The Achievement Habit (8 page)

In all these examples you will see that what has been left behind was at one point something you desired most in life. Yet now it hardly matters to you. There is nothing wrong with change and moving forward in life if it gets you to a better spot. Unfortunately, all too often in our search for the next big thing we don’t take the time to appreciate the satisfaction of achieving a goal, or the process itself. We are so busy being enticed by our next endeavor that we forget to savor what is already there and could be deeply meaningful. It is useful to remember the adage “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

A good case in point comes from a colleague of mine who made some important discoveries and became very prominent in the area of applied mathematics. Periodically he would win some award or receive an honorary degree. Invariably he would tell me about the next honor he was hoping for. Then, when he got it, he would tell me he was pleased because he could use it to get a pay raise in the coming year. In fact, he was unmarried, very well paid, and had no need of extra income. In spite of his many successes and his many raises, he was basically an unhappy person. Sadly, he reminded me of the caterpillars, always hoping to find something on the other side of the road, although it was all around him already on his side of the road.

Often the things we strive for only represent more of something we already have: money, fame, appreciation, love. It’s an endless chase; as the saying goes, You can’t get enough from more. For some people it’s the thrill of the chase that they really enjoy, so once they get what they have been seeking, it becomes irrelevant. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, as long as you are honest with yourself about your goals. Otherwise you are bound to spend your life frustrated and unhappy, like my friend.

There is an ethos regarding change in Silicon Valley. Within many companies there is always a fierce struggle to develop something new in an effort to stay ahead of competitors. Silicon Valley people believe their companies will stagnate and die without continual innovation: it’s the ultimate what-have-you-done-lately? culture. To maintain status in such a culture, people always need a new and evolving story. If they don’t deliver, they feel they lose face. These people are under a lot of pressure, and in their desperation they sometimes act like those caterpillars, taking their organizations on meaningless road-crossing journeys in pursuit of a new story to tell their friends.

The moral is that change for change’s sake is not necessarily good. Sometimes it is okay to fail in the pursuit of a meaningful goal. But it is never okay to commit organizational suicide just to save face with your friends or impress your latest love interest.

Once you have a problem statement, there are many formal methods that can assist you in generating solutions.
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Moreover, as you move forward in the problem-solving process, it is important to keep in mind that all problem statements (including POVs) are best regarded as provisional. Subsequent work often leads to multiple revisions of the problem statement.

Often just getting a good problem statement is enough to set you on the road to a great solution. At other times a satisfying direction is not apparent, and frustration sets in. My dear friend Rolf Faste created the handout that follows for our creativity workshops, listing twenty-two things to try if you find yourself hitting the lamppost. I have never lost my admiration for Rolf’s incredible ability to use simple sketches to bring complex ideas to life. In only one page he succeeded in beautifully summarizing the major tools from the product design culture that developed into the design thinking movement. (The following two pages each formed one column on the original 8.5" x 11" handout.)

Rolf’s drawing is supplemented by my short explanation about each of the items. It is useful to master a few of these methods.

This is my most productive technique. Sometimes things come to me in a flash. But most of the time the flash is preceded by a lot of hard work and frustration. There are no magic methods that substitute for
attention
and
intention
.

Take time to unclutter your work area, and keep supportive supplies handy. Make your surroundings remarkable and stimulating. Abraham Verghese had a poster printed, saying that the book he was working on had won a Nobel Prize and been on the
New York Times
best-seller list for over a year. He did not get the Nobel, but the other part came true.

To allow your subconscious to do its work, you must relax. There are many stories of people having breakthroughs during their dreams and daydreams. My favorite has to do with the Irish astronomer and mathematician W. R. Hamilton, who was walking with his wife when the solution to a long-standing problem popped into his head.
³
History does not say if his wife knew he was daydreaming while supposedly spending time with her. Without exposing the details—which might put my marriage in jeopardy—I can affirm that this method works.

Illustrations by Rolf Faste

Illustrations by Rolf Faste

In the Stanford product design program, students are taught to use a problem-solving process (we called it a design process) with the acronym ETC. The first step is to
express
an idea: come up with a trial solution. The next step is to
test
the idea: see what about it works and what does not. The third step is to
cycle
: use what you have learned to come up with a modified or new idea—that is, something new to express. This is repeated until you have a solution you are proud of—or until you run out of time.

In general, the
express
part of the process is generative. Your attitude here should be one of optimism about your idea. In contrast, when you get to the
test
part of the process, you need to change attitude and become a skeptic. Push yourself to find out what needs to be changed. In this way you need to flip attitudes as you cycle from express to test and from test to express. Two major tools are useful in this process: one is brainstorming, and the other is prototyping.

Brainstorming is perhaps the most familiar of all the methods in the diagram. Sometimes the word is used to simply describe a person coming up with ideas. In our context it refers to a more formal procedure through which a group of people gather to deal with a specific issue. The object is to come up
with many varied ideas. (We call this fluency and flexibility.) Ideally, a brainstorming group is chosen that represents enough variety of experience and knowledge that people can naturally build on each other’s ideas (piggybacking), and also jump to completely new ideas (leapfrogging).

Brainstorming sessions are not supposed to be evaluative. They are meant to open up possibilities, no matter how far-fetched. Thus a basic rule is to
defer judgment
during the session. This is a somewhat unfortunate phrase, implying as it does that the judgmental hammer will soon come crashing down. A better description of the participants’ desired state during a brainstorming session would be
gleefully accepting
. Wild ideas are encouraged. Usually a recorder or facilitator monitors the session to make sure people stay on the topic and that there are no cross-conversations (the rule is, one conversation at a time!).

Brainstorming in a group has the advantage of getting you out of your own head and letting you build on the ideas of others. Some people are loners and do not need others. (I have a friend who is a great designer who hates brainstorming. He tells me he gets his best ideas during long, solitary jogs through the mountains.) Obviously, most of us can profit from other people’s ideas. Diversity of backgrounds can lead to solutions that we might not arrive at on our own.

A list is a very simple and useful problem-solving tool. As the word implies, just make a list of all the possibilities. The trick is in generating a list inclusive enough to move you toward a solution. When Paul graduated from college, he decided he would figure out his future by using lists. First, he made a list of all the things he wanted out of his career. He listed things like “Be my
own boss,” “Use my engineering training,” “Do some public relations,” “Use my drawing ability,” “Travel,” “Have time for my family,” and “Be located in the San Francisco Bay Area.”

Although the list was longer than this, you get the idea. It led him to a part of the solution: he needed to own a business producing something for which he could be involved in all aspects—especially development, production, marketing, advertisement, and sales. The next step was to find a product to build this business around. Again, Paul used lists. This time he copied out the names of every type of product in the yellow pages. He spent a long time going over each product and thinking about whether it would be something he could build a business around, and which would satisfy his criteria in the original list of what he wanted out of his career.

Using this process, he found an unlikely product: a secret recipe for beef jerky. It turned out to be incredibly successful, both making a large financial profit and satisfying everything on his career list.

These are lists that contain the names of things from which to make more detailed lists. For example, you make a list of places to visit and then separate lists of things to do for each place.

This is the process of matching up elements from different columns of attribute lists. For example, if we want to design a clock, we could make a column listing power sources (for instance, batteries, AC, mechanical, solar, water), a column listing timing mechanisms (gears, escapements, vibrations, pendulum),
and a column listing indicators (two hands, three hands, LEDs, digital wheels). By forming all possible combinations of these elements, we automatically generate a large number of alternatives for clock designs. When attribute lists have many items, this method lends itself very nicely to computer implementation.

These are notebooks in which you sketch out your ideas, using drawings, words, and even pasted-in items to create a record of tangible speculations on your part. It is good to develop the habit of creating notebooks in which to record your ideas. Without a record, ideas are often forgotten and lost forever. The most famous idea logs ever created were the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. I have found many lesser mortals can also profit by using this tool. Unlike Leonardo, however, many people actually get a lot of things from their idea logs implemented during their lifetimes.

This is a great idea-generation tool. Even for very serious problems, joking around can get you where serious thought is afraid to go.

Some people are very secretive about their problems, and consequently they are often on their own. It is not a healthy psychological state to be in, and often not very productive. There are countless stories about how, in the famous “idea factories” of Bell Labs, Building 20 at MIT, and various Silicon Valley companies, casual conversation led to a big breakthrough. Talking to people is a great way to stimulate ideas.

This is the process of purposefully modifying your ideas to make the conventional into the unconventional. Alex Osborn, the famous early creativity guru, created a checklist of possible modifications, with items such as
magnify
and
minimize
, which referred to changing the scale of an idea. This method can be extended to include any type of transformation. For example, you can combine two unrelated ideas, such as “fish” and “tower.” If you make yourself a deck of cards in which each card lists a single transformation, you can generate a lot of ideas all by yourself by simply following the transformation on each card. If you lay the cards end to end, it looks a little like a game of solitaire.
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This term, derived from the Latin
synectica
, means “the joining together of different and apparently irrelevant elements.” In this context it stands for the use of analogy to come up with solutions. The method calls for thinking of situations or items analogous to what you are working on in the hope that the analogy will reveal a better idea. It is useful to consider analogies that are directly related to the situation under consideration and also analogies that are personally related to the problem solver. Another useful concept in the synectics framework is the
compressed conflict
, a combination of two concepts that seem contradictory. “Safe attack,” for example, one such combination, was central to the development of the concept of vaccines: by using a
safe
dose we
attack
the body with a mild case of a disease so that it produces antibodies that will protect it. Thinking of the problem along these seemingly contradictory lines opens new avenues to us.