Making Ideas Happen

Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

By: Scott Belsky

Narrated by: Don Hagen

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)

One of the best books I have read in a long time

This book not only makes you understand that ideas are common among the creativee but it gives you a process to get you to move forward. You no longer do you have to feel that your ideas will never go anywhere. Here is your blueprint to getting things really done.

Just okay

Nothing new or novel. The book is a brain dump of the author’s thoughts on productivity. It covers individual and team efforts but does not really share any secret sauce or recipes beyond common sense cliches. May have been a great read when it was first publishes but its relevance is so so for 2019

Right up my alley.

I like to think that i roll in the creative world and I throughly enjoyed it, now I'm back for another listen.

The voice on this did not bother me at all

I have read the reviews on this title, and I must say that I disagree to the critic voices of the reader. I found the performance of the reader 100%. I have listened to many, many audiobooks, and I very rarely get disturbed by the reader of the content. Getting absorbed in the content is so much more interesting than trying to find faults with the readers performance. This book is great! The quality of the audio and the performance of the reader is as good as one expect from Audible. Perfect.

Great Book, Wrong Voice

This book effectively lays out practical steps for creatives, entrepreneurs, innovators, and business people to actualize our ideas. It should be required reading. However, the voice of the reader did not match the content. I found his voice distracting. A book with such no-nonsense practical application is best served with a conversational voice. OVERALL: I still give this title 4 stars, and highly recommend you read it... right now!

Great methods, tiring narration

It’s great book with very useful content. Narrators voice was tiring. Check if you are comfortable with the voice before buying the book.

Get stuff done... NOW!!!

I loved it. Delivery was calm, but man do I want to make things happen now!

Great book plus new narrator

I downloaded this when it first came out and frankly wrote one of the original scathing reviews which have been deleted. All of the reviews were fairly similar, absolutely great content, but a poor narrator ruined it.

This version has been re-recorded with a new narrator! Awesome book!

Highly recommend this book if you consider yourself a creative or someone that has tons of great ideas and not as many results. Make sure you follow the links to the other Behance sites and conferences.

It took me third read to appreciate the content

Each bit of the book is so text book and thought provoking. I’m in complete spell in what author has conveyed.

The ultimate blueprint for all creative people

This book is a must read for anyone that has good ideas and struggles to take action to make them happen. The book is very well researched I cannot emphasize this enough. It gives you plenty of insight into the lives of creative leaders who can follow through and how they motivate themselves to make their ideas a reality.

You are guaranteed to understand in plain terms why so far you have been unable to execute your ideas and what to do about it in more ways than one. The author gives you the ultimate blueprint you need to focus, stay motivated and realize your ideas. I have to agree that the narration is a bit monotonous but don't let that hinder you from getting this book, the content is brilliant!