Utley Quotes

Rap started on the street, and religion is everywhere, even on the streets.

I got a servant, a nice clean German girl from the Volga. Her village had been devastated—no other word can convey my meaning—by the liquidation of the Kulaks. In the German Volga Republic the peasants, who had been settled there two hundred years before to set an example to the Russians, had been better farmers and so enjoyed a higher standard of life than most peasants in Russia. Consequently, the greater part of them were classified as Kulaks and liquidated. *** The girls came to the towns to work as servants, and were highly prized, since they were more competent, cleaner, more honest and self-respecting than the Russian peasants. Curiously, they were the most purely Teutonic Germans I had ever seen, Germans like the pictures in Hans Andersen fairy tales, blue-eyed, with long golden plaits and lovely, fair skins. Being Protestants, and regarding the Russians around them as no better than barbarians, they had intermarried little and retained a racial purity which would no doubt have delighted Hitler. *** My Hilda seemed a treasure. She could cook, she could read and write, she kept herself and the rooms clean and looked like a pink and flaxen doll. I could treat her as an equal without finding that this led to her stealing my clothes and doing no work. The servant problem in Moscow for Jane and me lay in our inability to bully and curse and drive, which was the only treatment the Russian servant understood. It was quite natural that this should be so, since Soviet society, like Tsarist society but to a far higher degree, was based on force and cheating. *** I was amazed at the outspoken way in which Hilda and Sophie (another German girl who worked for Jane) voiced their hatred and contempt of the Soviet Government. Sophie, one of thirteen children of a bedniak (poor peasant) would shake her fist and say: “Kulaks! The Kulaks are up there in the Kremlin, not in the village.” Since the word “Kulak” originally signified an exploiter and usurer, her meaning was quite plain.

What had been a region of model farming became almost a desert, for more than half the population was exiled or sent to concentration camps. The young people left the villages, the boys to go to the factories if they could get jobs, or to become vagabonds if they couldn’t. *** An echo of the tragic fate of Russia’s German Protestant population reached the world when the Mennonites flocked to Moscow and sought permission to leave the country. Some of these Germans had tried to obey the government and had formed collective farms, only to have them liquidated as Kulak collectives. Being first-class farmers, they had committed the crime of making even a Kolkhoz productive and prosperous. Others had quite simply been expropriated from their individual holdings. All were in despair. Few were allowed to leave Russia. They were sent to Siberia to die, or herded into slave labor concentration camps. The crime of being good farmers was unforgivable, and they must suffer for this sin. *** Cheat or be cheated, bully or be bullied, was the law of life. Only the German minority with their strong religious and moral sense—the individual morality of the Protestant as opposed to the mass subservience demanded by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Soviet Government—retained their culture and even some courage under Stalin’s Terror.

off with Utley.” We were all quiet then, Susan and I

The Cherokees had 1,200 miles to go before they reached eastern Oklahoma, the end of the trek they would forever be remembered as the Trail of Tears. As their homeland disappeared behind them, the cold autumn rains continued to fall, bringing disease and death. Four thousand shallow graves marked the trail. Marauding parties of white men appeared, seized Cherokee horses in payment for imaginary debts, and rode off. The Indians pressed on, the sullen troopers riding beside them. They

As the struggle continued, Mason abandoned his plan to seize the camp intact for its booty, grabbed a firebrand, and set it aflame. As the eighty closely packed huts, which housed 800 Indians, went up in smoke, the Pequots poured out of the stockade to meet death from English and Narraganset swords and muskets. Others - hundreds of them - remained huddled inside the huts and were burned, women and children, old and young, “in promiscuous ruin.” The

The tactics used by the English in their warfare with the Indians crossed the foggy dividing line between strategic deception and outright immorality.

Late in November, he suddenly appeared at Fort Lyon with the 3rd Colorado and other units and announced his intention to attack Black Kettle. Several officers remonstrated, declaring that the Cheyennes had been led to understand that they were prisoners of war. Chivington responded, as one of the protesters recalled, that “he believed it to be right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians that would kill women and children, and ‘damn any man that was in sympathy with Indians.’“ On November 29, 1864, Chivington methodically deployed his command, about 700 strong with four howitzers, around Black Kettle’s village. The chief, shouting reassurances to his alarmed people, ran up an American flag and a white flag over his tepee. Then the troops opened fire and charged. The Indians fled in panic in all directions. Only one pocket of resistance formed, and that was speedily eliminated. Chivington had made clear his wish that prisoners not be taken, and a massacre followed as the soldiers indiscriminately shot down men, women, and children. Interpreter John Smith later testified: “They were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.” Two hundred Cheyennes, two-thirds of them women and children, perished. Nine chiefs died, but Black Kettle made good his escape. As

As I said in the chipping chapter, I don’t want the grip end of the club moving very far. If you get the idea that you need to make a faster swing with your arms doing most of the work, the first thing that’s going to happen is that the pulling action of the left arm will send your left shoulder up, tilt your spine back, away from the target, move the bottom of your swing way behind the ball, and there it is—a fat shot, or a skull from hitting it on the upswing. Think of it as a bigger pivot and you’ll start to feel the chain reaction

The last word about the Little Bighorn belongs to perhaps Custer’s most insightful chronicler, Robert Utley. “The simplest answer, usually overlooked, is that the army lost largely because the Indians won,” he writes. “To ascribe defeat entirely to military failings is to devalue Indian strength and leadership.” The invasion of the Black Hills and the order to abandon the unceded lands galvanized the Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes.

The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked. —DAVID OGILVY

So much advice around innovation and creativity amounts to more: more methods, more habits, more techniques. If we don’t simultaneously carve away less important uses of our time to create space for reflection and contemplation—distance from the problem at hand—we only undermine the effort to boost ideaflow. Caught up in the day-to-day, our imaginations become blocked, just as David Ogilvy warned at the top of this chapter. To escape “the tyranny of reason,” we must be as tactical about withdrawing from a losing battle as we are about gathering divergent inputs or vigorously testing our ideas. The “Father of Advertising” was an ace at the mental game of creative output. He intuitively understood that generating more ideas required doing a little less.

Learning circles Unlike tactics tied to a specific role, project, or enterprise, establishing a Learning Circle—a group that connects regularly to share and discuss ideas—will provide a lifetime of divergent inputs for you.

Considering eighteenth-century social mores, Franklin assembled an incredibly divergent mix for the time: rich and poor, young and old, clerk and merchant alike. These were all white men, of course, but for his time, Franklin was breaking down barriers. Every Friday evening, the Junto would congregate to share the essays its members had written on subjects of personal interest. A debate on ethics or natural philosophy, aka scientific inquiry, might follow. To ensure civility, the group levied small fines for direct criticism or personal attacks. Many of these men had no higher education, but they were curious, intellectually intrepid, and, of course, avid readers. Franklin made sure of that in selecting them.

Pen pals Charles Darwin made good use of the postal service in his scientific work, corresponding regularly with hundreds of collaborators across more than a dozen fields of inquiry.

If you have more than one pressing idea problem, create a Problem Queue. (You can never have too many good problems to work on.) As you unwind for sleep, select a problem from your Problem Queue and let your mind play with it in a relaxed and unfocused way. You might even spend a few minutes doing some related reading. Don’t force solutions, though. What you’re doing here is luring the interest of your subconscious. Ponder the relevant details, but don’t try to make everything fit together yet.

In the shower, while making breakfast, on your morning run—during any lightly distracting physical activity, noodle on the problem in a relaxed manner. Then, before leaving for work, spend a few minutes jotting down possible solutions. Aim for a minimum of ten but count all iterations and variations. If you’re coming up with colors for a new logo, for instance, aquamarine and cornflower blue both count.

THE DISCIPLINE OF DOCUMENTATION At the d.school, we have a saying: “If you don’t capture it, it didn’t happen.” Memory isn’t as reliable as you might think. People chronically underestimate how much they’ll remember about something after even a few minutes have passed. This is even more true of our own ideas than simple facts like where we parked the car, or what our spouse wants from the take-out place.

An old saying goes, “The faintest ink is better than the sharpest memory.” But that’s not true if you never go back to read what you wrote.

Organizations from Google to Zappos to Ben & Jerry’s to NASA make dedicated nap rooms available to their employees.

When the answers run dry, ask a better question.

Leveraging the brain’s extraordinary capacity to pan for gold comes down to asking it questions that attract its interest and activate its attention.

Most of the seeds fail,” Darrell says, “but they don’t go away until I give up on them.” Likewise, Darrell makes sure to “trim trees regularly.” When this happens, Darrell celebrates failure by giving people a bonus and promoting them into other seeds, plants, or trees. “We never want association with a seed to appear to be a career-limiting move,” he told us.

A Wonder Wander is the simple but life-changing practice of using your legs to feed your brain by taking a walk through a stimulating environment.

It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved. —JOHN DEWEY

Expectations. What are you taking for granted about the problem? For this dial, it can be helpful to make a list of all the assumptions you’re making about how the product should work or how the solution should otherwise function. Then swap each assumption with its opposite. How might we share ice cream without a cone or a cup? How might we make ice cream hot? How might we make ice cream the appetizer rather than the dessert? How might we eliminate the post-ice-cream sugar crash?

Similarity. Analogy is one of the most powerful creative tools. We’ll dig deeper into the power of analogy in the next chapter. Here, consider parallel contexts at one end of the dial and completely unrelated ones at the other. To think of good analogies to try, start with the intended outcome. Want to make ice cream faster? “Who or what is built for speed?” Want to delight your customers? “Who or what delights people?” The brain solves new problems in this way, using its understanding of a familiar topic to grapple with one that appears very different on the surface. You might apply the lessons of high school football to your first job managing a team, or transplant one of Napoleon’s battlefield strategies to a product launch. Consciously or unconsciously, we distill principles from observations and then see where else they might fit. How might we make ice cream like a therapy session? How might an Olympic sprinter serve up an ice cream cone? How might Apple design a container for ice cream sprinkles? How might eating ice cream feel like a roller coaster? Like a magic show? Like a horror movie? HMW questions can be silly or serious.

Most of the time, the problem is the problem.” If you’re not willing to reframe the problem to explore a more productive avenue, you’ll end up spinning your tires.

Never put what you can do (feasibility) ahead of what the market wants (desirability

Is walking essential to creativity? Many great thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs throughout history, from Aristotle to Giacomo Puccini to, yes, Steve Jobs, would probably have agreed.

To arrive at a single successful product, 2,000 ideas become 100 working prototypes. Those 100 prototypes become 5 commercial products. Of the final 5, 1 will succeed. To truly grasp the implications of 2,000:100:5:1, however, forget the fact that we’re talking about toys, or even products in general. What we’ve found working with innovators of every kind is that the scale of this approach applies universally.

At Amazon, they take this principle to its logical extreme: a “single-threaded leader” is “100% dedicated and accountable” for pushing one solution forward. “The best way to undercut a strategic initiative is to make it someone’s part-time job,” writes Tom Godden, an enterprise strategist at Amazon Web Services.

Yet, as that perceptive seventh-grader put it at the very beginning of this book, creativity is “doing more than the first thing that comes to your mind.

This is a crucial discipline when creating with others. Every problem needs an owner. That owner needs to agree on a plan with the other stakeholders

Creators ranging from Ludwig van Beethoven to Salvador Dalí to Thomas Edison have relied on naps to refresh their minds and spark insights. (Edison napped in what he called his “thinking chair.”) While sleeping at your office may still be frowned upon where you work, more and more leaders are catching on to the value of this tool.

Browse. Go to Wikipedia.org and click “Random article” to be taken to one of the site’s millions of crowdsourced entries—then pretend it wasn’t random at all. What is Wikipedia trying to tell you? (Other online tools will send you to random websites, videos, and so on.)

If the right starting number isn’t six but the far side of six hundred, how do we bridge the gap between what people think they need and the scale of output that drives world-class results? It would help to use all the time available, for one thing. In our work at Stanford, we’ve found that even professional creatives tend to stop generating ideas before the allotted time. In most cases, people anchor on the first good idea the moment it’s been suggested and, once that happens, the energy in the room changes. The group spends the rest of the time effectively reassuring itself that the idea they’ve latched on to is a good one. I really think we’ve got ourselves a winner here, folks!

If people aren’t aware of the correlation between quantity and quality, persisting past the first good idea can be interpreted as perfectionism. Wasteful. People get annoyed when one contributor keeps throwing out new ideas when the majority is forming a consensus.

Don’t let perfectionism get in the way of rapid learning. Releasing a low-fidelity version of an idea into the world can be especially painful for a company with a commitment to quality.

THE IDEA QUOTA Loosening up your stiff creative muscles every morning helps you make the crucial flip from a mindset of quality to one of quantity when it’s time to come up with ideas. Making the following Idea Quota a part of your day will lighten the subconscious pressure for perfection that stymies creative exploration.

Every morning from now on, you will write down ten ideas. (We’ll get to what kind of ideas in a moment.) The quality of these ideas isn’t the point. Contrary to what you might believe, you can’t judge the merit of an idea while it’s still inside your head. Idea validation is as crucial to the creative process as idea generation. But that happens later. For now, our aim is just to freshen up stale thinking

Performing an Idea Quota is a simple, three-S process: Seed. Select a problem and study it. Sleep. Let the unconscious mind process the problem. Solve. Flood the problem with ideas.

From now on, you will feed your brain high-importance problems, pointing it toward areas where new thinking will contribute meaningfully to your goals.

It’s worth repeating: for quantity to soar, relax expectations around quality. As you’re learning from your Idea Quota, generating lots of ideas requires a no-judgment zone.

Once you’ve assembled a set of observations, create a new frame to inspire ideas you can test: “How might we use brutal honesty the way a barber does to build trust with new customers?” That’s a much richer and more interesting prompt than “How can we build trust quickly?” ~

In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos did his best to leave Mondays and Thursdays unscheduled so he could spend the time “trawling for ideas, exploring his own site, sometimes just surfing the Web.

The secret to doing good research,” Tversky once said, “is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.

As Charles Eames once said, “The first question of design is not how it should look, but if it should even be.

This means allowing yourself, just for this window of time, to think “irresponsibly.” When you adopt a divergent mindset, there are no longer mistakes. Only, in the words of the great creativity expert and landscape painter Bob Ross, “happy little accidents.

Warm-ups also shift the group out of the conventional, convergent mindset they rely on at work. When we’re doing our jobs, we’re primed to notice mistakes, minimize risk, organize chaos, and stay on point. Generating ideas together requires a different mode of operation.

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress. —RICHARD FEYNMAN

Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers, Robert Utley’s Lone Star Justice, and Mike Cox’s Wearing the Cinco Peso: A History of the Texas Rangers.

Be known for told stories that made a difference, instead of untold stories that changed nothing

Test before you invest, not once but at every stage. Testing is forecasting. It’s how you see your success before you achieve it.

Instead of struggling to come up with a single perfect solution, you go from: Quality to quantity Precious to scrappy Perfection to practice Done to doing Your perspective to someone else’s Isolation to collaboration Relevance-requiring to randomness-embracing Focused to mind-wandering Order to chaos Your expertise to unfamiliar territory Output-focused to input-obsessed

In tough times, however, we’re praised for staying at our desks and burning the midnight oil. How are you supposed to see the horizon with your nose pressed against the grindstone? Thanks in large part to the factory mentality of modern workplace culture, organizations discourage the very behaviors that can save them.

Why is it that we who have enjoyed the human free­doms which our forefathers fought so hard to win and to bequeath to us, do not, with the example of Russia before us, realize the horrors of life without freedom? Why is it that we cannot understand that there is no such thing as embracing Communism as an experiment? It is a one-way street, ending in a cul de sac of secret police terror, firing squads for the intellectuals and leaders and concentration camps and slave labor for the masses. There is no turning back; there is no escape.

Perhaps the breaking of the human spirit into submissive, thoughtless robots is the most terrible feature of Stalin’s Russia. Humanity is bowed down. Every one cringes before his superiors, and those who abase themselves seek outlets in bullying and terrifying the unfortunates beneath them. Integrity, courage and charity disappear in the stifling atmosphere of cant, falsehood and terror.

The part I always loved about golf was that you could go out there by yourself and be totally responsible for what happened or didn’t happen.

Wisdom warns against desire, but there is power in wanting, power that can fuel the will and keep lit that precious torch, hope.