The five steps to
Do Different
Things Differently
“Think differently” is easy advice to give. Knowing where to start is a lot harder.
The five steps to Do Different Things Differently™ are a process for moving beyond familiar answers and unlocking breakthrough ideas. Five steps to help you notice opportunities, decide what to change, imagine another way, and bring it to life. They're also the foundation of Tucker's keynotes, which he customizes for each audience.
Step One
The Fixation
Notice the thing that won't leave your attention.
It might be a problem everyone has learned to work around, or a possibility that keeps making its way back into your awareness. Either way, the first step to creative change is recognizing the thing that we become so curious about or bothered by that making something out of them becomes inevitable.
Step Two
The Shift
Choose what you want to do about it.
Once we acknowledge what we're fixated on, the natural next question is what should happen with that thing Do you want to fix what's broken? Replicate something that works really well? Change how people see it? Make a new version? Strip it back to its most important elements? The Shift is about identifying the broad goal for the change you want to see.
Step Three
The Vision
What's the best that can happen?
Unconventional ideas deserve unreasonable aspirations. The vision is where we dream up the boldest ideas we can that could bring our shift to life. Constraints are a reality we'll confront eventually, but truly original thinking requires that we let ourselves imagine unreasonable change before we narrow in.
Step Four
The Canvas
What do we have to work with?
You've got your vision. You've probably also got a deadline, a budget, and a limited amount of energy.
Those limits don't have to be reasons to stop. The canvas is where the idea has to live, and this is where we get resourceful about the tools and constraints available to us to make our idea real.
Step Five
The Sketch
What's the low stakes, imperfect way for us to make it real?
An idea in your head can stay perfect forever.
A first attempt gives you something more useful: a chance to discover what works and what doesn't. The sketch is the small, imperfect experiment that gets us infinitely farther than another hour of thinking would. You're not trying to prove that your first idea is brilliant; you're just giving it a chance to become something greater.
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