All the notes were taken directly from the source mentioned.

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Be remarkable, be generous, Create art, Make judgments calls, connect people and ideas

The competitive advantage the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion.

Doing a job that is not getting done is essential

When people realize that they are not a cog in a machine, an easily replaceable commodity, they take the challenge and growth. They produce more than you pay them to, because you are paying them with something worth more than money. They value quality for they own sake, anything less feels intellectually dishonest and a waste of time. You pay them with freedom, responsibility and respect which are priceless

Letting people on the organization use their best judgment turns out to be faster and cheaper, but only if you hire the right people and reward them for having the right attitude.

We teach people to take initiative and become remarkable, artists, to question the status quo, and to interact with transparency

School should teach:

– Solve Interesting problems

– Lead

If all you have to offer is information you lose because the internet knows more than you do. Depth of knowledge combined with good judgement is worth a lot.

Depth of knowledge is needed in 3 situations:

1. When the information is needed on a moment’s notice and bringing in an outside source is too risky or time consuming

2. When the knowledge is needed on a constant basis and the cost of bringing in an outside source is too high

3. When decision making is required, and internal credibility and organizational go hand in hand with knowing the right answer.

Understand the status quo better than anyone else

Every interaction you have with a coworker or a customer is an opportunity to practice the art of interaction

Organizations that can bring humanity and flexibility to their interactions with other human beings will thrive

“Fearless” Unafraid of things that one shouldn’t be afraid of.

As you get closer to perfect, it gets more and more difficult to improve and the market values the improvements a little bit less.

Projects/Portafolio are the new resume “Show, not tell”

If in the company you are the game is designed for you to lose, don’t play it. Play a different game.

The reason why you should put all your emotional labor is because you are paid for it. In fact, in most jobs that involve a customer, that’s all you are getting paid for

The act of giving a smile, connecting, taking initiative, being surprising, being creative is a gift you do for you, not your company or your boss.

Main motivations to work (Richard Florida)

• Challenge and responsibility
• Flexibility
• A stable work environment
• Money
• Profesional development
• Peer recognition
• Stimulating colleagues and bosses
• Exciting job content
• Organizations culture
• Location and community

The moment you are willing to sell your time for money is the moment you cease to be the artist you’re capable of being.

The passion wasn’t in making the money, it was in making a difference, solving a problem, creating a change that would help millions.

Attention is precious, if you are willing to trade your attention for my idea, we both thrive

You are not born to do a certain kind of art, mainly because your genes have no idea what technology is going to be available to you.

Passion isn’t project specific.

Making a connection when it’s not part of your job is a gift. You can choose to say the lines and get away with it, or you can touch someone and make a difference in their lives forever.

Whistling as you walk through the woods is a form of art, but you’re not doing it hoping a squirrel will applaud

It’s vital to know whom you are working for. First to understand your audience so that you can target your work. Second so that you can ignore everyone else. Art for everyone is mediocre, bland and ineffective

Nobody cares how hard you work, how it’s made or how difficult it was to make is sort of irrelevant for others

Optimism is for artists, they are working to make things better

When an artists stops work before his art is received, his work is unfulfilled

Every single person has been a genius at least once

If you have do it once, you can do it again

Art is the intentional act of using your humanity to create a change in another person***

You can’t ship if you are far outside the box, artists think along the edges of the box

The discipline of shipping is essential in the long-term path to becoming indispensable.

The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while projects we do are never really finished, they must ship. That is the coalition of your work and the outside world.

Daemon is genius in greek

Basal, amygdala causes emotions of fear

New part of brain: Neocortex

Brain systems:

• Brain Stem: Breathing and other unconscious survival functions
• Limbic system: The lizard brain. Anger and revenge ad sex and fear
• Cerebellum: Coordination and motor control
• Cerebrum: Newest and most sophisticated part of the brain

Cerebrum:

• Frontal lobe: Reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, problem-solving
• Parietal lobe: Movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli
• Occipital Lobe: Eyesight
• Temporal lobe: hearing, memory and speech

Untrained people surrender in face of fear, they can’t push through the common fear of completion unless they can create a greater fear of total failure

You will fail. Not all the time, but more than you’d like. You become a winner because you’re good at losing

When you have a great backup plan: you end up settling for the backup

When someone says that he doesn’t have any good ideas, most likely they don’t have any bad ideas neither. Finding good ideas is easy when you solve the problem of finding but ideas.

To be more creative you have to discipline yourself to be more creative.

3 biological factors that drive job performance and innovation: Social Intelligence, fear response and perception

It’s not an accident that successful people read more books

Here are some signs that the lizard brain is at work:

Don’t ship on time. Late is the first step to never

Procrastinate, claiming that you need to be perfect.

Ship early, sending out defective ideas, hoping they will be rejected.

Suffer anxiety about what to wear to an event.

Make excuses involving lack of money.

Do excessive networking with the goal of having everyone like you and support you.

Engage in deliberately provocative behavior designed to ostracize you so you’ll have no standing in the community.

Demonstrate a lack of desire to obtain new skills.

Spend hours on obsessive data collection. (Jeffrey Eisenberg reports that “79 percent of businesses obsessively capture Internet traffic data, yet only 30 percent of them changed their sites as a result of analysis.”)

Be snarky.

Start committees instead of taking action.

Join committees instead of leading.

Excessively criticize the work of your peers, thus unrealistically raising the bar for your work.

Produce deliberately outlandish work product that no one cap possibly embrace.

Ship deliberately average work product that will certainly fit jn and be ignored.

Don’t ask questions.

Ask too many questions.

Criticize anyone who is doing something differently. If they suceed, that means you’ll have to do something differently too.

Start a never-ending search for the next big thing, abandoning yesterday’s thing as old.

Embrace an emotional attachment to the status quo.

Invent anxiety about the side effects of a new approach.

Be boring.

Focus on revenge or teaching someone a lesson, at the expense of

doing the work.

Slow down as the deadline for completion approaches. Check your

work obsessively as ship date looms.

Wait for tomorrow.

Manufacture anxiety about people stealing your ideas.

When you find behaviors that increase the chances of shipping, stop using them.

Believe it’s about gifts and talents, not skill.

The Cult of Done

Bre Pettis wrote this manifesto on his blog:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and

completion.

2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

3. There is no editing stage.

4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same 5

knowing what you are doing, so accept that you know what you’re

doing even if you don’t and do it.

5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.

8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done,

9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes

you right.

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

11. Destruction is a variant of done.

12. If you have an idea and publish it on the Internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

13. Done is the engine of more.

The ideas aren’t the hard part. It’s shipping that’s difficult

Real artists trash a lot at the start, because staring means that they are going to finish

Work until you run out of time or run out of money. Then on ship date it’s gone

It takes crazy discipline to do nothing between projects

Leo Babauta’s suggestion, aim for significant work per year. Break into smaller projects and every day, find three tasks to accomplish that will help you complete a project

The line between successful artists and mediocre artists, is the race to completion.

Anxiety is the exaggeration of the worst possible what-if, accompanied by self-talk that leads to the relentless minimization of the actual odds of success

No rewards for worriers

Never let the lizard send an email

People will hate you first before they love you. They laugh at your first

Internet diet, five checks a day, not fifty

You can’t sprint every day, but it’s probably a good idea to sprint regularly. It keeps the resistance at bay

The resistance is happy to set up unachievable goals as a way of dissuading you from doing the work. After all, if it’s impossible to achieve something and it’s going to be painful to try, why bother?

Be alert write any thoughts that could be useful down, prioritize them, build over them and ship them. It’s a habit. Start today, start now and don’t stop until  you ship

Give gifts. Voluntarily… without the obligation to reciprocate, but with the obligation to help the next person

When we meet a stranger we do business. When we encounter a member of the tribe, we give gifts. If money circulates freely within the tribe, the tribe will grow prosperous more quickly

No charge of interest to members of the tribe. The more the network increases, the more value is created

The lack of transaction created a bond between the giver and the recipient, and perhaps surprisingly, the giver usually comes out even further ahead.

If art is created solely to be sold, it’s only a commodity

Reciprocation is an act of keeping score, which involves monetizing the art, not appreciating it

A generous artist isn’t easily replaceable

People who take gifts but don’t give them find themselves temporarily ahead of the game, but ultimately left out.

“Thank You and…”

If you appreciate a gift, consider saying, “thank you and…”

Thank you and I dog-eared forty of the pages.

Thank you and I told your boss what a wonderful thing you did.

Thank you and here’s a record my band and I recorded last week.

Thank you and you made me cry.

Thank you and I just blogged about what you did.

Thank you and here’s a twenty-dollar tip; I know it’s not much, but

it’s all I can afford right now.

Thank you and how can I help you spread the word?

Thank you and can you teach me how to do that?

Thank you and you changed me, forever.

Respect is the gift you can offer in return

If you are lucky enough to work with someone this generous, pay him a lot, or your competition will

Artists trace their own map. Art is the act of navigating without a map

you won’t be able if you can’t see the world as it is. You need to know where you are and know where you’re going before you can figure out how to go about getting there

Be aware that we all carry around a personal worldview – the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world

Be able to perceive the world as if you were the investor, the entrepreneur, and the market.

Seeing the world not as the interview or the applicant, but as someone watching dispassionately from a third chair.

Seeing clearly means that you’re smart enough to know when a project is doomed, or brave enough to preserve when your colleagues are fleeing for the hills

The linchpin understands that getting anger about the battery in the microphone isn’t going to make the battery come back to life

Embrace the uniqueness that everyone brings to the table, you’ll navigate the world with more bliss and effectiveness. And make better decisions too

Understand that perhaps it’s not your job to change what can’t be changed

Brainpower mind is exhausting and completely ineffective

A sign of attachment is how you handle bad news

Learn what you can learn; then move on

When our responses turn into reactions and we set out to teach people a lesson, we lose. The act of teaching someone a lesson rarely success at changing them, and always fails at making our day better, or our work more useful

Accept the day’s forecast for what it is, because there’s nothing you can do about it

• Fundamentalist Zealot: He is attached at the world as it is. Change is a threat, curiosity is a threat. They make the world smaller, poorer, and meaner
• Bureaucrat: Not attached to the outcome of events, he won’t be exerting any additional effort, regardless. Rules follower
• Whiner: Extremely attached to the worldview’s he bought into, life in the fear of change. No effort to make things better
• Linchpin: Brings passion to the world, right effort in the right place can change the outcome, and she reserves her effort for doing just that

Scarcity creates value. What’s scarce is a desire to accept what is and then work change it for the better, not deny that it exists.

A brilliant negotiator does her art by understanding the other side as honestly as anyone can

You have to be able to see the truth. It takes experience and expertise and most of all, a willingness to look

We get only a certain number of brain cycles to spend each day

2 options for Linchpins:

• Hire plenty of factory workers. Scale like crazy
• Find a boss who can’t live without a linchpin

The linchpin is able to invent a future, fall in love with it, live in it and then abandon it on a moment’s notice

Don’t let your circumstances or habits rule your choices today. Become a master of yourself and use your willpower to choose

Understand which hard work is worth doing***

Self-hating artists burns out

The alternative is to develop a sense of loyalty to your mission and generosity to your work

Discerning the difference between feedback that helps and criticism that degrades

In the meantime, ease up on yourself. We need you

Linchpin can’t succeed in isolation

Psychological 5 traits

Openness, Conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability

It’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on using a spreadsheet or a time clock to measure your progress, but in fact, it’s the investment you make in your interactions that will pay off

It’s almost impossible to fake your intent

The people you work with won’t change if you don’t believe. Enthusiasm, connection and leadership starts with the gift you give, not with the manipulation you attempt.

7 Abilities of a Linchpin

• Providing a unique interface between members of the organization
• Delivering unique creativity
• Managing a situation or organization of great complexity
• Leading customers
• Inspiring staff
• Providing deep domain knowledge (by itself it isn’t sufficient unless is combined with smart decisions and generous contributions)
• Possessing a unique talent

Mentoring is a transfer of emotion and confidence

When you meet someone is all about making the introduction meaningful

If you don’t know your superpower, then i don’t know how you can help me (or I can help you)

Your superpower comes from what you choose to do, and more importantly what you choose to give

If you are not the best in the world, develop other linchpin attributes or get a lot better at your unique talent

Compliance feels like a shortcut to humility because it permits us to deny responsibility for whatever goes wrong

In most non-cog jobs, the boss’s biggest lament is that her people won’t step up and bring their authentic selves to work

You don’t start with the confidence of the company you earn it

Everyone has the freedom to create, but not all creations end up being equal, meaning that some people aren’t going to win

It might mean that you’re making the wrong art, or drawing the wrong map. Know the market and yourself well enough to see the truth

Poets don’t get paid, even worse, poets who try to get paid end up writing jingles and failing and waiting it at the same time.

Pitfalls

• Monetize your work by corrupting it
• Attention doesn’t always equal significant cash flow

If you are going to make a living at it, it helps to find a niche where the money flows as a regular consequence of the success of your idea. Loving what you do is almost as important as doing what you love, especially if you need to make a living at it. Find a job you can fall in love with

Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love (yet), but you can figure out how to love what you do to make money (if you choose wisely)

People who are committed to their art never stop giving

If you give enough to the right people in the right way, your gifts will be treasured and your journey will be rewarded

Summary

Be the artist you already are. Make a difference, stand for something

Obsess about either fitting in or standing out. The act of deciding is the act of succeeding

Live without regret

You are a genius, the world need your contribution, just the the work.

Books:

• Adam Smith “Wealth of Nation”
• Michael Gerber “The E-Myth revisited”
• Arlie Hochschild “The Managed Heart”
• Ben Zander “The Art of Possibility”
• Elizabeth Gilbert TED
• A whack on the side of the head (creativity book)
• Leo Babauta’s “Zen Habits”

For Reference:

• Charlie Chaplin
• Alice Waters
• Herschell Gordon Lwis
• Spike Lee, Eliyahy Goldratt
• Muddy Waters
• Cory Doctorow
• Shepard Fairey
• Anne Jackson
• Mark Cuban
• Madeleine Albright
• Marissa Mayer
• Jonathan Ive (Designer of the iPod)
• Marcel Duchamp
• Paul Maclean and Antonio Damasio (Neuroscientists)
• Yo-yoma**
• Gustavo Dudamel**
• Bre Pettis
• Thomas Hawk (photographer)
• Keller Williams (Guitarist) ***
• Robin Dunbar (anthropologist) (Tribe fo 150 people theory)
• Bob Metcalfe (ethernet inventor and Metcalfe’s law: The more people who have a fax machine, the more fax machines are worth (one person with a fax is useless)

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