Resilience, Briefly
It's far more important to execute ideas than generate them than most people realize. Leaders don’t just think great thoughts; they execute them. It’s like taking swings in a batting cage over and over and over.
Here are 20 swings made by some of the leading companies in the world featured on 10 of my favorite How I Built This podcasts on COVID resilience last year:
Rip up your business plan when the unexpected comes;
Listen to your customers again with COVID ears;
Cut what isn’t essential;
Stay positive;
Develop a nose for new opportunities;
Write more; expect 80% of the magic of an idea to happen as you write it down;
Be confident enough to kill projects;
Re-listen to people you trust;
Don't replan in a crisis for the long term;
Mull ideas over making a final decision;
Journal;
Learn how to Build a Second Brain;
If a deadline forces you to start before you’re ready, just do the most important thing first;
Don't hesitate to change your business model on the fly;
Present your ideas out loud to see (a) where you stumble on logic and (b) which bits are mistakes (the ideas you dread sharing).
Try to create something new and useful for new times;
Work in fairly big quanta of time;
Build products for customers who won't know the tech as well as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios;
If you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately;
Publish your ideas in public; the new COVID classroom
Because an audience makes you write more; use simple, germanic words to describe your ideas.
These pandemic stories show how top leaders others swing, miss, connect, and come back to the batting cage the next day.
This article was inspired by dozens of COVID resilience stories on How I Built This with Guy Raz and Writing, Briefly, by Paul Graham.
