Three life lessons from the making of this Hollywood blockbuster
The 27-year-old director had a major problem in his hands. The star of his movie, Bruce, was high maintenance—even by Hollywood standards. Bruce was a mechanical shark, lovingly named after the director’s lawyer. But the shark couldn’t do the one thing he was [...]
Want to be right more often? Try this.
An experimenter walks into a room and gives you these three numbers. 2, 4, 6. She tells you that the numbers follow a simple rule, and your job is to discover the rule by proposing different strings of three numbers. The experimenter will [...]
Why you shouldn’t think outside the box
No five words in the English language make me cringe as much as “Let’s think outside the box.” Coming from someone who writes about contrarian thinking and non-conformity, that sentence might strike you as odd. After all, you redefine the status quo by [...]
Why nothing fails like success
Where were you on January 28, 1986? If you’re American, and you were older than six at the time, the chances are that you know the answer to that question. On that morning, the space shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing [...]
Three questions I ask before making a decision
1. What's the worst that can happen? When it comes to creating worst case scenarios, my imagination is particularly vivid. My creativity kicks into high gear as I think about all the awful consequences that can follow from a simple decision gone wrong. [...]
This is the antidote to failure
In her terrific book on creativity, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert recounts a story about Mike Nichols, who is the prolific director behind many classics including The Graduate (plastics, anyone?). Although people tend to remember Nichols’s hits, many of his films were flops. Some [...]
The power of moonshot thinking
In September 1962, President John F. Kennedy stood before a packed Rice University stadium and pledged to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth before the decade was out. “We choose to go to the Moon,” he [...]
Don’t look for the right answer. Try this instead.
In solving problems, our first instinct is to find the right answer. In boardrooms across America, executives fall over each other to be the first to deliver the correct answer to a perceived problem. Doctors assume they’ve got the right diagnosis based on [...]
This conversation stopper should be a starter.
Nobody does it that way. This line stops a conversation before it begins. If no one does it that way, it means it can’t be done. If no one does it that way, it means we’ll get ostracized or rejected. If no one [...]
Here’s the biggest thing holding you back
As I was doing research for the book I’m currently writing, I came across this quote from an anonymous NASA employee: “I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.” The quote resonated with me because we often [...]