I started my Saturday this past weekend with a midwest to westcoast flight. By the time I was over the Rockies, I was so excited to get to work on the new ideas filling my head that I couldn’t WAIT to get off that plane!
I had just finished reading through Josh Linkner’s brand new book, Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity
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Linkner’s big idea: Breakthrough creativity doesn’t need to be random or something that happens only at the inception stage of your business. Creativity can be–and must be–cultivated systematically on an ongoing basis.
Linkner provides five simple steps to help you become a creative, innovative, dynamic powerhouse – both individually and as a company.
As a long-time friend of mine, I’ve had the privilege of watching Josh perfect this systematic approach to creativity as a successful entrepreneur who rapidly grew a business to over $70 million in sales and as a legit jazz musician where improvisation has been a constant.
He deduced from his experiences that rather than waiting for a-ha! moments to wander through the door, it was possible to establish an environment where breakthrough ideas are farmed and harvested predictably, like crops.
It’s one thing to develop a system that works for yourself, but in Disciplined Dreaming, Linkner successfully packages his ideas into appealing, usable insights in a step-wise process that even at 33,000 feet, are simple and obvious to follow. Totally doable.
His five steps (paraphrased by me) are:
- Ask – Define your creativity challenge and foster curiosity and awareness of your business opportunity.
- Prepare – Get into the proverbial “zone” to be creatively productive.
- Discover – Explore and reveal every avenue to generate ideas and think innovativaly.
- Ignite – Explode your creative thinking up to the next level to create extraordinary ideas.
- Launch – Establish a specific framework for transforming ideas into action plans.
And Josh provides specific instructions for each step.
I am so psyched to put these steps to work with my team, and I know they’ll be equally into the process. It will not only bring fresh ideas to light and game-changing strategy, but it will also be A BLAST!
With its creative prescription at just the right moment in my life’s work, I know that this weekend read will have a sweeping, positive impact on what I crank out as a visionary entrepreneur.
If you want to take your business and personal achievements to the next level, and if you’re wondering what you should be disciplined about today, I’d say, get yourself a copy of Disciplined Dreaming and start creating your future systematically.
Amazon link for Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity
