How to avoid and recover from the distractions that can derail your progress with Scott Belsky

Authored by Scott Belsky

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Interview Insights

Top 3 Takeaways from this Interview

• Self-awareness is the only sustainable competitive advantage in business.

• Hardship brings your teams together and equips you to endure for the long haul.

• Nobody wants to inflict pain on their team, but quick and controlled pain is better than a drawn-out infection.

Show Notes

• Scott shares how he learned about his work ethic and personal empathy from his father, an orthopedic surgeon. [01:39]

• He shares how his father’s lessons had helped him when he was tired and unfocused as a young man. [2:49]

• Shares his experience as he wrote The Messy Middle. [3:29]

• He talks about the “relative joy of creating.” [5:04]

• How you define when you’re in a Messy Middle and how you orient others that this is part of the project. [7:59]

• What are some effective ways to harness that conviction when leading your teams? [10:13]

• Scott imparts advice about dealing with the long game. [13:39]

• How to effectively develop teams. [15:56]

• The consequences of fake wins at the expense of hard truth, and how to move forward from it. [21:15]

• How to deal with your team truthfully in the context of Elizabeth Holmes’ very public, disastrous experience. [22:53]

• How Scott leads organizational change. [26:27]

• My Quest for the Best Lightning Round begins [28:50]

Expert Bio

Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, early-stage seed investor, and now serves as Adobe’s Chief Product Officer. Scott’s passion is to make the creative world more productive, connected, and adaptive to new technologies. He founded Behance, the leading online platform for millions of professionals in the creative industry to showcase and discover creative work, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012.

Scott actively advises and invests in businesses that cross the intersection of technology and design, and help empower people. He is an early advisor and investor in Pinterest, Uber, Carta, sweetgreen, and Periscope as well as several others in the early stages.

Contact Info for Scott Belsky

Web address: http://www.scottbelsky.com/

Travels from: New York, NY

Social  Media Links:

Resources Mentioned During the Interview

• Scott’s professional website http://www.scottbelsky.com/
• Fred Wilson, VC investor
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou.
• Ben Silbermann, founder of Pinterest.
• Teresa Amabile, PhD, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School, originator of The Progress Principle.