Making Ideas Happen Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky

Making Ideas Happen Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky Founder and CEO of Behance

Scott Belsky is a very much a new media type of writer. He is the CEO of Behance which is a social networking platform for creative professionals. I took a look at the site and it is a shared image database of advertisements, designs, and illustrations. It is quite interesting to look at http://www.behance.com/Products/Creative_Network The site has a new media, trendy feeling to it which is quite catchy.

This book is about executing on ideas. It is focused on creative ideas from writers, artists, musicians, and others, but much of what is being said here can be applied to ideas in general. This book is not about how to create new ideas. It is about how to pick ideas which can be put into practice. It is very much a business management book.

What Scott Belsky is describing is a system to take action; you systematically create checklists of what actions you are going to take, sort and keep what you need to know to do it, and put ideas that you plan to do in the future in storage. It is not about taking lots of notes, or organizing things into files. This is not a traditional organizational schema.

The examples which Scott Belsky uses are of idea factories, people and companies that are both incredibly creative and productive. People like John Grisham, Steve Jobs, Chris Anderson, and James Patterson. Companies like IDEO, Walker Digital, Apple, Gizmodo, and Palm computing. The book is very new media oriented, specifically aimed at people who produce content both online and in print. If you read the magazines Fast Company or Inc., you would probably like this book.

This book does not say a whole lot about quality, but it does say a tremendous amount about productivity and how to get to "done." If you are a creative person who is interested in how to become more productive, this book could be quite useful.

Daily Thoughts 5/3/2010

Music and Literature," oil on canvas, by the American artist William Michael Harnett. Courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.1878

Daily Thoughts 5/3/2010

Next week we are viewing an online seminar for Bookletters which is a content management system for adding bookcovers and recommendation lists for library websites as well as creating email newsletters. I am also preparing for the next weeks collection development meeting.

I spent some time designing a flyer for the Overdrive Digital Media Catalog as well as straightening up the displays. There was also a little busywork cleaning up my desk.

I also checked out a book, Making Ideas Happen Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky who is the Founder and CEO of Behance.

I read some of Making Ideas Happen on the way home from work. It is an organization and management book for Creatives. Creatives is a euphemism for artists, film makers, writers, musicians, and other creative types in the business world. This book focuses on how creative people make their ideas actionable. Scott Belsky urges people not to take notes, but instead to create steps and actions to get projects done. He also makes the point that the aesthetics of the tools you are using makes you appreciate what you are doing more.