Book of the Week: Insight Out

26 Mar 2016

This week I read Tina Seelig’s Insight Out: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and Into the World. I previously read inGenius by Tina. This book introduces the invention cycle, which describes the stages that bring an idea to life. This book is about bringing ideas to life, not necessarily companies. At the end of each chapter there are assignments to do, which help reinforce the content. At the end of the book Tina talks about how the invention cycle compares to design thinking and the lean startup methodology. When I started reading the book, I was worried that I heard all the stories already and would feel disappointed. I’m glad that wasn’t the case. If I heard the story already, I would read through it quickly and focus on the point that Tina was going to make. I am worried that if you can only refer to the same stories over and over again, maybe things won’t work for you. It’s like saying you can play basketball, here’s the story of Michael Jordan Nine Dots Puzzle I didn’t know that the origin of the phrase, thinking outside the box, is from the 9 dots puzzle. You need to connect all 9 dots by drawing 4 straight lines without lifting your pen. The phrase is enough to give you a clue on how to solve it. Tina’s criticism of the phrase is that it is not actionable. That’s great advice, but what do I do? The Invention Cycle [caption id=”attachment_4779” align=”aligncenter” width=”566”] https://medium.com/@tseelig/inventure-cycle-e89579b328da#.5n3c123h5[/caption] The book is about the invention cycle. It starts with imagination, which leads into creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s a cycle, so it keeps going in an endless cycle. The important part is how you move from one part of the cycle to the other. What it takes to make that leap. Imagination

Imagination requires engagement and the ability to envision alternatives.

Imagination is fueled by diverse inputs. Traveling and doing lots of different things helps. If you grow up thinking there are right and wrong answers, you end up limiting yourself. This why school beats the imagination out of you. People that don’t have imaginations are boring to work with. You must not let impostor syndrome keep you from envisioning something that is loftier. You need vision to see what things could grow into, not what they are now. You look at something and see how it came become grander. Creativity

Creativity requires motivation and experimentation to address a challenge.

Daniel Pink’s Drive describes what motivates people. There is external motivation and internal motivation. External motivation is about outside validation. What matter is internal motivation, what you personally want to do regardless of what other people think or say. You need to be self motivated to overcome the challenge. For something to begin to take form, you need to experiment. If you see some progress, it motivates you to do more experimentation. Innovation

Innovation requires focusing and reframing to generate unique solutions.

People waste a lot of time. If you remove sleep, personal needs and work, you are still left with over 1400 hours a year. Some people will precrastinate by beginning a task immediately instead of taking a little more effort to do something that has a better long term outcome. If it is easy for you to write code, you’ll probably do it before checking to see if your customers want what you’re selling. Tina has a trash compactor analogy for dealing with a lot of things. When a trash compactor is full, you can 1) throw stuff away 2) give stuff to other people 3) keep it in the compactor. Refreshing social media repeatedly is like playing a slot machine. Each time you refresh the screen, you are gambling with small amounts of time. Over a long period of time, it amounts to a lot and you’re broke on time. Creativity needs blocks of focused time for it to work. But what should you be focusing on? I might have missed this in The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. You can divide tasks as urgent/non-urgent and important/unimportant. To be effective, you need to focus on things that are important, but not urgent, because those tasks setup the next things and makes life easier in the future. You need to think ahead instead of react to problems. Reframing is a very important technique. It lets you look at the world in a different way. Mauricio Estrella had a painful divorce. When he was forced to change his password at work, the changed it to “Forgive@h3r”. The next time he changed it to “Quit@smoking4ever”. Then he changed it to “Save4trip@thailand”. By typing these passwords every time he logged in, he was able to achieve his goals. Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship requires persistence and the ability to inspire others.

Sometimes you need to exhaust all obvious ideas first before you start getting to the good stuff. The point is that if you keep it in, you keep holding on to it instead of putting out there and letting it be free. Only by emptying yourself can new ideas come into being. Startups are a team sport. You can’t do everything alone. You need to be able to inspire people to join your cause. Purchase Insight Out from Amazon.com or check it out from you local library.