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Andy Unedited

Exploring Books, Life, and Writing

Category: Creativity

The Unexpected Ways of Originals

November 14, 2019 by Andy Le Peau

Adam Grant made a huge mistake. Grant had the opportunity to invest on the ground floor of a revolutionary e-commerce enterprise. As he talked to the entrepreneurs, he discovered they had no experience in e-commerce, they were hedging their bets by not quitting their day jobs, and their decision-making process seemed interminable. He turned them …

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The Messiness of Creativity

November 12, 2019 by Andy Le Peau

At the beginning of Wired to Create, Scott Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire dismiss the four-steps of creativity that Graham Wallas proposed a hundred years ago. Such a notion is just too simplistic, they say. I was interested in this because I make use of Wallas’s ideas in Write Better. And the authors have a point. …

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Why Some Innovations Succeed and Others Don’t

November 6, 2019 by Andy Le Peau

Coming up with a great idea can be hard enough. Getting the idea adopted can be even harder. Why do some innovations change the world and others go nowhere? The reasons are many. In Originals Adam Grant highlights one factor in the story of the American suffrage movement. Lucy Stone launched the women’s rights movement …

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Don’t Just Spot the Future, Make the Future

May 16, 2012 by Andy Le Peau

Our desire to know the future seems limitless. Our ability to know it, however, is very limited. So how are we to satisfy those longings that even Snickers can’t satisfy? Here’s a clue: it’s not measuring how many hits you get when you Google something because everything gets a gazillion hits.

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Solving a Puzzle

June 17, 2010 by Andy Le Peau

I am known to work on the occasional crossword puzzle. Maybe every week or two I try my hand. I’m not like some friends who can whip through one in thirty minutes. In fact, it usually takes me a few days to finish. But I’ve seen a remarkable pattern in how I manage to solve …

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The Familiar and the Unfamiliar

March 10, 2009 by Andy Le Peau

Do you have a favorite book title? One that is memorable and interesting, all the while telling you just what the book is about? Here’s another perspective on what makes an ideal nonfiction book title. Previously I wrote that the ideal title employed two elements: content and creativity. You can also think of them as …

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The Ideal Book Title

March 2, 2009 by Andy Le Peau

What’s the ideal nonfiction book title? In my mind it has two elements.

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Bad Title Strategies

February 23, 2009 by Andy Le Peau

If one of the most difficult tasks in publishing is coming up with a good concept for a book, surely a close second is coming up with a good nonfiction book title. It’s so hard that even when you are trying to do a good job you often end up making a baboon out of …

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The Frenetic, Jagged Pace

October 21, 2008 by Andy Le Peau

Last week I worked away from the office. I had a project that required large chunks of uninterrupted time. There was no way I was going to find that at work. So I left. I’ve said before that my job is to be interrupted. And it is. As a manager, one of my primary tasks …

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Why You Should Leave Work

April 7, 2008 by Andy Le Peau

Several years ago I loved reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. For my reading tastes it was the perfect combination of science, history, politics and World War II. One thing that struck me, however, was how time and again during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries brilliant physicists like Niels Bohr …

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