TL;DR
8/10. Edison’s line about one percent inspiration, taken seriously and turned into a method. Belsky founded Behance, spent six years watching which creative people finish things, and reports what they do differently. The answer is unglamorous and correct.
The premise is that everyone has ideas and almost nobody ships them, and that the gap has nothing to do with talent. Execution is a skill built out of organizational habits, accountability, and the willingness to keep going after the excitement wears off.
Belsky interviewed hundreds of productive creatives at Apple, IDEO, Disney, and Google, plus a great many individual designers and small studios, and looked for what the finishers had in common. He founded Behance and later sold it to Adobe, and the book is the distilled version of six years of that observation.
What is the Action Method?
This is the transferable core and it is worth the price on its own.
Every meeting, every burst of thinking, and every conversation gets broken into three categories. Action steps, which are specific physical tasks with a single owner. References, which are the notes and links and background you might want later. And backburner items, which are the ideas you are not doing now and are not willing to lose.
The discipline is in the wording. An action step has to start with a verb and describe something a person can physically do, so a step reading think about the cover does not qualify, and one reading email three designers with the brief does. That sounds pedantic until you audit your own list and discover most of it is wishes.
The backburner category is the underrated part. Most systems make you either act on an idea or discard it, and creative people will do neither, so the idea sits in the active list forever generating guilt. Giving it a named place to wait removes it from your attention without losing it.
What advice in Making Ideas Happen stings?
Generate ideas in moderation and kill ideas liberally.
That one is aimed straight at people who mistake idea generation for progress, which is most creative people including me. Every new idea is a small dopamine hit and a large tax on the projects already open, and a person with fifteen live projects has fifteen ways to avoid finishing any of them.
Prioritize through nagging is the second, and it sounds petty until you have watched a project die because everyone was too polite to keep asking. Belsky is explicit that the person who follows up repeatedly is doing the most valuable job in the room and is usually the least liked.
Encourage fighting within your team is the third, and it is right for the same reason. Consensus produces work nobody argues with and nobody remembers, and a team that never disagrees is either homogeneous or frightened.
How does Making Ideas Happen apply to writing a book?
Directly, and this is why I keep it near the desk.
A manuscript is a long project with no external deadline, no client chasing you, and a middle stretch where the initial excitement is gone and the end is not visible. That is precisely the condition Belsky is writing about, and it is the condition in which almost every abandoned book gets abandoned.
The action step discipline works on a chapter. Fix chapter seven is a wish. Cut the second scene and rewrite the ending of chapter seven so it lands on the argument is something a person can sit down and do at eight in the morning without deciding anything first.
The accountability material matters more for writers than for the design teams he studied, because a writer has none by default. Belsky’s answer is a deliberate community, meaning people who expect to see the work, and it is the single most reliable predictor I have seen of who finishes.
What is wrong with Making Ideas Happen?
It functions partly as an advertisement for Behance, and readers who notice this find it hard to unnotice.
The company appears throughout as the exemplar, the products are mentioned, and the 99U conference gets its share. That was fair enough in 2010 when the company was the evidence for the argument, and it dates the book now that Behance is an Adobe property and the physical Action Method products are gone.
The case studies also skew toward design and technology, so the examples are studios and startups. A novelist or an academic will have to translate, and the translation is easy but it is work the book does not do for you.
Verdict
The best book I know on the gap between having ideas and finishing things, which is the gap most writers live in.
Read it for the Action Method and for the three uncomfortable principles, and skip the case studies if the branding grates. The framework survives its packaging.
Explore further
The Psychology of Writing Hub: what drives creative work and what stops it.
Frequently Asked Questions
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