Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

By Scott Belsky
Portfolio, $25.95, 244 pages

If you are anxious and discouraged, you need Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision & Reality. This book is not so much about generating ideas for new businesses, coming up with solutions to the world’s problems, or conceiving artistic breakthroughs as it is about making things happen. Hinged on Thomas Edison’s famous words that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, this book is about making your amazing ideas spring to life and bear fruit.

“Ideas don’t happen because they are great—or by accident.”

Mining the philosophy at the core of the book and powering Behance, a company Belsky founded to help creative people and teams across industries “take action,” Belsky spent over six years studying habits of productive individuals and groups who make their ideas happen. He compiled their best practices for success, some of which seem counterintuitive: generating ideas in moderation and acting without conviction, reducing projects to three primary components, encouraging fights within teams, seeking competition, and sharing ideas liberally.

Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen will turn your focus from being good at discovering great ideas to developing the capacity to turn these ideas into reality. This is one book that will help you make your dreams come true.

Reviewed by Dominique James