the intersection of personal passion and problem solving is where good ideas are born and lasting businesses are built.

That seems to be the recipe for every successful pivot—not just the recognition that you can’t keep doing what you’re doing if you want to grow or survive, but also identifying something else to do and/or some other place to do it.

“The five words that changed my life were my mom saying to my sisters and myself, ‘Learn how to do something!’” Jane said. “She was absolutely adamant that each of us had to get a skill so that no matter what happened, if we were somewhere, anywhere, in the world, we would have a skill set in our hands that we could go to work [with] immediately an

Failing is scary. Wasting your life is dangerous.

“Where you live matters,” Drew said in his address. “Whatever you’re doing, there’s usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don’t settle for anything else . . . If the real action is happening somewhere else, move.”

The creators and innovators whom I meet, if they do struggle with criticism and perfectionism, also understand the importance of allowing their product to be judged by the marketplace, and the opportunity that users’ feedback presents to make the product better as a result. They know that they need an abundance of feedback to dial in their product.

She started it in 2008 as an in-home service called Straight-at-Home by posting on a Yahoo! “mommy” group called Peachhead, which acted as an online resource for about 5,000 moms in the Los Angeles area. “I said, ‘I’m a longtime stylist. I’m thinking about starting a mobile blow-dry business where I’d charge thirty-five or forty dollars. Would anyb