Design Work Life: Cataloging Inspiration Daily

Yesterday I attended the 99% Conference at the Times Center. Curated and orga­nized by Bēhance and Cool Hunting, the con­fer­ence focused not on gen­er­at­ing ideas but on mak­ing them a real­ity. (The name comes from the famous quote by Thomas Edison, “Genius is 1% inspi­ra­tion and 99% perspiration!”)

Here’s a quick recap of the things I enjoyed. (swiss­miss has some recaps up as well right here.)

• Cheryl Dorsey, of Echoing Green, an orga­ni­za­tion that invests in socially-based start-ups, talked about their idea of Social Entrepreneurial Intelligence. This model encom­passes traits that are con­sis­tently found in suc­cess­ful social entre­peneurs. She didn’t have time to get through all of them, but a few of the ways this suc­cess­ful group is described include focused and the abil­ity to exe­cute with alacrity, solutions-oriented, resource mag­net, asset-based think­ing, and a deep and unshak­able oblig­a­tion to a cause.
• Ji Lee talked about how his per­sonal and pro­fes­sional projects com­pli­ment each other, and noted that con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, shar­ing your ideas with a larger com­mu­nity, before they are devel­oped, is rewarding.
• Jason Randall was fas­ci­nat­ing. An expert in a ridicu­lous amount of dis­ci­plines (check out the link for a brief bio), I wish he could have spo­ken for longer. He was a lit­tle manic, but I would love to really under­stand how some­one like him gets so much accom­plished, when I’m the type of per­son always com­plain­ing that there aren’t enough hours in the day.
• Jill Greenberg talked more about her work than actu­ally mak­ing ideas hap­pen. But I wasn’t extremely famil­iar with every­thing she does before her talk, so it was cool to get a more exten­sive look at her projects.
• Michael Beirut was the last speaker of the day, and shared 5 secrets from 86 note­books. Many of you might be famil­iar with the note­books he’s col­lected ideas in for over 20 years, since they’ve been pub­li­cized in quite a few places lately. So Michael shared 5 lessons gleaned from the col­lec­tion and showed projects to illus­trate each one. The last secret, Love is the answer, was illus­trated with his ongo­ing mural project for the Library Initiative.

One of the com­mon themes I noticed were that all of these inspir­ing peo­ple were just extremely hard work­ers. In order to get to where they are now, each one of them has spent count­less hours work­ing to accom­plish their goals. Not one of them expe­ri­enced overnight suc­cess. They all also seemed to empha­size sur­round­ing your­self with peo­ple who moti­vate and push you. And per­haps most sim­ply, advised to just write every­thing down and check off to-do’s.

Overall they put together an amaz­ing group of speak­ers, and I left feel­ing inspired, moti­vated, and ready to make things hap­pen. I’ll def­i­nitely be there next year.