Tom Kelley > Quotes

“I used to think that to make something happen in a corporation or in the army, you had to be at the higher ranks, to be a general. But you just need to start a movement.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“If you want a team of smart, creative people to do extraordinary things, don’t put them in a drab, ordinary space.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Like a muscle, your creative abilities will grow and strengthen with practice.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“The first step toward a great answer is to reframe the question.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Mark Twain said a century ago, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“At its core, creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“The history of discovery is full of creative serendipity.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“So design your space for flexibility instead of inertia and the status quo.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Friedrich Nietzsche said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“As Brown writes: “When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts.” One way to embrace creativity, Brown says, is to let go of comparison.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Design thinking relies on the natural—and coachable—human ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Everything in modern society is the result of a collection of decisions made by someone. Why shouldn’t that someone be you?”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“No matter how high you rise in your career, no matter how much expertise you gain, you still need to keep your knowledge and your insights refreshed. Otherwise, you may develop a false confidence in what you already “know” that might lead you to the wrong decision.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“In our experience, one of the scariest snakes in the room is the fear of failure, which manifests itself in such ways as fear of being judged, fear of getting started, fear of the unknown. And while much has been said about fear of failure, it still is the single biggest obstacle people face to creative success.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“The key is to be quick and dirty—exploring a range of ideas without becoming too invested in only one.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“But to act, most of us must first overcome the fears that have blocked our creativity in the past.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Great groups ship. “They are places of action, not think tanks or retreat centers devoted solely to the generation of ideas.” Warren characterized the successful collaborations he studied as “dreams with deadlines.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“you are not limited to only what you have been able to do before.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Great groups are more optimistic than realistic. They believe they can do what no one else has done before. “And the optimists, even when their good cheer is unwarranted, accomplish more,” says Warren.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“It’s hard to be “best” right away, so commit to rapid and continuous improvements.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it's what you know for sure that ain't so" Mark Twain”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Noticing that something is broken is an essential prerequisite for coming up with a creative solution to fix”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“It turns out that creativity isn’t some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few—it’s a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked. And unblocking that creative spark can have far-reaching implications for yourself, your organization, and your community.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Their ultimate “strokes of genius” don’t come about because they succeed more often than other people—they just do more, period.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Design thinking is a way of finding human needs and creating new solutions using the tools and mindsets of design practitioners.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Empathy means challenging your preconceived ideas and setting aside your sense of what you think is true in order to learn what actually is true. that people aren’t conscious of.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

“Cool technology alone is not enough. If it were, we’d all be riding Segways and playing with robotic dogs.”
― Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All