It seems that bad advice that's fun will always be better known than than good advice that's dull-no matter how useless that fun advice is.

All great tasks test our motivation. It's easy to court ideas over beers and change the world with napkin sketches, but like most things taken home from bars, new challenges arise the next day. It's in the morning light when work begins, and grand ideas (or barroom conquests) lose their luster. To do interesting things requires work and it's no surprise we abandon demanding passions for simpler, easier, more predictable things.

Innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. If you forget people’s concerns and feelings when you present an innovation, or neglect to understand their perspectives in your design, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

Big thoughts are fun to romanticize, but it's many small insights coming together that bring big ideas into the world.

No one has died from giving a bad presentation. Well, at least one person did, President William Henry Harrison, but he developed pneumonia after giving the longest inaugural address in U.S. history. The easy lesson from his story: keep it short, or you might die.

Innovation is significant positive change.

Commit yourself to taking enough risks that you will fail some of the time. If you're not failing, we're not doing something sufficiently difficult or creative.