Things A Little Bird Told Me

Things A Little Bird Told Me is Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s look back at the years of his life during and before Twitter, from which he draws many lessons about business, life and society.

Have you ever had a test in school where the teacher would just sit you down in front of a blank piece of paper, give you a pencil, and tell you to start? Probably not. That’d be weird, right?

I mean, what would you even put on the paper? The pure number of options is overwhelming. Should you draw? Write? Calculate something? Teachers know that limits inspire creativity, and that’s why they give you a specific task, like “write a short story”, “draw an elephant” or “solve these binomial formula problems.”

A limit automatically forces you to be creative, because now you have to come up with a way to get around it.

Limits can be financial, biological, social, or even made up. For example, when Steven Spielberg shot Jaws, he wanted to get an animatronic shark, but it was too expensive at the time. To get around this limit, he decided to film from the shark’s point of view, making the movie scarier than it could ever have been with some mechanic model. Ultimately, this is what made the movie a big hit and sparked a whole new point-of-view genre in horror movies.

This is also why tweets on Twitter allow only 140 characters – it forces you to be creative and concise!

When Biz Stone designed the Twitter logo, he just sketched a bird based on an image he found online. But it didn’t quite feel right, so someone else made a few changes he hadn’t thought of. Eventually, the design was finalized by a professional designer. Over the years, the logo has changed a couple times.

Imagine Biz had insisted on using his first design – we’d probably be looking at an arguably less beautiful Twitter logo today. But Biz knows that ideas rarely enter the world fully formed and ready to go. That’s why he always remains open to changes, even after the idea has been released.

For example, most of Twitter’s main features were user suggestions. People initially copied tweets they liked to share them, so Twitter introduced the “retweet.” When one user wanted to bundle together all tweets about the South by Southwest Festival, he added #sxsw to his tweets, and voilà, the hashtag was born.

Even tweets itself got their name from the users, initially people would just say they’re “twittering.”

So never stop forming your ideas with the feedback of others, there’s always something to be improved!