Steve Yastrow

Quiver in Your Boots

When was the last time your company made a daring, bold decision that turned out to be wildly successful? Not that recently? Not ever?

But how likely is it that your company’s boring, middle-of-the-road decisions will ever turn out to be wildly successful? Probably never.

Steve’s newsletter challenges you to “Quiver in Your Boots” from time to time– only risky moves have the chance for great reward!

Read the newsletter: “Quiver in Your Boots”

And here’s a link to Apple’s famous “1984″ ad referenced in the newsletter.

Posted in Creativity, Invent Your Future, Observations, Wisdom from everyday life | 2 Comments »

Improvise your success!

Last Thursday, I was watching Whose Line Is It Anyway?, as Wayne Brady invented a song, on the spot, like no one else can.  Drew Carey would throw out a musical style, the audience would yell out topics, and Wayne would instantly compose and sing a song, with perfect rhymes, double entendres, wit and humor.

That got me thinking a lot about improvisation, which has been a big part of my life since I started playing guitar at age 12. Improvisation became a theme a few more times throughout the weekend, inspiring this week’s newsletter,  Improvise your success.

Improvise your success connects, chimpanzees, bonobos, The Second City, jazz and my second book together to create this message: Improvise!

There is a place in business for policy and programming, and there are many places for improvising. So what do you think? Is improv important to your business success?

Newsletter link: Improvise your success

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Outtakes

Things are rarely perfect the first time.

I used to write songs with a good friend of mine.  We had a problem. If an idea wasn’t perfect, the first time we played it or sang it, he focused on how the idea wasn’t good enough to be in a song.  He couldn’t move forward. He had to discard the idea.

I think it is important look at imperfect ideas in a different way.  The trick is to see the possibility in the idea, and then make it a little better.  After many iterations, these possibilities become real, as a substantive idea starts to take shape.

I remember learning, in college, about Beethoven’s obsessive rewriting of phrases.  Over and over, note by note, he would tweak, change and edit until he got it just right. At first I thought it was just his obsessive perfectionism, but then I realized it was something more.  He could see when the possibilities in an idea had not yet been realized.

Outtakes are critical to the creative process.  “Take 22″ is not necessarily a sign of failure, a lack of creativity, or poor execution.  In a strong creative process, Take 22 is 22 steps better than Take 1.  You must be willing to take what’s good about an idea and improve upon it, and take what is bad about the idea and extract it, without killing the whole idea.

Iteration is the path to idea improvement.

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