inGenius

Ideas That Work.4 Bob argues that creativity is enhanced when you reward both success and failure and punish inaction.

constraints are necessary for all companies, especially start-ups. Without them, companies pursue failing strategies and are much less creative in finding ways to reach their goals. With severely limited resources, company founders need to make painful trade-offs and must find creative ways of solving their problems. They have to sacrifice things they want to do in order to do the things they need to do. Constraints force them to be thoughtful, to prioritize, and to be as innovative as possible.

Space is the stage on which we play out our lives. If you want to be creative, you need to build physical habitats that unlock your imagination.

This unleashes ideas that would never have surfaced if they only focused on their best ideas. When people are asked to generate bad ideas, they defer judgment and push beyond obvious solutions.

The results of this simple exercise are surprisingly predictable across ages and cultures, and it uncovers a very important point: most people fall into the trap of running with the first solution they find, even though it might not be the best solution. The first answers to any problem are not always the best answers. In fact, much better solutions are usually waiting to be unearthed. Unfortunately, most people are satisfied with the first solution they find, missing the opportunity to come up with innovative approaches that require more effort to discover.

blindly moving ahead

This is terribly unfortunate.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it

in order to find creative solutions to big challenges, you must first believe that you’ll find them.

“If anything can go wrong, fix it!” We should call this revised rule “Diamandis’s Law.”