Here is the uncomfortable question: How much of your time do you spend on the type of problem only you can solve? Or do you spend too much of it on problems that other people can solve without you?
A surprising number of problems resolve themselves even if you do nothing. Have you ever gone on holiday and got an email about something that needs attending. And by the time you're back it's resolved. Some problems don't need you, they need time. You're not that critical to most problems.
Not every fire needs a firefighter
Not every problem needs you to intervene.
You should put your creative attention on the right things.
When everyone operates on autopilot, the ability to think differently is exceedingly valuable.
Our mind thinks what it expects to see.
Autopilot mode seeps into everything. It governs how we see problems, opportunities, people and possibilities. Our expectations drive our thoughts far more than our perception.
Your brain is a filtering machine. Without this, the sheer volume of data would paralyse you. This was true even before the onslaught of social media and AI.
But the efficiency comes at a cost.
We operate on autopilot - all the time.
Your brain filters out 99.99% of reality
Every second, your senses process about 1 gigabit of information. Only 100 bits make it through to conscious thought. The rest gets filtered out as irrelevant noise.
Are you working on anything remarkable right now?
Something worth people talking about?
Or are you adding to the noise?
Remarkable means to be worthy of remark. More than getting people to notice. But to find what you offer to be worth talking about.
As more and more noise enters the system - there is another skill that will be even more useful. And that's the ability to create signal in a world of noise. Not just to be noticed, but to be remarkable.
In the past, the skill of good decision-making was the ability to extract signal from noise. And with so much AI generated "noise" that skill is going to become even more valuable.
If you want to be exceptional
You need to be zigging when everyone else is zagging
What does being the exception mean?
- Thinking differently
- Recognising assumptions
- Testing conventional wisdom
- Thinking for yourself to figure out what works
If you want to be exceptional, you have to be the exception.
If you do what everyone else has done you are just conventional
Real expertise comes from cutting your own path
You are not unique.
Everybody learns the same things
We train the same way to learn the accepted practices
Creativity is best cultivated as a shift in problem framing
Creativity is like farming: you have to sow and nurture ideas before you can harvest them
If you only judge the finished thing, you miss the solution got there
To be creative, try changing how you think about the problem first.
Stop worshiping the final output; reward the mental sweat that actually grows it.
Writing down a hypothesis keeps us honest, because the easiest people to fool are ourselves. You don't have to make it complicated - write down what you expect the results will be and why. And then afterwards test if that was true and where they differed.
It's useful is to have a testable hypothesis whenever we embark on anything. That way, if it doesn't work (ie it fails) then we can examine the outcomes, the actions that led to them and the hypothesis.
"Learn from failure" is such a vague platitude.
It's the world's most repeated (and least practiced) advice.
Growth feels scrappy because you're under-resourced. The trick is to remove the bloat by going back to a founders mentality:
1. Find a bold insurgent mission to rally around
2. Obsess about the frontline - eliminate bureaucracy
3. Establish personal accountability
So why do businesses lose their boldness? What happens to tame their ambitions?
1. Success breeds process
2. Growth leads to conformity
3. Risk becomes the enemy
If a company isn’t chasing a bold future, it’s heading towards obsolescence. And the only thing left to defend is being ordinary.
When organisations lose their spark, they shift from offence to defence
They stop cutting their own path. They stop innovating. And they start working to the norms of their industry. They slowly decline into mediocrity.
We think creativity is about originality, but it's actually about making. And that happens on the page.
Every writer will tell you that first drafts are messy. That should give us hope when we drag our own ideas kicking and screaming into reality. We have to embrace the mess.
