Success Strategies – Page 6

What a High School Teacher Who Turned Her Students into Best-Selling Authors Teaches Us About Innovation

How a high school teacher transformed her students into best-selling authors by becoming a student of her students.

When Erin Gruwell jettisoned her entire curriculum and replaced it with creative new teaching techniques, she inspired her students to start journaling about their lives, which became the best-selling “Freedom Writers Diaries.”

Along with education advocates Geoffrey Canada and Ken Robinson, Erin Gruwell and her teaching foundation, The Freedom Writers, are at the forefront of some of the most visionary thinking about education.

But Gruwell’s success began with a crushing failure.

In the mid-1990s as an idealistic young teaching novice, Gruwell stepped into Room 203 at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, with dreams of teaching her at-risk students Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s sonnets. Her students, whose lives were plagued by poverty and violence, could not have cared less. “On my first day, in my pearls and polka dot dress, I thought I was going to change the world. But I didn’t have a clue,” said Gruwell. “My students checked their pagers, reapplied their eyeliner, and laid down their heads on their desks and took naps. I dodged a paper airplane made out of my syllabus and tried to make myself heard over the ‘Yo, Mama’ jokes.” As the bell rang, she heard one student say, “I give her five days.”

It couldn’t have gone any worse, until it did. But instead of accepting a fate as a disrespected, ineffective teacher, Gruwell had a failure-inspired epiphany. Continue reading “What a High School Teacher Who Turned Her Students into Best-Selling Authors Teaches Us About Innovation”

With MLK as Her Inspiration: How Constance Rice Fights for Justice

Civil rights lawyer and activist Constance Rice fights for justice on a large scale, devoting herself to changing the institutions that affect all of our lives.

Constance Rice, a L.A. civil rights activist and lawyer (who happens to be Condoleeza’s second cousin), has known from a very young age that she’s wanted to fight for justice.

When we interviewed her in our book (Chapter 14 “How to Fight for Justice”), Rice told us that she could have become a social worker or drug counselor helping one person at a time. Instead, inspired by Martin Luther King, Rice wanted to fight for justice on a larger scale. She devoted herself to changing the institutions that affect all of our lives—a process that King called a radical restructuring of our economic and political systems.

At first, Rice fought most of her battles in the courtroom, treating the police department and other institutions as adversaries. But inevitably she realized that she was winning in the courtroom but losing in the streets. She was not even coming close to achieving the radical restructuring King had inspired her to pursue. Continue reading “With MLK as Her Inspiration: How Constance Rice Fights for Justice”

How to Engineer a Fad

How a crash-test engineer with no business experience or knowledge of the toy industry turned a plastic device and a bag of rubber bands into Rainbow Loom, the super-hot kids’ craze and a multimillion-dollar business.

How did a crash-test engineer with no business experience or knowledge of the toy industry turn a plastic device and a bag of rubber bands into Rainbow Loom, the super-hot kids’ craze and a multimillion-dollar business?

The Invention

Choon Ng, a Malaysian immigrant, wasn’t even thinking about entering the toy market. He simply wanted to share the experience of making bracelets out of rubber bands with his daughters. But his fingers were too big.

Ng, who was employed as a crash-safety engineer for Nissan, went out to his garage workshop and made a device by pressing pushpins into a block of wood. With the aid of a hook, he could then make the bracelets. But when he showed his daughters the bracelets, they didn’t see the purpose of using of a device to make the same bracelets they could create by hand.

So Ng went back to the workshop. He rejiggered the contraption by creating three rows of pushpins. By wrapping rubber bands around the pushpins in geometric patters and then pulling them off, he was able to create more elaborate rubber-band bracelets than his daughters could make by hand. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, look at this. I just discovered a new craft right in front of me,’” Ng said. Continue reading “How to Engineer a Fad”

Elmore Leonard’s Rules for Writing

Keep your exclamation points under control! And other lessons from the late, great master of modern crime fiction, Elmore Leonard.

Keep your exclamation points under control! And other lessons from the late, great master of modern crime fiction.

Anyone who has ever picked up a book by Elmore Leonard knows that putting the book down is often harder than just finishing the damn thing. Once you get going and feel the high of reading a Leonard story, eating, sleeping or even having a conversation with a friend or spouse can’t compete.

The recently deceased author of 45 novels including Get Shorty, Hombre, Swag,Raylan, and Glitz (he died at work on his 46th), was reluctant to write about his own writing. But back in 2001 the New York Times convinced him to make a list of his ten writing rules.

Leonard introduced these rules as tips he “picked up along the way” whose purpose was to help him “remain invisible” in his own writing. Continue reading “Elmore Leonard’s Rules for Writing”

The Contender Syndrome

Writer Abby Ellin describes the Contender Syndrome as less about envy and more a sense of not living up to the best you.

There may be a lot of names for what we call ourselves when we don’t, or believe we don’t, live up to our potential. Writer Abby Ellin, in an article for Psychology Today in 2010, aptly called it “The Contender Syndrome.” It’s worth taking a look at what Ellin characterizes as not a clinical diagnosis, but a phenomenon “quite common today, especially with the proliferation of social networking and the public blaring of the fabulousness of other people’s lives.”

Ellin writes:

“Potential isn’t some static, internal entity that springs from us onto the page, or stage, or ball field. Our potential is malleable; it can be built. Recognizing this is essential if we hope to reach it.”

Here’s a link to Marlon Brando’s famous contender scene in “On the Waterfront.”

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What You Can Learn About Embracing Chaos from Gypsy Punk Genius Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello

Eugene Hutz, Ukranian frontman of the Gogol Bordello, talks about embracing chaos, setting your own standard, finding a creativity stream that never runs dry and how only boring people get bored.

Gogol Bordello puts on some of the most transcendently sweat-drenched, crowd-inciting shows, but how do they keep reinventing themselves after nearly 15 years of non-stop touring all over the world?

We first saw the band Gogol Bordello in 2000 at the National Restaurant and Night Club, a glitzy supper club that caters to Russian immigrants in Brighton Beach. The lead singer and hyperactive Ukranian frontman of the band, Eugene Hutz, wore an upcycled tux jacket over his bare chest, leggings, high tops and floppy rabbit ears as he stalked back and forth across the stage like a madman on amphetamines, walking precariously out over the crowd on top of a hand-held gang plank and shimmying up and down his mike stand, belting out tunes like a Russian born Iggy Pop raised on Berthold Brecht. The songs were melodic mash-ups of Russian and Roma folk tunes bashed out with a punk sensibility, Hutz on acoustic guitar accompanied by horns, electric guitar, drums, an accordion, a mad fiddler sharing the stage with a Romanian belly dancer and two lithe performers in costumes straight out of a Russian Constructivist fashion show who acted out the lyrics as they banged on a bass drum with mallets and clanged oversized marching band cymbals.

What did it all mean? We had no idea. But we were in love.

We saw every New York City concert the band played for the next few years, most of them in small venues where their possessed fans—most of them from Eastern Europe, Russia or Latin America—would hooliganize in the mosh pits, dance on tables and pass Hutz around the crowd as he rode around on top of a bass drum turned on its side. In 2001, Gogol Bordello played late into the night out in the dark in upstate New York down a road called Mink Hollow. There was a full moon. There was a bear. It was our wedding. And when it came time to cut the cake and some of our more genteel family members expressed a preference to do it without the accompaniment of Hutz and his noisy band, Hutz growled into the mike, “I got a song for cuttin’ the fucking cake.” Continue reading “What You Can Learn About Embracing Chaos from Gypsy Punk Genius Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello”

Think Like a Bug: How to Know Your Enemy

It’s a tough world out there, and the competition is fierce. Here’s how some of the world’s greatest leaders—Charles Darwin, Sam Walton, Jack Welch, Arianna Huffington, Madonna—have embraced the challenge, and one-upped the other guy.

IT’S A TOUGH WORLD OUT THERE, AND THE COMPETITION IS FIERCE. HERE’S HOW SOME OF THE WORLD’S SUPERACHIEVERS HAVE EMBRACED THE CHALLENGE, AND ONE-UPPED THE OTHER GUY.

At a fourth of July barbecue, New York Times reporter, William J. Broad marveled at his hosts’ ability to keep mosquitoes at bay with an unlikely weapon–an electric fan.

Curious as to how his hosts had come up with the idea, in a story for the New York Times, the reporter traces the dissemination of the information all the way back to its originator, a Philadelphia businessman, who told him, “The solution came from trying to think like a bug, and realizing ‘I don’t like flying into a 15 mph wind.’” Since mosquitoes are weak flyers that clock in at a pokey 1 to 1.5 mph, the blow-‘em-away theory works.

This think-like-a-bug philosophy reminded us of the adage, “Know your enemy.” We’ve all heard the maxim, “Know your customer,” but that will only get you so far if part of your mission is to dominate or defeat a condition, say, Barbecue Host vs. Mosquitos or Big Pharma vs. the Big C. Or if your mission, in large part, involves dominating or defeating a rival as in Coke vs. Pepsi or Instagram vs. Vine. Sometimes for you to win your rival has to lose. So in a world of fierce competition, why do recent studies suggest that business managers who think-like-their-enemies are in the minority? Continue reading “Think Like a Bug: How to Know Your Enemy”

What Makes Laura Linney Act?
It’s the Story, Stupid

Laura Linney, interviewed in “The Art of Doing,” reveals who she’s really acting for.

Laura Linney in her Golden-Globe winning role in "The Big C" — Laura Linney in her Golden-Globe winning role as Cathy Jamison in “The Big C”

When we interviewed Laura Linney for a chapter on “How to Act” in our book, we asked the award-winning actress:

“Who are you acting for?”

And then we waited. A long time. We had to stifle the urge to blurt out helpful suggestions. As the seconds of silence turned into minutes (hours in interview time), we wondered if Linney had misunderstood our question or been offended.

It turned out that she was actually thinking, not pretending to think as sometimes happens when you talk to a famous person who is feeding you lines because that is what their publicist told them to do.

When Linney finally did respond—a full two minutes of tape time later—her answer wasn’t at all one we would have expected. She wasn’t acting for her audience, her fellow actors, directors, producers or even her late father, the playwright Romulus Linney, as we had suspected. No. She wasn’t even acting for herself. Continue reading “What Makes Laura Linney Act?
It’s the Story, Stupid”

This is What FAILURE Looks Like

My Startup Has 30 Days to Live, a raw, uncensored look at a startup going down told by a guy who takes responsibility for everything that’s gone wrong.

A raw, uncensored look at a startup, going down, told by a guy who takes responsibility for everything that went wrong.

In the research for our book the superacheivers we spoke to told of us past failures. What set them apart was their honesty about how they had contributed to their own failures. Because they challenged their beliefs, they were able to reinvent themselves and find entirely new ways of approaching their work. (Which we wrote about here.)

On the Tumblr blog, My Startup Has 30 Days to Live by an anonymous author about an unknown company, we are witnesses to a moment of real-time failure. What strikes us is the author’s brutal honesty about what has gone wrong. He is in the throes of defeat so he doesn’t yet have any answers about how to reconfigure his strategies—but based on how important we found that self-assesment is to success we would guess that he has a good shot at eventually sorting out what went wrong and figuring out how to do it differently the next time.

Subtitled “In 30 Days My Startup Will Be Dead,” the fascinating blog post recounts the rise and fall of a startup. It begins as most startups do. Continue reading “This is What FAILURE Looks Like”

What Will Happen If E.T. Phones Us?

Astronomer, Jill Tarter, the TED Prize–winning, former director of the world’s most ambitious search for alien life at the Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research, offers SETI’s 9-point plan should an extraterrestrial attempt to communicate with us.

Just over 30 years ago this month, E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial hit the big screen and made everyone feel warm and fuzzy about aliens with E.T.’s sweetly urgent message about wanting to “phone home.”

This summer, Hollywood alien fare paints a far gloomier picture with a deadly alien monster in After Earth, a zombie invasion in World Z, giant robots in Pacific Rim and more robot invaders in The World’s End.

So what do the experts really think?

We asked astronomer, Jill Tarter, the TED Prize–winning, former director of the world’s most ambitious search for alien life at the Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research, who we interviewed on How to Find Extraterrestrial Life for our book on success. Tarter gave us SETI’s 9-point plan should there be an extraterrestrial attempt of any kind to contact us: Continue reading “What Will Happen If E.T. Phones Us?”