I spent most of Thursday in a lovely auditorium inside the The New York Times building attending the second annual 99% Conference—a gathering put on by the folks at Behance and Cool Hunting aimed at getting creative people to stop coming up with ideas, and start executing them. The speakers were a motivated bunch of overachievers who, through there own successes, have demonstrated a pronounced ability to turn thought into action. Here are some choice quotes from the day:
"Don't let your ideas stew for too long before moving into action."—Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter
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Entrepreneurship exists somewhere between madness and genius."—Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures
"A successful partnership is based on the willingness to share the ownership of ideas."—Masamichi Udagawa, partner at Antenna Design
"The purpose of a strategy is not to come up with the right answers. It's to enable you to act."—Frans Johannson, CEO of the Medici group
"Nobody likes to change. Until not changing hurts more than doing the actual change."—Jamie Oliver
"Young man, go make money. It will allow you to create what you want."—Paul Rand (the "Michael Jordan of graphic design"), as remembered by John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design
"Make sure your mother can understand it"—Leslie Koch, president of Governor's Island Preservation
"The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."—Fred Wilson, quoting a tweet he recently saw
"We have a strategic plan; it's called doing things."—Frans Johannson, quoting Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines.
"We fall in love with ideas, unfortunately we're not monogamous"—Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and author of Making Ideas Happen.
There's a more in-depth analysis available here, and you can always retroactively follow the conference tweets by searching Twitter for hashtag #99conf.
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