Josh Allred's Blog

Who’s right?

Everyone is right.

Everyone is right because of how they were raised, the choices they made, the environment they lived in, what they were taught, the circumstances they lived through…

And if you lived exactly the same way as someone else, you would probably make the same decisions they would make.

The important thing to remember about people is they don’t believe what you believe, they don’t want what you want, they won’t choose what you would choose.

We see the world through our lens, walk in our shoes, not in someone else’s.

Does it help?

Yes, you were wronged. Justice was not served. The bad guy got away.

The question is: does it help?

Does it help holding on to this narrative that you’re the victim of circumstance? That you have no control, no agency in what others do?

Our first instinct is to react with fear to a tantalizing situation.

But when we learn to respond, we learn to love.

Don’t write a book

Instead, write a page.

And then another.

That’s how big projects finish.

Are geniuses born or made?

“Congratulations! It’s a genius.”

Said no one.

If you look back in history, the Greeks believed that a person’s genius came from a divine entity, an outside source called daemons.

The Romans had a similar view called a genius.

It turns out, no one ever referred to themselves as being a genius but rather having a genius.

This all changed during the Renaissance period when human beings began to place themselves at the center of all things.

And overtime, creativity is now seen as coming from within. Something that only an elite few have. Someone with a high IQ. Something you are born with.

Let’s be clear: creativity is not something you are born with. No one is born understanding Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Everyone is capable of having a genius. Everyone is capable of making something that needs to be made, helping someone who needs to be helped.

When passion exceeds patience and discipline

For year, scientists were stuck on how to tame the extremely volatile and violent substance nitroglycerin.

It wasn’t until 1867 when Alfred Nobel discovered that by combining a stabilizer of clay with nitroglycerin you would get dynamite.

Our passions are the same way, they can be extremely volatile.

But it is only useful when we learn to combine it with stabilizers like patience and discipline to make the impact we seek to make.

Perfect leaves no room for surprise

The music industry was perfect until Napster was invented and changed the way we listened to music.

Encyclopedias were perfect until Wikipedia took over how we looked up information.

Travel agents were perfect until the internet.

The first person to try improv wasn’t perfect. In fact, it was awful.

The problem with perfect is that it leaves no room for surprises.

The magic of opening night isn’t that it is perfect, the fact that it might not work is what makes it fun to go see.

The cost of avoiding important conversations

In 1953, Hugh DeHaven introduced the idea of a collapsible steering column. Since it has been used it is estimated to have saved over 80,000 lives.

The problem was that it took car companies 13 years to launch a collapsible steering column.

Why?

It turns out, car companies were afraid to talk about safety. In fact, many car companies had safety patents they were intentionally not using to avoid the appearance of cars not being safe to drive.

The lesson we need to understand is this: Not everyone believes what you believe and not everyone wants what you want. (Even when it comes to things as important as safety.)

If it’s important to you, make it important for others. The perfect product or the perfect idea isn’t good enough to change people’s minds—only stories will.

[How many lives were lost in those 13 years because of people avoiding conversation that seemed too difficult to have?]