Book Reflection #1 - Make Possibilities Happen: How To Transform Ideas Into Reality

“This book is a toolkit to snap you out of zombie mode so you can scheme the impossible and bring your projects, potential, and promises to life.”

This line is on the very first page. Actually, it is the only line on the first page. What stands out is the term “zombie mode,” or the state of walking around aimlessly and without purpose, only getting excited about survival. This is an easy state to find ourselves in where we only focus on our survival, aka our primal bias to “comfort, certainty, and safety.” This is sticking to the same routine day in and day out, only adventuring at pre-planned times, and losing all desire to be spontaneous and take small risks. And just like a zombie movie, our lives become boring because we know what to expect and get caught up in the same old tropes.

But there is a way out. There is a way to exercise your creativity muscle and add a new flavor to your life. There are ways we can loosen up our primal biases to comfort, certainty, and safety so we can do and be something great. A quote from Pope Benedict XVI that I hold near and dear is

“The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.”

In her guidebook, Grace Hawthorne strives to help you break up the monotony and realize your creative potential. Creativity and innovative ideas come differently to everyone, but they are not exclusive to visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. Grace divides her book along the framework of “See, Start, Do, and Finish” and provides practical exercises used in Stanford’s d.school classes to help readers expand their capacity to ideate and make moves to a realistic success.

See: Visualize your desired outcome

In the first section of the framework, the goal is to fulfill those internal changes that are keeping us in our ruts. Something I’ve heard a partner use in a workshop that was written in the book is that when professional athletes prepare for competition, they create mental images of success so real that the brain has trouble distinguishing it from true memory. The way we trick our mind, elaborate our purpose, vision, and goals, and set plans for controlling our boundaries lays a steady foundation that will drive us. When it’s time to be creative, we look at how our inspirations lead to our originality, how curiosity leads to wisdom (instead of killing the cat), and how the context surrounding our idea is equally important as the idea itself.

Across the six chapters in this section, there are exercises used in the d.school classes to help stretch and condition your creative muscles. Before going into an ideation or design thinking workshop, take a little bit of time on these exercises to help with your solutioning.

Start: Just begin (this is everything)

This is the hardest part. Starting. It is easy to stay in the visioning and ideation mode, but we can’t stay in our own heads. That first step, that first daunting step, that first uncertain step, requires just a little bit of bravery. As Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) said in We Bought a Zoo,

“You know, sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage, just literally 20 seconds of embarrassing bravery, and I promise you something great will come of it.”

In this short section, Grace starts to bridge the gap between seeing and doing. The goal of this section is to get the reader to start taking action, and not waiting for their dreams to magically come true. Effort and risk-taking is required to make the vision a reality and it requires flexibility to make sure that it produces good fruits. You are going to be facing great uncertainty, but hyper fixating on fear will get you nowhere. Prime yourself to take the leap, and when time comes to get started, that fear of failure should turn into excitement to succeed.

Do: Show up and work

Doing is what gets stuff done. Doing seems scary, but it could be as small as putting your idea on paper or beginning research. As long as the idea stays in your head, it holds no value to anyone. Our ideas crave form - to be molded from start to finish. Grace uses the example of clay on a potter’s wheel, in that the transformation of the clay requires a process, and won’t magically go from a lump to a beautiful vase in an instant. The vase will go through iterations, it may break and require starting over, but if you love the process and commit wholeheartedly, it will be worth it. But until the clay hits the wheel, all it could be is a maybe.?

Similar to the See section, Grace provides exercises used in the d.school classroom for each of the six chapters. In the Do section, these exercises are designed to bring ideas into reality, drive momentum, and bring comfortability with failure.

Finish: Follow through

When all is said and done, we can look back and reflect on all that we have done. Our ideas may or may not come to an absolute end, but it is important to realize what has been accomplished up to the current moment. How have we grown in confidence and greatness through our work? What have we learned across the growth, peak, stagnation, and diminishment of our ideas? How have we created something that has a greater purpose than we could’ve ever imagined? Have we taken a step back just to bask and admire? Finishing up an idea isn’t just wrapping a bow and calling it a day, but understanding what we did and priming ourselves to take on whatever comes next.

In conclusion, if you are new to ideating or need a refresher, I’d recommend dedicating some time to reading this book. At 134 colorful and engaging pages, Grace and her co-authors offer a well-structured approach to conditioning readers to make their possibilities a reality.

I’ll admit, I can spend a lot of time in the See category. If I’m doing well, I’ll be at the early stages of development in the Do category when I write down and start developing my ideas. But I can find it difficult to start building, to take those necessary leaps and risks forward in adding form to the idea. I intend to add some of Grace’s classroom exercises to my routine, to stretch my creativity muscle, add form to my ideas, and practice those 20 seconds of insane bravery.

I want to leave you with a few questions to reflect on and hopefully start taking action on.

1. What does zombie mode look like for you and what is your cure?
2. Over the next 30 days, how can you workout your creativity muscle at work and in life?
3. If you have no resource, time, or energy limitations to bringing an idea to life, what would you do?
4. When thinking of obstacles, what would it look/sound like if you replaced “what if” questions with “even if” statements? (Instead of “What if this unfortunate thing happens?” say “Even if this unfortunate thing happens, here is how I can keep going forward.”)