Great Work summary

Would you consider the person who invented the wheel to be a great inventor? Yes? Then what about the one who invented the axle?

The wheel was a smart piece of work, but good work is just the starting point – the foundation upon which great work is made.

In 1944 a three-year-old girl asked her father the right question as he was taking a picture of her: Why couldn’t she see the photo right there and then?

Her father explained that the films needed to be developed in various chemical baths in a darkroom. For the kid, this answer meant nothing.

Today, Netflix is a household name with global success, which makes it easy to forget that, earlier on in their existence, the company was in serious trouble.

At that time a large part of their business involved mailing DVDs to customers, who then returned them. But mail sorting machines destroyed DVDs packaged in normal envelopes.

Did you know that 80 percent of the 16,000 words that we utter each day are spoken to the same five-to-eight person group of friends and trusted confidants?

That leaves you with only 3,000 words for the people you don’t usually talk to – and it’s these people who have the greatest impact on your creativity. Talking to people you don’t usually talk to can lead to ideas that you couldn’t put together on your own.

So far, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how to approach work in a way that will give you positive, creative ideas. But this isn’t all. You must also edit and improve your ideas before implementing them in order to make a difference people love.

Great workers create changes in their mind before making them a reality. Your goal should be to model, adjust and play with your awesome ideas before executing them, if you want to give them the greatest chance for success.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger once created an app which they named Burbn. The app was designed to allow users to share their location with friends, as well as share photos.

Never heard of it?