With the policymaking process, you have an idea, and you try to sell other stakeholders on the idea. That's not much different than in business, where you're trying to find capital to make your idea a reality.
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.
Ideas are nothing. They're irrelevant. If you think your idea is so important, you're doomed. The reality is if you don't like one idea, I've got 299 more. If I tell you my idea, and you can execute better against that idea than I can - great; I get to play a terrific game.
Basically I'm in the idea business -- whether it's a musical idea or a spoken idea ... If you wind up with a political system that wants to put idea men out of business, then you have worry on your hands.
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life. Think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other thought. This is the way to success.
A social entrepreneur is somebody who knows how to make an idea reality, and one of the great ideas of our time is pluralism. Can people from different backgrounds live together in mutual peace and loyalty? And what we need is a generation of young social entrepreneurs who know how to make that great idea reality in an historical moment where religious extremists are, frankly, making their idea reality.
To make an idea become a reality is a process that fascinates me; otherwise it stays just an idea.
If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.
I sell ideas. Actually, if you think about it, everything is really no more than idea. The past is nothing more than a memory, which is one kind of idea. The future is still a hope, another kind of idea. The present is fleeting and becomes a memory before you can put your hands on it. All ideas. I sell ideas.
I have seen entrepreneurs ask for hundreds of millions of dollars on a concept and try to sell because of 'their passion' for an idea. If the idea is that good, why wouldn't I cut you out and hire someone who is just as passionate for much, much less?
I often try to think about, What sounds like a bad idea, but if you find the right plan of attack, it's actually a really good idea? I spend a lot of time really trying to systematically tackle problems from different angles.
A manager can have a great idea but if the players don't understand it, or don't follow you, your idea doesn't have much use. On the other side, you can have a bad idea, but if the players are convinced it, and you transmit it well, it can work.
Never submit an idea or chapter to an editor or publisher, no matter how much he would like you to. Writing from the approved idea is (another) gravely serious time-waster. This is your story. Try and find out what your editor wants in advance, but then try and give it to him in one piece.
What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.
Much more than trying to focus on the battlefield of the war, it was the central place that German doctors occupied within Nazism, the omnipotent and insane idea of wanting to generically modify an entire nation. This idea was not on the outskirts of Nazi ideology, it was the heart of movement, that's what intrigued me. Mengele is the most extreme expression of this idea.
America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.
I try getting in front of as many opportunities as possible, but in the late '90s, I had no idea that I'd end up being CFO of a technology company. I'd no idea what venture capital was.