Welcome to the Action Digest, where we make the creative process smoother than a single attempt parallel park.

A glimpse at the action we’re bringing you this week:

• 🎬 One of Matthew McConaughey’s most famous moments reveals why success goes beyond sticking to the script 

• 🏙️ The Beatles teach us what to do when we’re struggling to agree on the path ahead

• 👾 We learn how to turn things around from someone who turned a failing company into a billion-dollar success in just 8 months. 

P.s., you can check out editions 1-26 here in case you missed them, including insights such as the mindset that helped an entrepreneur build seven different billion-dollar companies, how Steve Jobs cultivated great creative taste, and why success might be much closer than we thought possible.

Seriously, there are some gems you’ll appreciate in these earlier editions ;-)

1. Leave the door open for unplanned surprises

One of the most iconic moments in recent cinema was unscripted.

When Matthew McConaughey was asked about the chest pounding hum/chant that he performs in Wolf Of Wall Street, he revealed that it was “something I’d do before scenes to relax myself, get my voice to drop. I’ve been doing it for a while but it’s just something I do to relax myself, get out of my head.”

As usual, McConaughey was doing the warm up prior to his scene with Leonardo DiCaprio. “I was doing it before the scene and then I’d start the scene,” McConaughey continues, “We do 5 takes. I’m happy. Martin’s happy. We’re about to move on, and before we moved on Leonardo raises his hand and he goes hang on a second, what’s that thing you’re doing before the scene? And I told him. And he goes - what if you put that in the scene? And I was like - yeah, great. So the next scene I started it off and gave him my spiel and didn’t know if it was going to come back - and then it hit me in my head - get him on the same rhythm because now he understands, pass the torch - awh huh huh - and then he started it off.”

So many of the most iconic moments that we remember, whether it’s in art, sport, politics, or beyond, were unplanned. Don’t just execute the plan, leave the door open for all of the small and authentic surprises along the way.

2. Sometimes the best move is to throw it all away and embrace serendipity

In January 1969, as the Beatles gathered for what would become some of their final album sessions, tensions were high and the band's future uncertain. 

The band was debating whether to play live again, a prospect that excited some members more than others. "We're all just sitting around,” Ringo Starr recalls, “and Paul says, ‘who wants to play live?’ and I said ‘I do.’" But not everyone shared this enthusiasm. George Harrison, in particular, was reluctant to return to the stage, feeling increasingly frustrated with the group's dynamics.

Grandiose ideas for performance venues were tossed around, "we had great discussions about going to Hawaii in a crater, or the pyramids to do it, you know, Mount Everest," Starr continues, but it when it became clear that Harrison would never agree to one of these outlandish ideas, a spontaneous compromise was proposed, "ah sod it, let's just do it on the roof."

This impromptu decision led to one of the most iconic moments in rock history: the Beatles' rooftop concert atop their Apple Corps building in London. It was a compromise that allowed the band to fulfill their desire for a live performance without the logistical nightmares of a major public event. It gave them a way to push through and complete their final albums. And the rooftop concert became the Beatles' last live performance, a fitting bookend to their career.

When you reach a roadblock and can’t agree on a plan, sometimes the best move is to throw it all away and embrace serendipity. Letting go of rigid plans opens up space for unexpected creativity and simpler, more authentic solutions to emerge.

3. In its ashes lies the seed of a new success

In 2012, Stewart Butterfield was working on a game called Glitch. He’d raised millions of dollars from investors and he’d convinced dozens of employees to move to Vancouver to join the mission. 

But Butterfield’s hope was fading. 

“I had exhausted all of the ideas we had to fix the problems,” Butterfield remembers, “at first you have… you can fill up post-it notes, like those giant boards, you can fill up whiteboards with ideas, and you argue about which ones are the highest value, and then one by one you eliminate them. Months go by. Years go by.” “[Out of] all of the ideas we thought were the worst ones to begin with, we only have three left, so this is probably not going to work.” 

Everyone wanted him to keep going until they either found the Hail Mary or burned through their last dollar. 

But Butterfield had a different mentality, “we have this approach to work that is a little more improvisational,” he explains, “taking cues from, in my life, cooking, [or] for many people, team sports, or anyone who’s worked in a restaurant. There’s this kind of real time interaction between what everyone else is doing and your understanding of your role and how you should be participating. So whether you’re a bass player in a jazz band or play right wing on a hockey team, or whatever it is, that approach is less about executing against a very concrete plan that’s immutable, and more about the synthesis of all the signal you’re getting, might be from customers, might be from the team, whoever, and then continually altering course based on that.”

So that’s what he did. 

Butterfield met with the company to announce that Glitch was shutting down. 

“I didn’t even get through the first sentence without starting to cry,” he recalls, but “within a couple of weeks, I think three weeks, there was a lot of stupid ideas first, but we decided that this internal communication system we had developed while we were working on the game—that could be a product! And we started building that.” 

That internal communication tool was Slack, a work-focused chat app that surged to a billion dollar valuation within just 8 months. 

When you’re running out of ideas on how to make something work, it might be a sign that it’s time to pivot. But don’t despair at the end of your original vision—sometimes, in its ashes lies the seed of a new success waiting to emerge.

_{Sources: The Big Pivot | Startup Archive}

4. Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage

When you study the world’s most prolific creatives, athletes, business leaders, etc, you see the same pattern over and over again.

Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage.

That means always knowing your next move. And it means building a habit of turning your ideas and notes into action steps.

The Action Method product line, designed by a research team devoted to optimizing productivity, was made to optimize working with a bias towards action.

Each page includes a dedicated Action Zone that encourages you to stay action-oriented.

That means getting more done, seeing more results, and feeling more satisfaction.

You can pick up or replenish your supply here. 

We’ll leave you with this…

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