Beethoven made music that sounded like everyone else’s until he used experiments to gradually differentiate his style from Mozart’s established brand of composition. The creative process he adopted, driven by hundreds of

When we can’t know what’s going to happen, little bets help us learn about the factors that can’t be understood beforehand.

as failing forward. That is, entrepreneurs push ideas into the market as quickly as possible in order to learn from mistakes and failures that will point the way forward. This is an extremely well-known Silicon Valley operating principle. Howard

Two fundamental advantages of the little bets approach are highlighted in the research of Professor Saras Sarasvathy: that it enables us to focus on what we can afford to lose rather than make assumptions about how much we can expect to gain, and that it facilitates the development of means as we progress with an idea. Sarasvathy points to the valu

Jobs never expected the experience to have practical applications, but it did ten years later when Jobs and Steve Wozniak were developing Apple’s first Macintosh computer. “It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionall

This correlation between being open to experience and creativity is, in fact, one of the most prominent findings that threads throughout the creativity research.

organizational management has been developing methods for increasing productivity and minimizing risk and errors that tend to stifle creative experimentation.

In analyzing behavior patterns at social parties, for example, unlucky people tended to talk with the same types of people, people who are like themselves. It’s a common phenomenon.

Although you’ve probably never heard of him, when it comes to creating opportunities in unknown territory, Chet Pipkin is something of a master. He began teaching himself how when he was sixteen years old, on what could be called the other side of the tracks from downtown Los Angeles. As the founder and CEO of Belkin, a company that produces a wide