Making Ideas Happen

Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

By: Scott Belsky

Narrated by: Don Hagen

Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

How the world's leading innovators push their ideas to fruition, time and time again. Edison famously said that genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. Ideas for new businesses, solutions to the world's problems, and artistic breakthroughs are common, but great execution is rare. According to Scott Belsky, the capacity to make ideas happen can be strengthened by anyone willing to build their organizational habits and harness the forces of community. That's why he founded Behance, a company that helps creative people and teams across industries develop these skills. Belsky has spent six years studying the habits of especially productive creative people and teams—the ones who make their ideas happen time and time again.

After interviewing hundreds of successful creatives, he has compiled their most powerful-and often counterintuitive-practices, such as:

• Generate ideas in moderation and act without conviction
• Reduce all projects to just three primary components
• Encourage fighting within your team
• Seek competition and share ideas liberally

In an increasingly flexible and entrepreneurial environment, creative minds have the opportunity (and responsibility) to solve and change industries—but they can only do that if they overcome the obstacles. While many of us obsess about discovering great new ideas, Belsky shows why it's better to develop the capacity to make ideas happen-a capacity that endures over time.

©2010 Scott Belsky (P)2010 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

"If you care about your art, your job or your market, you really have no choice. This is strategy and tactics, concepts and how-to, all in one on a topic that's often overlooked." (Seth Godin, author of Linchpin)

"Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. This audio book helps you with the hard part." (Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop and former chief evangelist of Apple)

It was an experience to listening to it 👌

It's certainly not a game changer idea source but it's a well structured and up to date masterpiece for those who wants to improve constantly! The book contains a lot of stories to deliver the message in an understandable way and the chapters are long enough to give a full picture about a topic, but not too G. R. R. Martin like to get bored on a scene ;)

Great book. Great plan. Needs more Belsky.

The content however CANNOT be matched. If you are a creative who cares about realizing your ideas, this book is a must have. Totally a great plan.

I agree with the others. This book would be more successful if another voice talent did it. Mr. Hagen is more of a fiction reader and, unfortunately, did not capture the energy Mr. Belsky created in his tome. Wish Scott would have read it himself. Could have been a more valuable listen to me.

Well Read

I read a number of reviews complaining about the quality of the narration. It kept me from purchasing this book for a while but finally gave in.
I found the narration a perfect speed and tone and easy to listen to. I don't know where the negative comments have come from unless it's been re-recorded and re-posted.
This book is full of very useful information from start to finish. I highly recommend it.

No Woodchoppers here!

I can understand why people didn't like the reader but it wasn't a problem for me. The reading style actually made the concepts easy to absorb. I think some people might've been looking for a motivational speaker and didn't get one.

The ideas presented are really just logical things that you might be able to come up with yourself, if you could only see the wood for the trees. That is where I think this book succeeds. It doesn't really say anything new but reminds you to step outside the moment of creative inspiration and incorporate other strategies into your long term creative process to keep you motivated and moving forward. To continue the earlier metaphore, it gives you a nice aerial view of the forest. We need that forest, it lends oxygen to our creativity.

If you're looking for a pep talk this won't do it but if you're looking for something that will push you to look beyond the solitary creative individual to become a creative person that exists within a wider context of community etc then this will open your eyes to that.

This book basically says don't just think but do..

Nothing really stands out in this book in terms of concepts and mind stimulation. It does, however, put a process in place to take an idea from its conception to the actual execution that returns a result. This in itself is great value!

Read once a year and change the world.

This book is packed with knowledge Distilled from several of the greats. Unlike Greene's Mastery, this book is more actionable. Practically, any member of a world changing team can leverage the ideas here. It's not just for creatives, but for leaders and entrepreneurs everywhere.

Great for some one getting started for the first time

He shares some great points and i enjoyed listening to it a second time. He has helped me to just ship, weather its perfect or not. Ship and move to the next project.

A good book well delivered.

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, it offer actionable advice, even if it the message is not always welcomed. Idea people often don't want to hear the their ideas aren;t important unless executable.

What about Don Hagen’s performance did you like?

Okay, some of the other reviews are giving Don Hagan a bad wrap. He did a great job delivering the information with a fatherly tone. There are always multiple way to go with delivery. Don Hagan's director obviously wanted fatherly. Yes, it could have been delivered like a motivational speech, but it wasn't, however the delivery is great none the less.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, too long, plus it's a good commute book.

Narrator is unbearable

Narrator puts me to sleep. His next book has a better narrator. This is not a bad review of the book. But it’s not a good one either because the narrator is bad

Adecuado para personas que desean enfocarse

El convertir ideas en pasos a seguir es un gran reto que pasa por el ordenamiento de las mismas y procedimientos de revisitar las salidas de las mismas. Le vendría bien a este libro algún entregable digital para ejercitar o una guía práctica step by step.