MAIN IDEA
How do you make achievement a habit in your personal and professional life?
You do this by applying the "design thinking" methodology to your life and career. Specifically, there are five things you should do:
Get into the habit of approaching everything using design thinking
Favor action over thinking – make a 100-percent effort to do things
Don't be intimidated if the odds are against you – they always will be
Do what you can now – we all face a final countdown so don't delay
Be the cause of good things – not the victim of circumstances
BERNARD ROTH has been professor of engineering at Stanford University for more than fifty years. He is today considered to be one of the world's leading thinkers on kinematics and robotics. In 2003, Bernard Roth was a co-founder of Stanford's highly regarded Design School, called "the d.school." In the late 1980s, he started teaching a workshop on creativity to students, faculty and professionals which is now a highly regarded d.school course. Bernard Roth is a graduate of Columbia University.
The Web site for this book is at www.theachievementhabit.com.
This is a summary and not a critique or a review of the book. It does not offer judgment or opinion on the content of the book. This summary may not be organized chapter-wise but is an overview of the main ideas, view points and arguments from the book as a whole. This means that the organization of this summary is not a representation of the book.
Design thinking is a set of five general practices which engineers have developed over the years to solve design challenges. Most of the time, design thinking is applied to external challenges but it is equally effective at being used internally to form and mold the best version of yourself. Use it often.
Design thinking is an amorphous practice which encompasses how engineers have been thinking and acting for generations. The term was first coined by IDEO co-founder (and Stanford professor) David Kelley when he was trying to explain how engineers approach design challenges.
Design thinking has five principles:
Empathize
Define problem
Ideate
Prototype
Test!
Everything starts when you empathize with the client or the user and see things through their eyes. To come up with a better product or a better experience, you need to know the underlying desires and needs of the user. If you don't learn what the issues are and align yourself with the user, you won't be able to come up with something new and better.
Next you define the problem you want to solve or the question you want to answer. There will likely be many problems layered together so get specific.
You then come up with multiple possibilities for potential solutions. Use brainstorming, mind mapping. sketching or whatever you prefer to generate lots of potential solutions.
Choose your most promising idea and make a rough working prototype of your solution. Build it in physical format even if in rudimentary form. If this is not possible, develop a paper-based prototype and use that.
Test your prototype, get feedback and improve it steadily. Ask others for their ideas on how to make it and apply their suggestions.