Yet somehow in the face of all of this, you clear a space for the writing voice, hacking away at the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

This rang true to me as a perfect way to describe what it means to be “creative” in whatever you are doing. You’re trying to create meaning for others. It has very little to do with art. It’s hard work. The end.

I sat in corners with my little finger hooked over my bottom lip, reading, in a trance, lost in the place and times to which books took me. And there was a moment during my junior year in high school when I began to believe that I could do what other writers were doing. I came to believe that I might be able to put a pencil in my hand and make something magical happen. Then I wrote some terrible, terrible stories.

This made me laugh out loud! I love that one of my favorite writers began with those thoughts. I think people, including myself, judge worthiness of doing something based on their first try. That’s ridiculous! Comparing yourself to professionals on your first try is leading you down a very painful and uneventful road.

He could go anyplace he wanted with a sense of purpose. One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

It’s so easy to find yourself in a place that doesn’t seem relevant or make sense. In locations, in books, in relationships, in ideas… But sometimes a change in perspective is all it takes to get you to notice interesting things with value. If you’re looking, it’s there. We just always forget to look and care.

Research has shown, in fact, that the vast majority of successful new business ventures abandoned their original business strategies when they began implementing their initial plans and learned what would work and what would not work in their market. The dominant difference between successful ventures and failed ones, generally, is not the astuteness of their original strategy. Guessing the right strategy at the outset isn’t nearly as important to success as conserving enough resources so that new business initiatives get a second or third stab at getting it right. Those that run out of resources or credibility before they can iterate toward a viable strategy are the ones that fail.

What’s the minimum that can be done to see what happens in real life?

It’s a simple question, but for some reason we never seem to ask it. And if we do, we don’t take it seriously and let it get out of control. Often times we end up complicating things so much that we only get one shot when we could have had ten.

Markets that do not exist yet cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together. Not only are they market applications for disruptive technologies unknown at the time of their development, they are unknowable. The strategies and plans that managers formulate for confronting disruptive technological change, therefore, should be plans for learning and discovery rather than plans for execution.

I would also say that a market that already exists but has never been entered by a specific company should be treated the same way. If you haven’t done it a thousand times you’re probably going to stumble and fail a few times. Planning for failures and making it a point to learn from them will lead to far more success than any amount of research.

Analyzing the situation can help you dodge a bullet here and there, so don’t ignore it altogether. Just don’t let it drive the decisions.

Building alibis with which to explain away failure is a habit as old as the human race, and is fatal to success! … Building habits is a deeply rooted habit. Habits are difficult to break, especially when they provide justification for something we do. Plato had this truth in mind when he said, “The first and best victory is to conquer self. To be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile.”

I’ve always felt the best alibis are the ones that lay blame on inanimate objects. You know—things that can’t defend themselves. Like traffic and the weather… But when you avoid responsibility, you avoid giving yourself the option to change anything. As long as you keep redirecting blame to inanimate objects and people who don’t care, there’s never going to be a better solution.

Long story short: Alibis keep you stuck in suck land! Take responsibility and then do something about it!

Poverty may, and generally does, take the place of riches. When riches take the place of poverty, the change is usually brought about through well-conceived and carefully executed plans. Poverty needs no plans.

It’s amazing to think that most monetary gains are simply plans that were well thought out and then executed properly. That’s it!

So getting good at planning and getting good at following through are probably the two most important things you can do… Maybe even more important than gaining the skills of the industry you’re trying to make money in.

I estimate that the ratio of useless to relevant reading material is about twenty to one. With that in mind, my advice it to reduce the literary inflow to a maximum of two newspapers a day, two weekly magazines, and two publications in a specialized field. Get off distribution lists. The reward will be an opportunity to engage in that underappreciated occupation, contemplation.

It’s funny that almost everyone I know is running on nothing or drowning themselves in information. At what point does self-improvement stop paying off? At what point to you start relying more on what you read to make your decisions for you? At what point to you forget how to think for yourself?

Or… At it’s worst. At what point do you realize the world has changed while you weren’t paying attention at all.

To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest—quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all—will follow.

How can anyone ever really be motivated if they don’t believe that they are gaining ground in quality of life? Whether it’s for a salary, or a cause, or a hobby—it’s hard to do your best when you know you’re not creating a better life for yourself or your loved ones.

But when cards are held close to the vest, communication will be faulty, and anxieties, misunderstandings, insecurity, and eventually hostility will manifest itself. No amount of “we’re-all-in-this-together-because-we’re-all-one-big-family” sloganeering will compensate.

I think people with power in an organization often forget that they have to earn the trust of the people constantly. It’s easy to think that your “position” means something and you should “get what you deserve” without keeping everyone informed. It’s amazing how fast things go downhill.