Break the Rules!

1It's Time to Break the Rules: Challenge Assumptions, Overcome Obstacles, Mitigate Risk

Are you ready to adopt your own entrepreneurial mindset? Let's dive right in. Buckle your seatbelt, because here we go!

A $1.5 Billion Story That Begins with “No”¹

It was 1984, and Lynda Weinman had just bought a Macintosh computer. Thanks to its user‐friendly interface, Weinman, with the occasional help of Mac user group meetings, taught herself how to use it. “I was doggedly persistent and stubborn about wanting to learn it. You could just try everything and you're not going to break it,” she remembers.² Before long, she was getting hired to do contract work for Hollywood animators, including working directly with film director William Shatner, where she worked on animations for the movie Star Trek V: The Last Frontier. What she didn't yet know how to do, she figured out.

By the early 1990s, she found herself teaching graphic arts at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where she was teaching students how to use tools like the then‐new‐fangled Photoshop, Illustrator, and other computer graphics software. She was looking for a web design book she could assign to her students. Searching the bookstore, she grew more and more frustrated. She found only complicated technical guides that were impossible for the average person to understand. “I remember thinking, maybe this book doesn't exist yet,” she says. “I went home from the bookstore and wrote the book proposal.” ...