Welcome to the Action Digest, where we make the creative process feel about as exciting as guessing a Wordle answer on the first attempt.

Did you know… A lot of fascinating insights are uncovered during the research process for each edition. Sometimes it’s difficult to fit them all into the final draft for one reason or another! But you can find these bonus insights and more on X at @ActionDigest. 

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

• ☕️ A famous pop star reveals the principle that catapulted her from homelessness to selling out stadiums.

• 🪄 Decades of scientific research reveals a unique trait that sets great entrepreneurs apart.

• 👟 The founding team of Nike teaches us an essential principle for achieving success when the odds are stacked against us.

P.s., you can check out editions 1-30 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. Resources are overrated

Jewel Kilcher has sold over 30 million records worldwide and had multiple singles on the Billboard Top 100 for months at a time. 

But in 1992, she was homeless—living out of her car in San Diego, shoplifting to survive, and struggling to deal with her frequent panic attacks. Jewel was once asked how she turned her life around. “I was like, I’m gonna figure this out,” she remembers, “I’m gonna die or figure this out, and I’m figuring this out.” 

She went all in on the one thing she had always been good at: singing. “I was like, maybe I could get a gig somewhere and start singing, because I made money singing for my whole life since I was little. Like 100 bucks, 200 bucks, but whatever. So I’d go around to coffee shops in the area...” But there was a problem. San Diego was awash with aspiring performers so “they charged you to sing there. I was like, this is not ideal. They wanted me to pay them $200.”

Undeterred, Jewel went searching for another path. 

“When I was living in my car, there was a little tree that was a flowering tree and I liked to park next to it. So like that was my home. And I noticed there was this coffee shop right there that was going out of business and it was really off the beaten path. And so I went in there and I talked to the lady who owned it. Her name was Nancy. And I was like, do you think you could stay open for two more months? And she’s like, why? I’m like, if I bring people in, can I keep the door money? You can keep all the coffee and food, and like, we’ll try to make it together? And she said yes. And so I started going down on the beachfront in San Diego and I’d sing, like street sing. And I’d tell people I’m singing at the interchange coffee shop on Thursday night at six o’clock. And two people came. Like it was two surfers that thought I was hot, I think. And I did a five hour show because [with] bar singing, you do five hour shows. And I just thought I had to do a five hour show.” “It was amazing. I made $10. And the next night, I would go sing all throughout town. On the street corner, I’d say, hey, Thursday night, they knew where to see me. And it just grew. It went from two people, to four people, to eight people, to 40, to 80, to capacity, to people standing outside watching me singing through the windows.” 

Then, one Thursday in the summer of 1993, a talent manager named Inga Vainshtein made the drive to Jewel’s coffee shop after receiving a call about a surfer girl who sang there every week. Inga introduced Jewel to the head of Atlantic Records who would eventually sign Jewel’s first record deal. 

When she was living out of her car, Jewel had little to no resources at her disposal. But she had something much more important. So important, in fact, that scientists have coined a term for it…

2. The science of making do

Governments across the world have spent billions of dollars on entrepreneurial research studies. 

Entrepreneurship is a huge driver of economic growth and so many policymakers are keen to understand how to encourage their nation’s entrepreneurs and help them succeed. 

As scientists began to study what sets successful enterprises apart, they noticed the same trait crop up among the best founders and organizations. 

The word they have settled on for this trait is bricolage. 

“Bricolage is a concept widely used in the area of entrepreneurship,” one research team writes, “it means “making do” with what is “at hand” by reusing and recombining resources in the face of new problems or opportunities.”

Put another way: bricolage is the ability to use limited resources in creative ways to overcome challenges. Jewel is a textbook example. 

The most successful entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily those who start with the most resources at their disposal (although that can certainly help), it’s that they are uniquely good at using whatever available resources they do have at their disposal to maximum effect. 

Studies have found that entrepreneurs high in bricolage, or bricoleurs, as they are sometimes known, innovate at faster speeds, leverage their networks in more creative ways, make more money, and outpace their competitors.

Some interesting findings from the research field:

• A key facet of bricolage is the ability to recognize opportunities to recombine existing resources in a way that gives them new utility. This was famously how the post-it note was invented. At first, an adhesive that was so weak that it could be removed and restuck was viewed as useless. It took several years before a scientist realized the potential value of combining weak glue with paper notes. 

• The core mindset that comes up repeatedly across studies of bricolage is a refusal to be constrained by limitations.

• Displays of bricolage often occur off the clock: “bricoleurs often make use of their own time (spare time, after work hours) to engage in bricolage activities.”

• Bricoleurs are defined by a high willingness to improvise and experiment.

• Bricolage has been found to “support entrepreneurial decision-making in all the contexts studied.” It gives an edge to both small startups with limited resources and giant organizations who are resource-abundant. 

• They say too much of anything is bad, but this doesn’t seem to be the case for bricolage, with one study finding that “excessive bricolage” had no negative impact. 

• Bricoleurs are uniquely good at leveraging their networks, with researchers noting that “having established networks does not automatically imply that they are usable resources” and that “transforming networks into usable resources is part of the bricolage process.” 

Almost every great founding story is rich with examples of doing much with little…

3. Resourcefulness > resources

In 1965, Phil Knight had been running his shoe company, Blue Ribbon (that would eventually become Nike) for a little more than a year.

Blue Ribbon was willed into existence after Knight struck a deal with the Japanese shoe company, Onitsuka, that allowed him to sell their running shoes in the U.S. 

But Knight’s one-year contract with Onitsuka was set to expire and the company was ignoring his letters to request a renewal. 

To make matters worse, Knight was competing with a running coach who had also struck a deal with Onitsuka. Word on the street was that Blue Ribbon’s customers were being poached by the coach.  

Perhaps this was a sign that Onitsuka was going to give the coach exclusive rights and cut ties with Blue Ribbon. 

As panic intensified, Knight visited his one and only salesman, known as “Johnson,” to brainstorm. “Get thee to Japan,” Johnson said. “What?” replied Knight. “‘You gotta go,” Johnson pushed, “tell them about the work we’ve done. Demand your rights.” 

“I’d just come back from Japan,” Knight recalls, “and I didn’t have the money to go again. I’d poured all my savings into Blue Ribbon, and I couldn’t possibly ask Wallace [his banker] for another loan. The thought nauseated me.”

But what choice did he have?

“I put the airfare on my credit card,” Knight conceded, “Twelve months to pay. And unlike my last visit to Japan, this time I wired ahead. I told the executives at Onitsuka that I was coming, and that I wanted a meeting.” They finally wired back a response: “Come ahead.” 

Knight once again found himself at a conference table filled with Japanese executives. He made a desperate pitch and an outlandish request: to become the U.S.’s exclusive distributor. 

“I looked around the table,” Knight remembers. “Grim faces. None grimmer than Kitami’s [the key decision maker]. He said in a few terse words that this would not be possible. Onitsuka wanted for its U.S. distributor someone bigger, more established, a firm that could handle the workload. A firm with offices on the East Coast. ‘But, but,’ I spluttered, ‘Blue Ribbon does have offices on the East Coast.’” 

… Blue Ribbon did not have any offices on the East Coast. 

But Knight was committed to the lie now. 

“The grim faces were becoming less grim. ‘Well,’ Kitami said, ‘this change things.’” 

Knight got a call the next morning to inform him that Blue Ribbon had been granted exclusive U.S. rights. 

His act of bricolage had given him a lifeline, but several questions haunted him on the flight home: “how was I going to open an office on the East Coast? And how was I going to do it before those shoes arrived? And who was I going to get to run it?”

Fortunately, Knight had hired an employee that had as much bricolage as he did. When Knight informed Johnson that he would need to pack up his things and move to the East Coast, he was reluctant at first, but eventually agreed. 

“Okay,” he said, at last, “I’ll go.”

“Great. That’s great. Terrific. Thank you.” 

“But where?”

“Where what?”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Ah. Yes. Well. Anywhere on the East Coast with a port. Just don’t go to Portland, Maine.” 

“Why?”

“A company based in two different Portlands? That’ll confuse the heck out of the Japanese.”

“Okay,” he said. “Boston, here I come.”

Once Johnson arrived in Boston, he had to figure out how to single handedly set up Blue Ribbon’s East Coast operations. As Knight retells it: “He riffled through his card catalog and found the address of a local customer, another high school track star. He drove to the kid’s house, knocked at the door, unannounced. The kid wasn’t there, but his parents said Johnson was more than welcome to come in and wait. When the kid got home he found his shoe salesman sitting at the dining room table eating dinner with the whole family. The next day, after they went for a run, Johnson got from the kid a list of names—local coaches, potential customers, likely contacts—and a list of what neighborhoods he might like. Within days he’d found and rented a little house behind a funeral parlor. Claiming it in the name of Blue Ribbon.” “And then I got a letter from Johnson saying he was living in his new office.”

With their new East Coast operations up and running, larger and larger shipments began to arrive and revenue climbed higher and higher. Their success persuaded Onitsuka to grant a three-year extension to the deal. 

More importantly, their scrappiness ensured that Knight and his small team could survive long enough to reach the next leg of their journey toward building one of the most recognizable brands in the world.

“Just do it” isn’t just a slogan. It’s the core strategy that Nike’s founding team used to build the company. Time and again, they pulled solutions from the thinnest of air. 

Remember: on the road to build something great, it is much more valuable to possess resourcefulness than it is to possess resources. 

_{Source: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight}

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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