will I use it?
  2. What is this like? What is this totally unlike? What else can it do? What surprises me about this? What markets can it disrupt? What will I do with it?
  3. Why was it invented? Why aren’t there more products like this on the market? Why is it made in this shape and color? Why is it available only with X features but not Y features? Why am I reacting like this? Why do I like it? Why not?

So my question is this: how do you approach curiosity and questioning? How do you find out more about your world? I’m a kick-the-tires, take-it-for-a-test-drive kind of girl … I’ll get around to reading the driver’s manual only after getting stuck on the side of the road. My parents were smart enough not to get me a chem set or I would have surely blown up the garage. Instead, they shipped me off to courses in bubbleology and computer science (and this was 1984).

Once, a friend got mad at me—really, truly, angry—because I would not let him show me how to play a video game. I wanted to try it myself. And if I lost, well, I could start over, right?

Oh, no. In his mind, it was do-or-die, and he demanded I do it right the first time. Needless to say, we got in quite the tiff over whether it’s better to show someone the right way or let them figure it out for themselves.

You know which side I’m on.

I’m for experimentation. For mistakes. For more questions than answers. For try-it-before-you-buy-it. For fiddling around with all the knobs and levers until you’ve got things just the way you want them. For endless Control+Z do-overs until I finally, finally get it right.

That’s how I roll. How about you? GO.

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Key question for innovators: How can we make this more fun?

30 Nov Fun paint

As part of my social media experimentation and engagement strategy (that’s code for “learning it by doing it”), I sometimes participate in one of Harvard Business Review’s #HBRchat sessions on Twitter about leadership.

These can be a great—if chaotic—place to discuss business and management issues with other leaders on Twitter. Even if you miss the weekly chat sessions, the posted recaps always include a few insightful zingers, in tidy 140-character bites.

One of the questions I recently answered was “What are the qualities of a great leader?” My immediate tweet back? “A sense of fun.”

Leaders generate better ideas (and greater innovation) when people are willing to take a chance in proposing a wacky idea. Fun breaks down the barriers and fear of failure.

During the chat, I went on to argue that the most effective leaders make a conscious effort to build a sense of fun in their teams. They are intentionally approachable, which in turn encourages people to go out on a limb, look silly and even fail.

Let me put it another way: I strongly believe that leaders with a sense of fun will get better ideas from their team, because their team members will be less afraid to propose or pursue them.

I can tell you this: I can offer up the most hair-brained idea to my CEO fearlessly. While I typically put serious effort and thought into honing things before they get in front of him, I still feel the sense of fun, the permission to be foolish that makes innovation possible.

For example, at Pixar, mistakes are celebrated along with successes—the nothing-ventured, nothing-gained mantra is “He who fails the most wins.” Pixar’s appetite for risk has removed layers of fear that stifle creativity and limit an individual’s willingness to go out on a limb with a crazy idea.

What I love is that Pixar hired top-notch creatives who were considered “unmanageable” and gave this group free reign to do their best work. Result? Their film, The Incredibles, won Academy Awards and became a best-selling DVD, even though its budget per minute was lower than any previous Pixar film.

I have to imagine that fun was more than just a movie goal. It was an essential mandate for being part of the team.

Google tells a similar success story; it enables its engineers to spend one day per week or up to 20% of their time working on anything that interests them. Here, I see fun at work as a product of autonomy—getting to choose to do what you love.

Both Google News and Google Product Search were spawned by this permission to innovate. Pulitzer-winning author David Vise explained, “Google … technologists think first of ways to solve problems; only later, if ever, do they worry about how to ‘monetize’ them.”

For an extra helping of fun, take your meeting outside, or somewhere more interesting than your office.

One of my most successful projects was proposed twice, dismissed twice, and finally left for dead by a boss that fostered a sense of fear, not fun, in the workplace. It’s hard to keep pushing your idea at what feels like a brick wall.

But, when things changed and I had a new opportunity to pitch my idea, the project was resurrected (and we had a lot of fun doing it).

Fun beat fear, and the results speak for themselves.

What’s getting in the way of your ability to innovate? Maybe it’s a lack of fun, or the presence of fear of failure. So instead of tackling the innovation problem, consider taking a step back and asking a simpler question: How can we make this more fun?

GO.

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I am thankful for … mentors who guide my career

24 Nov Hopscotch

Happy Thanksgiving! It’s my favorite holiday—we celebrate our many blessings, we give to the less fortunate, there’s always room at the table for another; we cook, eat, nap and watch football. What could be better?

There’s more: I’ve never had someone get mad at me for failing to buy them a Thanksgiving Day gift, or send them a Thanksgiving card. The hardest holiday shopping is the Costco parking lot the day before the big event, and even then, it doesn’t require traffic cops like the mall does on Christmas Eve. (Not that I’d be caught dead there and then.)

But I digress. It’s Thanksgiving, and I wanted to share what I’m thankful for. Since this is a blog about work and purpose, I wanted to specifically acknowledge mentors who have been important to me: I got a wonderful surprise via Facebook last week, which was a blog post via aPriori International about my blog post on styles. You can read the whole thing here, but my favorite part is this:

We don’t bring Heidi’s blog to the forefront just because she is a participant in our programs or because her latest post references the principles we espouse. Rather, we feel her documentation of her learning expands the risk that is inherent in learning. By jumping into Market Force courses, Heidi admitted to herself that there are things in her life with which she needs assistance, from employee assessments to personal time management to … whatever. And so by writing about her learning, she is taking a greater risk, a critical action in the process of becoming your “whole self.”

The thing that this post immediately brought to my mind was Charles Bukowski’s poem, “The Rape of the Holy Mother.”

Before that title freaks you out, read what this poem is really about: “To expose your ass on paper/ terrifies some/ and/ it should:/ the more you put down/ the more you leave yourself/ open/ to those who label themselves/ “critics.” (full poem here)

As Travis Carson, author of the aPriori post above, rightly says, learning is inherently risky. And that’s why today, on Thanksgiving, I am especially grateful for mentors.

Mentors challenge you. They allow you to fail. They guide your learning and your experimentation. They’re not about “thinking out of the box,” they’re about tearing that whole damned box apart.

Which is pretty cool, don’t you think? So here’s my list (and only just a start) of career mentors who have helped me make pivotal choices.

I am thankful for Yvonne Young, my second-grade teacher, who constantly repeated the phrase, “You are loveable and capable!” She built tremendous self-esteem (and daring qualities), and her expert storytelling remains so memorable that I try to mimic it with my own children.

I am thankful for Andy Gottesman, my high school debate coach. Winning in debate helped me feel fantastic about myself in high school even though I was pretty nerdy. That’s a big deal, but more importantly, I truly believe that speech and debate skills got me through college and prepared me for the world of work.

I am thankful for Cliff Rowe, my college journalism professor. Cliff literally changed my life when he prompted me to apply for a fellowship even though I hadn’t declared a major in journalism. I ended up winning the fellowship, a $1,000 stipend to intern at a newspaper, and then Cliff then directed me to an idyllic summer at the Port Townsend-Jefferson County Leader. By the end of five months there, I was hooked, and spent the next nine years in newspapers.

I am thankful for Pat Jenkins, my first, full-time newspaper editor. He took a chance on hiring me fresh out of college and pushed my writing far, far forward by taking the time to show me how I could improve (not just making corrections and moving on). He helped me develop strong reporting skills to really immerse myself in a community, and also helped me navigate some tricky political stories that resulted in the resignation of a judge.

I am thankful for Dan Cook, my business reporting editor, whose passion for digging into a story completely changed my reporting style, who managed to reign in this spitfire with good humor and tons of patience, and who taught me the value of having conviction in your work (and knowing when to take a pass).

I am thankful for Lynn Parsons, marketing and business development consultant, who understands the value of real business relationships (not just LinkedIn connections) and how to manage clients with diplomacy and grace, and who I admire tremendously for running her own firm through any economic cycle. She is the master of client service.

I am thankful for Craig Robbins, Chief Knowledge Officer and “dean” of Colliers University, who has given me hours of insight into work styles and systems, and who has the kind of advice that is tough to hear but absolutely essential if you want to get through any roadblock.

And I am also thankful for Katherine Steen, director of Colliers University, who since 2006 who has given me the platform and opportunity to speak to a broader audience, share my expertise and connect with people from around the world, and tackle challenging projects with zest.

There are many more on the list, but I wanted to recognize the people above because the each played a pivotal role in my career development. I am deeply grateful for everything they shared and invested in me.

If you’re from the USA, have a wonderful Thanksgiving. If you’re not, give thanks anyway. I’m taking this weekend off blogging to spend with my family, but I’ll send you a post later tonight on gift-giving and see you back here on Monday, Nov. 28.

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Even gatekeepers get it wrong

18 Nov Umbrellas to meeting

Ever heard of Wikipedia?

Unless you’re living under a rock, of course you have.

It has 20 million articles (more than 3.8 million in English), which are written collaboratively by volunteers from around the world, including 90,000 regularly active contributors. It’s also written in 282 languages and is the largest and most popular general reference site on the Internet, with 365 million readers.

Let me revise: even if you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Wikipedia. There’s probably even an entry for under-rock dwellers.

But I digress.

Now, let me ask you another question: Ever heard of Nupedia?

No? Well, let me tell you about it, because its story is fascinating. Nupedia was an English-language encyclopedia founded by the same smart guys who started Wikipedia.

Sounds a lot like Wikipedia? Yes. The content was free. The experts were supposed to write articles for free. But the big difference is that instead of being open to all authors and editors, it required expert authorship and an extensive peer-review process.

It required gatekeepers.

Neupedia lasted from March 2000 until September 2003, and in that time only produced 24 articles for publication, with 74 more in the works. That’s pretty sad.

What the colossal failure of Nupedia—and colossal success of Wikipedia—suggests to me is this: gatekeepers are suspect.

For example, we’re seeing an explosion in independent publishing as authors go straight to their readers via e-readers, tablets, on-demand publishing and Internet marketing. Gatekeepers, in the form of agents, traditional publishing houses, distributors and stores, are bypassed entirely.

The result is that a lot of really, really crappy stuff gets published. But a lot of great stuff that might otherwise have been overlooked gets out there, too. Then the market decides. And for the crappy books, well, their sales totals number in the hundreds, if the authors are lucky.

So, as a consumer, I can take comfort in buying a traditionally published book because it’s likely the book has been vetted, edited and proofread. The gatekeepers are at work. (Still, crap gets by them. Of course it does.)

Flip side—there’s an enormous group of gatekeepers out there (readers!) crowdsourcing new content. When I read an awesome, independently published book, I review and recommend it. I help the cream rise to the top, even if it didn’t go through traditional publishing channels.

In work, consider who your gatekeepers are. Are your great ideas lost on a gatekeeping boss who would like you to simply do as directed, thankyouverymuch? Do you even censor yourself, as in “Well, this idea isn’t very good, so I’m not even going to volunteer it.”

Nupedia’s spectacular failure teaches me this: be wary of gatekeepers. When they add value, like fantastic editing, embrace them. But don’t imagine that they’re always going to be right, always going to be fair, or always going to produce the best results.

Ultimately, the market decides. So take a risk. Put it out there. Idea, book, project, whatever—let the market decide. GO.

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When inspiration strikes, pray that your car is dirty.

9 Nov Inspiration strikes feat

Hi again. I’m taking the next 15 minutes to add another post. It’s late (my whole family is asleep … even the dog is snoring) and the rain is absolutely pounding our house. Ah, Oregon.

I’d love to be in bed, too, but I find that when inspiration hits, I just can’t get away from it. It plagues me like a mosquito humming around my head as I try to get to sleep, keeping me up for hours if I don’t just settle down and write it out. And so I obey.

Sometimes, the inspiration is personal—an idea for my novel, or for a children’s book. I stumbled on a Facebook event launched because two mothers were asked to leave a local mall for breastfeeding in public (which is legally protected) and I spent that night doing research and drumming up a press release.

The result was coverage by three stations over two days, and I passed out more than 100 flyers at the event. I didn’t even know these women, but when I saw what was happening, inspiration struck … and it just wouldn’t leave me alone. (Also, I like to use my marketing powers for good, not evil.)

When I get inspired, the best response is to just do it. Do it now. Do it all all all. Because the flash of passion and inspiration is like a shot of adrenaline in my creative system, and the longer I make it wait, the more it fades and fizzles, like soda left open on the counter to grow warm and flat.

Yuck.

When inspiration or ideas strike me, it's as subtle as a fireworks spectacular. Featured photo by Denizen24; insert photo by Bayasaa

Often, my inspiration is for work: an idea for a cool project, a creative marketing idea, a new way of helping my company win new business or retain clients. If you’re in a meeting with me when inspiration strikes, you’ll know it—instantly. It’s like an enormous neon lightbulb exploding over my head.

Fireworks are more subtle.

If I were a third-grader in business meetings, I’d be flapping my hand, high in the air, doing that grunting thing kids do that’s code for “Pick me! Pick me!”

Yeah, sorry ‘bout that. I’m just that enthusiastic about ideas. It’s where I got one of my nicknames, “the idea vending machine.” Can’t help it. My best friend at work loves to tease me about it, pointing to something imaginary over my shoulder and saying, “Look! Shiny!”

I laugh, claiming I’m not that distract-able. But let’s be real—if it’s a really good idea, I am. I totally am. And as a recovering procrastinator, I should add that my favorite project at any given time is always the one that I just had a new idea for. Always.

Here’s my all-time favorite story about inspiration, from author Roald Dahl. Before I tell you about it, I have to say this: If you think you know that author (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach), throw that notion out of your head and sit down with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More.

Yes. As an adult. It is one of my favorite books, a perennial read, mostly fiction and one startling nonfiction short story. And Henry Sugar’s story still haunts me (but more on that in a later blog—I’d like to think it’s the reason I met my husband).

Back to Mr. Dahl. In the book’s introduction, he describes how inspiration once struck him while he was out on a drive. The idea for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory popped into his head and he was so desperate to capture this idea, he immediately pulled over to the side of the road and emptied the contents of his glove box to find paper and a pen.

Nothing. He came up empty. And he was feeling more and more desperate to hold onto his idea. So here’s what he did: he got out of the car, walked around to the back of the car, and wrote one word, chocolate, with his finger in the dust on his bumper.

And just like that, he’d grabbed hold of inspiration and tethered it to something tangible in our real world.

So what do you do when inspiration strikes? If I were sitting next to you and saw fireworks exploding from your ears, evidence of a great idea that had just occurred to you, I’d say, “GO! Run! Do it now! Write it down now! Make it real now!”

Because you never know how long inspiration will linger. Capture it. GO.

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Who needs a muse when the clock is ticking?

31 Oct Who needs a muse when the clock is ticking? Photo by Tobyotter

It’s Halloween, and tomorrow is a big day for many writers. Why? It’s the kickoff day for NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated. Throughout the month of November, participants take the challenge of writing 50,000 words (about 175 pages) in a novel by 11:59 on November 30.

That’s no mean feat.

According to the organizers (backed by UC Berkeley’s Office of Letters and Light), “Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.”

And then, the disclaimer: You will be writing a lot of crap.

With such a strict deadline, you are forced to run headlong through your plot, through shaky characters and dialog, through self-questioning and edits that truly stymie you, and into something few writers I know actually accomplish—a finished work.

I compared the feeling of finishing my first, 82,000  word novel Won’t Last Long to a person’s first marathon. You might not finish fast, you might not finish well, but the point is, you’ve finished.

And how many people can say that?

In writing circles, it’s clichéd to say, “Oh, you’re writing a novel? I’m working on a book, too.” And then the question, “Have you finished?” is met with mumbling excuses as they explain why their manuscript has been stuffed in a drawer for years.

Runners, I’m sure, can relate. Marathon finishers probably hear from dozens of other runners who have “trained” for a marathon without actually completing one.

I want to shout from the rooftops, “People! Stop talking about it and just Get.It.Done!”

So, back to NaNoWriMo and writing crap.

You might think that it’s a good thing to write slow, write carefully, edit as you go. But my mom told me a story that changed my tune entirely.

Who needs a muse when the clock is ticking? Photo by Tobyotter

As my mom earned a BFA, one of her ceramics instructors was teaching two of the same pottery classes concurrently. Same assignments, but he gave each group of students a different evaluation criteria.

He told one class: “I’m going to grade you based on the perfection of your work, the polish of each piece.” He told the other class: “I’m going to grade you based on the volume of your work, the sheer output of pieces you create.”

Then something strange happened.

The professor lined up both classes’ work and stood back for evaluation, not knowing which sculptures were submitted from the “most perfect” class and which were from the “most volume” class.

Guess what? As he graded the sculpture, the “most volume” class won—by a landslide.

There was something incredibly freeing for the student artists in the volume classes about just being asked to create, create, create—rather than to slow down and hone, edit, polish.

And so I imagine NaNo inspires writers in the same way. It works for me. Sometimes, as I write a novel, all I have to go on is the spiderweb sketch of the plot and a general sense of what I need to accomplish in the next chapter. I dive in and my characters surprise me. My subconscious connects the dots in unexpected ways.

For more on the idea of inspiration or muse, check out Julie Jordan’s blog post. I tweeted to her @Writers_Cafe that “the writing process itself inspires me.” Just getting in front of a blank page can be intimidating, sure, but with a timer to beat, who needs a muse? Just put words on the page and go.

So that’s it for me, my fifteen minutes are up. Whether your goal is to write or to run, what inspires you? Don’t make it hard, don’t count on a muse. Just lace up your shoes, fire up your laptop and GO.

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