By Shane Snow
Journalist Shane Snow debunks the myth that success takes time, and he presents a series of examples and real life cases of fast overachievers, from tech entrepreneurs to Skrillex, that embody the principles for taking smartcuts (as different from "shortcuts").
Among these smartcuts, Shane talks about changing (or "hacking") ladders as a way of growing and learning organically, the importance of mentors and rapid feedback, and the fact that there is virtually low competition at the top, as strategies for fast success.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 8 / 10
Click Here to Read my Notes
Journalist Shane Snow debunks the myth that success takes time, and he presents a series of examples and real life cases of fast overachievers, from tech entrepreneurs to Skrillex, that embody the principles for taking smartcuts (as different from "shortcuts").
Among these smartcuts, Shane talks about changing (or "hacking") ladders as a way of growing and learning organically, the importance of mentors and rapid feedback, and the fact that there is virtually low competition at the top, as strategies for fast success.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 8 / 10
Click Here to Read my Notes
Lateral thinking doesn’t replace hard work; it eliminates unnecessary cycles.
Leverage is the overachiever’s approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck.
I’m not being contrarian for the sake of it; I’m hoping to spark lateral thinking when it comes to success, indeed to show that lateral thinking is how the most successful people have always made it.
Momentum—not experience—is the single biggest predictor of business and personal success.
The one irreplaceable ingredient I’ve found, however, is work.
This book is about patterns found in stories of people who didn’t want their hard work to end up in vain, who were too impatient to accept “that’s just how it’s done.”
Too many of us accept the plateaus our lives have offered us and succumb to passivity, to the well-meaning delusion of “If I work hard enough, something good will hopefully happen to me.”
There’s something wrong with the great American ladder-climbing advice: presidents of the United States, some of the world’s most successful people, don’t follow it. It’s like each invented his own ladder.
“By itself, one small win may seem unimportant,” writes Dr. Karl Weick in a seminal paper for American Psychologist in 1984. “A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals.”
“Once a small win has been accomplished,” Weick continues, “forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”
Business research shows that this kind of ladder switching generally tends to accelerate a company’s growth. Companies that pivot—that is, switch business models or products—while on the upswing tend to perform much better than those that stay on a single course.
It’s clear that switching ladders can help bypass “dues” and accelerate the Bigger or Better cycle. But what makes someone willing to make that sideways trade with us in the first place?
The presidents, for the most part, got to high office by not playing the game everyone else plays. They acquire leadership experience in disparate fields, then use Frank Sinatra–style credibility to switch ladders to politics.
Stubbornness and tradition make for poor performance—as we see with Andrew Johnson and other presidents at the bottom of history’s rankings.
LIVE IN AN age of nontraditional ladder climbing. Not just in politics, but in business and personal development and education and entertainment and innovation. Traditional paths are not just slow; they’re no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate.
That’s great news, because throwing out the dues paradigm leads us toward meritocracy.
Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history.
We can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly.
Business research backs this up, too. Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors.
Indeed, equal amounts of research support both assertions: that mentorship works and that it doesn’t.
“Informal mentoring,” Underhill found, “produced a larger and more significant effect on career outcomes than formal mentoring.”
This is why Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and the author of Lean In, dedicates a chapter in her book to this concept, arguing that asking someone to formally mentor you is like asking a celebrity for an autograph; it’s stiff, inorganic, and often doesn’t work out.
This waiting for luck to strike is the antithesis of lateral thinking.
There’s a big difference, in other words, between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey.
On the other hand, a smartcut-savvy mentee approaches things a bit differently. She develops personal relationships with her mentors, asks their advice on other aspects of life, not just the formal challenge at hand. And she cares about her mentors’ lives too.
Both the teacher and the student must be able to open up about their fears, and that builds trust, which in turn accelerates learning.
The more vulnerability is shown in the relationship, the more critical details become available for a student to pick up on, and assimilate.
How can building deep relationships with master mentors be a smartcut if it hinges on our being lucky enough to know the master?
In ancient Greece, few people had access to the best mentors. Jay-Z didn’t either, but he had books from which he could get an inkling about what those kinds of mentors were like.
With every increase in communication, with every autobiography published, and every YouTube video of a superstar created, we increase our access to the great models in every category. This allows us to at least study the moves that make masters great—which is a start.
The late literary giant Saul Bellow would call someone with the ability to spot important details among noise a “first-class noticer.” This is a key difference between those who learn more quickly than others.
Jimmy Fallon got SNL not just because he had a great relationship with a great manager, but because of another deep relationship: the one he’d spent his entire life developing with comedians he hadn’t met.
Jimmy’s intimate connection with these comedians drove him to master the tiny details that would separate his performance from aspiring comics who moved on once their celebrity impressions were “good enough.”
Oscar Wilde once said, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
Since the rise of the Web, the Silicon Valley crowd has decided that failure in the quest to build a business is not only OK, but cool. “Fail often” is a guiding aphorism.
In business, the more socially acceptable it is to fail, the more likely smart people will try crazy things, the geeks argue.
It turns out that after you adjust for statistical margin of error, an entrepreneur who’d failed in a previous venture was not likely to do better than someone who’d never run a business in her life.
According to the study, successful entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are 50 percent more likely to succeed in a second venture. The more you win, the more likely you are to win again.
So, failing in business doesn’t make us better or smarter.
But succeeding makes us more likely to continue to succeed.
It looks like the advice of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “failure makes you wiser” isn’t actually true.
It turns out that the surgeons who botched the new procedure tended to do worse in subsequent surgeries. Rather than learning from their mistakes, their success rates continuously declined. On the other hand, when surgeons did well on the new surgery, more successes tended to follow.
When colleagues screwed up, observers got better. When a doctor succeeded, she did better on her subsequent surgeries. When her colleagues did well, it didn’t affect her.
When doctors failed due to what they perceived as bad luck, they didn’t tend to work any smarter the next time. They attributed failure in a way that made them feel as good as they could about themselves.
“Even though an individual failure experience may contain valuable knowledge,” Staats says, “without subsequent effort to reflect upon that experience, the potential learning will remain untapped.
The difference was how much the feedback caused a person to focus on himself rather than the task.
The research showed that experts—people who were masters at a trade—vastly preferred negative feedback to positive. It spurred the most improvement. That was because criticism is generally more actionable than compliments.
Crucially, experts tended to be able to turn off the part of their egos that took legitimate feedback personally when it came to their craft, and they were confident enough to parse helpful feedback from incorrect feedback. Meanwhile novices psyched themselves out.
SECOND CITY MANAGES to accomplish three things to accelerate its performers’ growth: (1) it gives them rapid feedback; (2) it depersonalizes the feedback; and (3) it lowers the stakes and pressure, so students take risks that force them to improve.
In contrast, a typical acting class might spend an entire semester building up to a single performance. Students practice together in class, but they don’t know if the audience will like their show until the final day. And if the audience hates it, there’s nothing students can do. If you think about it, that’s how most businesses operate. When releasing a new product, a company will spend months, sometimes years, fine-tuning, building up to one critical moment: the launch. Then on launch day the product either is a success or a failure. People buy it and the company makes a profit, or they don’t and the product fails.
The class I sat in on wasn’t just practicing for the big show in four weeks; they were practicing for the little live show they did every week, the one with a crowd that would give them feedback on their material-in-progress. That’s how in just eight weeks—half a typical college semester—a class can put together a full-length sketch comedy show and it will be extremely funny. They know, because they got the feedback early, and often.
“Speed is an essential part of our game,” Leonard explains. “The rapid feedback . . . it’s non-stop.”
DHH lives and works by a philosophy that helps him do dramatically more with his time and effort. It’s a principle that’s fueled his underdog climbs in both racing and programming, and just might deliver a win for him as the cars slide around the rain-slicked Silverstone course.
In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.
Dyson believes that American schools teach kids to, metaphorically, drive on bumpy grass instead of to pilot cars on highways. Memorization of facts and figures is the primary culprit. What we really need, he says, is to teach kids to use tools that do math for us.
The primary argument against calculators is a reasonable one: kids need to learn the underlying math, not just push buttons.
Can we really expect our kids to compete in the world marketplace by teaching them less of the hard stuff? Would one of the world’s greatest mathematicians really advocate that?
Studies show that students who use calculators have better attitudes toward math, and are more likely to pursue highly computational careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) than those who don’t or can’t.
Dyson says, and Papert confirms, that to get kids to become interested in an academic subject on their own, they have to play. Building with LEGOs, visiting museums, experimenting with tools.
But this, Devlin adds, is the clincher: “Get the thinking right and the skills come largely for free.” The overwhelming majority of academic research about calculators indicates that leveraging such tools improves conceptual understanding. By learning the tool (calculator) first, we actually master the discipline (math) faster.
This is the point that Dyson was making earlier. Hands-on learning and the use of tools, he says, helps us to want to learn, to get rapid feedback, and to actually grasp math better than memorizing facts from the bottom up.
Finnish education reflects that: it focuses on teaching students how to think, not what to think.
“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”
By teaching tools and problem solving instead of memorization and by hiring only teachers with master’s degrees, Finland created a higher educational platform that gave its kids an advantage. That’s how its school system shot to number one.
Edward de Bono, who coined the term “lateral thinking” in 1967, put the “Einstein” quote a bit differently: “You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”
Effort for the sake of effort is as foolish a tradition as paying dues.
Platforms teach us skills and allow us to focus on being great, rather than reinventing wheels or repeating ourselves.
There are two ways to catch a wave: exhausting hard work—paddling—and pattern recognition—spotting a wave early and casually drifting to the sweet spot.
“There are people who make careers based on the fact that they know how to read the ocean better than others,”
The real question is, was that all just luck? Was Sonny just a natural? Or can such wavespotting be taught?
Deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience.
Through deliberate analysis, the little guy can spot waves better than the big company that relies on experience and instinct once it’s at the top. And a wave can take an amateur farther faster than an expert can swim.
It also explains why the world’s best surfers arrive at the beach hours before a competition and stare at the ocean.
After years of practice, a surfer can “feel” the ocean, and intuitively find waves. But the best surfers, the ones who win championships, are tireless students of the sea.
Behind this concept (which is meticulously outlined in an excellent book by Ryan Tate called The 20% Doctrine) is the idea of constantly tinkering with potential trends—having a toe in interesting waters in case waves form.
This kind of budgeted experimentation helps businesses avoid being disrupted, by helping them harness waves on which younger competitors might otherwise use to ride past them. It’s helped companies like Google, 3M, Flickr, Condé Nast, and NPR remain innovative even as peer companies plateaued.
In contrast, companies that are too focused on defending their current business practice and too fearful to experiment often get overtaken.
The best way to be in the water when the wave comes is to budget time for swimming.
Fast followers, on the other hand, benefit from free-rider effects. The pioneers clear the way in terms of market education and infrastructure and learn the hard lessons, so the next guys can steal what works, learn objectively from the first movers’ failures, and spend more effort elsewhere. The first wave clears the way for a more powerful ride.
As entrepreneurship scholar Steve Blank points out in his article for Business Insider, “You’re Better Off Being a Fast Follower Than an Originator,”
Conventional thinking leads talented and driven people to believe that if they simply work hard, luck will eventually strike. That’s like saying if a surfer treads water in the same spot for long enough, a wave will come; it certainly happens to some people, once in a while, but it’s not the most effective strategy for success. Paradoxically, it’s actually a lazier move.
There’s a reason some people practice things for twenty years and never become experts; a golfer can put in 30,000 hours of practice and not improve his game if he’s gripping his clubs wrong the whole time.
A business can work five times harder and longer than its neighbors and still lose to rivals that read the market better.
Just like a pro surfer never wins by staying in one spot.
Her secret, and Sonny’s (and Google’s and 3M’s and General Motors’), isn’t practice—though that certainly helps. It’s going to the beach to watch the waves and getting into the water to experiment.
And if you’re in the sweet spot when that superwave does come, Sonny says, “It’s pure energy.”
WHICH IS EASIER—MAKING FRIENDS with a thousand people one by one or making friends with someone who already has a thousand friends? Which is faster—going door to door with a message or broadcasting the message to a million homes at once?
Grant would know. He wrote the book on the subject. In his bestseller, Give and Take, he presents rigorous research showing that a disproportionate number of the most successful people in a given industry are extremely generous.
“The principle was partner up with somebody who is already a gorilla, that has huge reach and impact, and create a win-win,”
“The number one problem with networking is people are out for themselves,” says Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, who coined the term superconnector. “Superconnecting is about learning what people need, then talking about ‘how do we create something of value.’”
Building relationships through giving is more work than begging for help, but it’s also much more powerful.
Is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down.
Found that minor victories at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as major breakthroughs.
Motivate stuck employees, as Amabile and her colleague Steven J. Kramer suggest in their book, The Progress Principle, businesses need to help their workers experience lots of tiny wins.
As we learned from the bored BYU students in chapter 1, breaking up big challenges into tiny ones also speeds up progress.)
MOMENTUM ISN’T JUST A powerful ingredient of success. It’s also a powerful predictor of success.
Investors see momentum and future success as so highly correlated that they will take bigger bets on companies with fast-growing user bases even if the companies are bleeding money.
“Success is like a lightning bolt,” Phan once declared in an interview with Mashable. “It’ll strike you when you least expect it, and you just have to keep the momentum going.”
Innovation is when the introduction of a lower-cost product steals market share from existing players, like when e-mail usurped postal mail (how much would you spend a month if every e-mail cost the price of a postage stamp?) or when Craigslist replaced costly classified newspaper ads with free Internet listings.
OFTEN, THE THING HOLDING us back from success is our inability to say no. Think back to the Olympic rings analogy. We can’t keep the momentum going if we don’t let go of the ring behind us as we swing forward. By breaking that weakness and simplifying, Blam became untethered, able to move on to better things.
Like Holmes, hackers strip the unnecessary from their lives.
They zero in on what matters. Like great writers, innovators have the fortitude to cut the adverbs.
This is why Apple founder Steve Jobs’s closet was filled with dozens of identical black turtlenecks and Levi’s 501 jeans—to simplify his choices.
President Barack Obama told Michael Lewis for his October 2012 Vanity Fair cover story. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”
Making lots of tiny choices depletes one’s subsequent self-control.
Apparently, patience and willpower, even creativity, are exhaustible resources. That’s why so many busy and powerful people practice mind-clearing meditation and stick to rigid daily routines: to minimize distractions and maximize good decision making.
Creativity comes easier within constraints.
“Less is more” and “small is beautiful” are common aphorisms in Finland, and Finnish schools injected them into the curriculum.
The lack of in-school athletics allowed Finland to focus minds and resources and sprint forward academically.
Students start learning vocations like engineering and business as soon as they hit high school. They skip many of the general education courses most of us forget.
Perhaps that’s why Steve Jobs referred to simplicity as “the ultimate sophistication.” Holmes, on the other hand, would simply call it elementary.
“10x Thinking.” 10x Thinking is the art of the extremely big swing. To use a baseball analogy: instead of trying to get on base—or even aiming for a home run—it’s trying to hit the ball into the next town.
No amount of weight lifting or swing practice will get you there. Such a goal requires you to think radically different.
The secret sounds a bit crazy. Says Teller, “It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.”
“In order to get really big improvements, you usually have to start over in one or more ways. You have to break some of the basic assumptions and, of course, you can’t know ahead of time. It’s by definition counterintuitive.”
In other words, 10x goals force you to come up with smartcuts.
Most “innovation” inside industries and companies today focuses on making faster horses, not automobiles. That’s why so many of us fall victim to the innovator’s dilemma, wherein competitors usurp while we think we’re being innovative.
Academic research actually shows that we’re less likely to perform at our peak potential when we’re reaching for low-hanging fruit. That’s in part because there’s more competition at the bottom of the tree than at the top.
In 2009 behavioral psychologists Stephen M. Garcia and Avishalom Tor showed that merely knowing there are more competitors in a competition decreases our performance.
The diminished number of competitors in the upper branches (not to mention the necessary expertise of those that make it that high) provides fuel for 10x Thinking, and brings out our potential.
Brands with lofty purposes beyond making profits wildly outperformed the S&P 500.
From 2001 to 2011, an investment in the 50 most idealistic brands—the ones opting for the high-hanging purpose and not just low-hanging profits—would have been 400 percent more profitable than shares of an S&P index fund.
Why is this? The simple explanation is that human nature makes us surprisingly willing to support big ideals and big swings. That means more customers, more investors, and more word-of-mouth for the dreamers.
This explains brands like Red Bull and Whole Foods that manage to convey their values so loudly; they tell good stories. This explains Gaga, Alexander, and other revolutionary types; they tell fantastic stories.
People who realized that striving toward a massive goal and rallying people around a rethinking of life’s rules and expectations and conventions were actually easier than working for small change.
“Generally speaking, if you’re gonna make something ten percent better than the way things currently are, you better be great in sales and marketing, because you’re gonna have to talk people into changing their behavior for a very marginal increase in value,” explains Astro Teller.
“If, on the other hand, you make something ten times better for a large number of people—you really produce huge amounts of new value—the money’s gonna come find you. Because it would be hard not to make money if you’re really adding that much value.”
Big causes attract big believers, big investors, big capital, big-name advisers, and big talent. They force us to rethink convention and hack the ladder of success. To engage with masters and to leverage waves and platforms and superconnectors. To swing and to simplify, to quickly turn failure into feedback. To become not just bigger, but truly better.
They brought Jackie up because of not just his physical abilities, but his mental strength. He would have to endure more than other players would have to. He wouldn’t be allowed to speak up; he had to just let his play speak for him.
“He patted me on my back and said, ‘People say it’s all about who you meet, but to me it’s about who you make part of your circle that really matters.’”
The 9 Principles:
#1: HACKING THE LADDER
#2: TRAINING WITH MASTERS
#3: RAPID FEEDBACK
#4: PLATFORMS
#5: CATCHING WAVES
#6: SUPERCONNECTING
#7: MOMENTUM
#8: SIMPLICITY
#9: 10X THINKING
Create terrific products. But I hope we can do something 10x bigger than that. What stops us from applying the principles of Smartcuts to macro problems? To lifting societies out of oppression and the poor out of poverty? To making each generation a little bit better than the last?
Leverage is the overachiever’s approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck.
I’m not being contrarian for the sake of it; I’m hoping to spark lateral thinking when it comes to success, indeed to show that lateral thinking is how the most successful people have always made it.
Momentum—not experience—is the single biggest predictor of business and personal success.
The one irreplaceable ingredient I’ve found, however, is work.
This book is about patterns found in stories of people who didn’t want their hard work to end up in vain, who were too impatient to accept “that’s just how it’s done.”
Too many of us accept the plateaus our lives have offered us and succumb to passivity, to the well-meaning delusion of “If I work hard enough, something good will hopefully happen to me.”
There’s something wrong with the great American ladder-climbing advice: presidents of the United States, some of the world’s most successful people, don’t follow it. It’s like each invented his own ladder.
“By itself, one small win may seem unimportant,” writes Dr. Karl Weick in a seminal paper for American Psychologist in 1984. “A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals.”
“Once a small win has been accomplished,” Weick continues, “forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”
Business research shows that this kind of ladder switching generally tends to accelerate a company’s growth. Companies that pivot—that is, switch business models or products—while on the upswing tend to perform much better than those that stay on a single course.
It’s clear that switching ladders can help bypass “dues” and accelerate the Bigger or Better cycle. But what makes someone willing to make that sideways trade with us in the first place?
The presidents, for the most part, got to high office by not playing the game everyone else plays. They acquire leadership experience in disparate fields, then use Frank Sinatra–style credibility to switch ladders to politics.
Stubbornness and tradition make for poor performance—as we see with Andrew Johnson and other presidents at the bottom of history’s rankings.
LIVE IN AN age of nontraditional ladder climbing. Not just in politics, but in business and personal development and education and entertainment and innovation. Traditional paths are not just slow; they’re no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate.
That’s great news, because throwing out the dues paradigm leads us toward meritocracy.
Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history.
We can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly.
Business research backs this up, too. Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors.
Indeed, equal amounts of research support both assertions: that mentorship works and that it doesn’t.
“Informal mentoring,” Underhill found, “produced a larger and more significant effect on career outcomes than formal mentoring.”
This is why Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and the author of Lean In, dedicates a chapter in her book to this concept, arguing that asking someone to formally mentor you is like asking a celebrity for an autograph; it’s stiff, inorganic, and often doesn’t work out.
This waiting for luck to strike is the antithesis of lateral thinking.
There’s a big difference, in other words, between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey.
On the other hand, a smartcut-savvy mentee approaches things a bit differently. She develops personal relationships with her mentors, asks their advice on other aspects of life, not just the formal challenge at hand. And she cares about her mentors’ lives too.
Both the teacher and the student must be able to open up about their fears, and that builds trust, which in turn accelerates learning.
The more vulnerability is shown in the relationship, the more critical details become available for a student to pick up on, and assimilate.
How can building deep relationships with master mentors be a smartcut if it hinges on our being lucky enough to know the master?
In ancient Greece, few people had access to the best mentors. Jay-Z didn’t either, but he had books from which he could get an inkling about what those kinds of mentors were like.
With every increase in communication, with every autobiography published, and every YouTube video of a superstar created, we increase our access to the great models in every category. This allows us to at least study the moves that make masters great—which is a start.
The late literary giant Saul Bellow would call someone with the ability to spot important details among noise a “first-class noticer.” This is a key difference between those who learn more quickly than others.
Jimmy Fallon got SNL not just because he had a great relationship with a great manager, but because of another deep relationship: the one he’d spent his entire life developing with comedians he hadn’t met.
Jimmy’s intimate connection with these comedians drove him to master the tiny details that would separate his performance from aspiring comics who moved on once their celebrity impressions were “good enough.”
Oscar Wilde once said, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
Since the rise of the Web, the Silicon Valley crowd has decided that failure in the quest to build a business is not only OK, but cool. “Fail often” is a guiding aphorism.
In business, the more socially acceptable it is to fail, the more likely smart people will try crazy things, the geeks argue.
It turns out that after you adjust for statistical margin of error, an entrepreneur who’d failed in a previous venture was not likely to do better than someone who’d never run a business in her life.
According to the study, successful entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are 50 percent more likely to succeed in a second venture. The more you win, the more likely you are to win again.
So, failing in business doesn’t make us better or smarter.
But succeeding makes us more likely to continue to succeed.
It looks like the advice of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “failure makes you wiser” isn’t actually true.
It turns out that the surgeons who botched the new procedure tended to do worse in subsequent surgeries. Rather than learning from their mistakes, their success rates continuously declined. On the other hand, when surgeons did well on the new surgery, more successes tended to follow.
When colleagues screwed up, observers got better. When a doctor succeeded, she did better on her subsequent surgeries. When her colleagues did well, it didn’t affect her.
When doctors failed due to what they perceived as bad luck, they didn’t tend to work any smarter the next time. They attributed failure in a way that made them feel as good as they could about themselves.
“Even though an individual failure experience may contain valuable knowledge,” Staats says, “without subsequent effort to reflect upon that experience, the potential learning will remain untapped.
The difference was how much the feedback caused a person to focus on himself rather than the task.
The research showed that experts—people who were masters at a trade—vastly preferred negative feedback to positive. It spurred the most improvement. That was because criticism is generally more actionable than compliments.
Crucially, experts tended to be able to turn off the part of their egos that took legitimate feedback personally when it came to their craft, and they were confident enough to parse helpful feedback from incorrect feedback. Meanwhile novices psyched themselves out.
SECOND CITY MANAGES to accomplish three things to accelerate its performers’ growth: (1) it gives them rapid feedback; (2) it depersonalizes the feedback; and (3) it lowers the stakes and pressure, so students take risks that force them to improve.
In contrast, a typical acting class might spend an entire semester building up to a single performance. Students practice together in class, but they don’t know if the audience will like their show until the final day. And if the audience hates it, there’s nothing students can do. If you think about it, that’s how most businesses operate. When releasing a new product, a company will spend months, sometimes years, fine-tuning, building up to one critical moment: the launch. Then on launch day the product either is a success or a failure. People buy it and the company makes a profit, or they don’t and the product fails.
The class I sat in on wasn’t just practicing for the big show in four weeks; they were practicing for the little live show they did every week, the one with a crowd that would give them feedback on their material-in-progress. That’s how in just eight weeks—half a typical college semester—a class can put together a full-length sketch comedy show and it will be extremely funny. They know, because they got the feedback early, and often.
“Speed is an essential part of our game,” Leonard explains. “The rapid feedback . . . it’s non-stop.”
DHH lives and works by a philosophy that helps him do dramatically more with his time and effort. It’s a principle that’s fueled his underdog climbs in both racing and programming, and just might deliver a win for him as the cars slide around the rain-slicked Silverstone course.
In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.
Dyson believes that American schools teach kids to, metaphorically, drive on bumpy grass instead of to pilot cars on highways. Memorization of facts and figures is the primary culprit. What we really need, he says, is to teach kids to use tools that do math for us.
The primary argument against calculators is a reasonable one: kids need to learn the underlying math, not just push buttons.
Can we really expect our kids to compete in the world marketplace by teaching them less of the hard stuff? Would one of the world’s greatest mathematicians really advocate that?
Studies show that students who use calculators have better attitudes toward math, and are more likely to pursue highly computational careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) than those who don’t or can’t.
Dyson says, and Papert confirms, that to get kids to become interested in an academic subject on their own, they have to play. Building with LEGOs, visiting museums, experimenting with tools.
But this, Devlin adds, is the clincher: “Get the thinking right and the skills come largely for free.” The overwhelming majority of academic research about calculators indicates that leveraging such tools improves conceptual understanding. By learning the tool (calculator) first, we actually master the discipline (math) faster.
This is the point that Dyson was making earlier. Hands-on learning and the use of tools, he says, helps us to want to learn, to get rapid feedback, and to actually grasp math better than memorizing facts from the bottom up.
Finnish education reflects that: it focuses on teaching students how to think, not what to think.
“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”
By teaching tools and problem solving instead of memorization and by hiring only teachers with master’s degrees, Finland created a higher educational platform that gave its kids an advantage. That’s how its school system shot to number one.
Edward de Bono, who coined the term “lateral thinking” in 1967, put the “Einstein” quote a bit differently: “You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”
Effort for the sake of effort is as foolish a tradition as paying dues.
Platforms teach us skills and allow us to focus on being great, rather than reinventing wheels or repeating ourselves.
There are two ways to catch a wave: exhausting hard work—paddling—and pattern recognition—spotting a wave early and casually drifting to the sweet spot.
“There are people who make careers based on the fact that they know how to read the ocean better than others,”
The real question is, was that all just luck? Was Sonny just a natural? Or can such wavespotting be taught?
Deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience.
Through deliberate analysis, the little guy can spot waves better than the big company that relies on experience and instinct once it’s at the top. And a wave can take an amateur farther faster than an expert can swim.
It also explains why the world’s best surfers arrive at the beach hours before a competition and stare at the ocean.
After years of practice, a surfer can “feel” the ocean, and intuitively find waves. But the best surfers, the ones who win championships, are tireless students of the sea.
Behind this concept (which is meticulously outlined in an excellent book by Ryan Tate called The 20% Doctrine) is the idea of constantly tinkering with potential trends—having a toe in interesting waters in case waves form.
This kind of budgeted experimentation helps businesses avoid being disrupted, by helping them harness waves on which younger competitors might otherwise use to ride past them. It’s helped companies like Google, 3M, Flickr, Condé Nast, and NPR remain innovative even as peer companies plateaued.
In contrast, companies that are too focused on defending their current business practice and too fearful to experiment often get overtaken.
The best way to be in the water when the wave comes is to budget time for swimming.
Fast followers, on the other hand, benefit from free-rider effects. The pioneers clear the way in terms of market education and infrastructure and learn the hard lessons, so the next guys can steal what works, learn objectively from the first movers’ failures, and spend more effort elsewhere. The first wave clears the way for a more powerful ride.
As entrepreneurship scholar Steve Blank points out in his article for Business Insider, “You’re Better Off Being a Fast Follower Than an Originator,”
Conventional thinking leads talented and driven people to believe that if they simply work hard, luck will eventually strike. That’s like saying if a surfer treads water in the same spot for long enough, a wave will come; it certainly happens to some people, once in a while, but it’s not the most effective strategy for success. Paradoxically, it’s actually a lazier move.
There’s a reason some people practice things for twenty years and never become experts; a golfer can put in 30,000 hours of practice and not improve his game if he’s gripping his clubs wrong the whole time.
A business can work five times harder and longer than its neighbors and still lose to rivals that read the market better.
Just like a pro surfer never wins by staying in one spot.
Her secret, and Sonny’s (and Google’s and 3M’s and General Motors’), isn’t practice—though that certainly helps. It’s going to the beach to watch the waves and getting into the water to experiment.
And if you’re in the sweet spot when that superwave does come, Sonny says, “It’s pure energy.”
WHICH IS EASIER—MAKING FRIENDS with a thousand people one by one or making friends with someone who already has a thousand friends? Which is faster—going door to door with a message or broadcasting the message to a million homes at once?
Grant would know. He wrote the book on the subject. In his bestseller, Give and Take, he presents rigorous research showing that a disproportionate number of the most successful people in a given industry are extremely generous.
“The principle was partner up with somebody who is already a gorilla, that has huge reach and impact, and create a win-win,”
“The number one problem with networking is people are out for themselves,” says Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, who coined the term superconnector. “Superconnecting is about learning what people need, then talking about ‘how do we create something of value.’”
Building relationships through giving is more work than begging for help, but it’s also much more powerful.
Is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down.
Found that minor victories at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as major breakthroughs.
Motivate stuck employees, as Amabile and her colleague Steven J. Kramer suggest in their book, The Progress Principle, businesses need to help their workers experience lots of tiny wins.
As we learned from the bored BYU students in chapter 1, breaking up big challenges into tiny ones also speeds up progress.)
MOMENTUM ISN’T JUST A powerful ingredient of success. It’s also a powerful predictor of success.
Investors see momentum and future success as so highly correlated that they will take bigger bets on companies with fast-growing user bases even if the companies are bleeding money.
“Success is like a lightning bolt,” Phan once declared in an interview with Mashable. “It’ll strike you when you least expect it, and you just have to keep the momentum going.”
Innovation is when the introduction of a lower-cost product steals market share from existing players, like when e-mail usurped postal mail (how much would you spend a month if every e-mail cost the price of a postage stamp?) or when Craigslist replaced costly classified newspaper ads with free Internet listings.
OFTEN, THE THING HOLDING us back from success is our inability to say no. Think back to the Olympic rings analogy. We can’t keep the momentum going if we don’t let go of the ring behind us as we swing forward. By breaking that weakness and simplifying, Blam became untethered, able to move on to better things.
Like Holmes, hackers strip the unnecessary from their lives.
They zero in on what matters. Like great writers, innovators have the fortitude to cut the adverbs.
This is why Apple founder Steve Jobs’s closet was filled with dozens of identical black turtlenecks and Levi’s 501 jeans—to simplify his choices.
President Barack Obama told Michael Lewis for his October 2012 Vanity Fair cover story. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”
Making lots of tiny choices depletes one’s subsequent self-control.
Apparently, patience and willpower, even creativity, are exhaustible resources. That’s why so many busy and powerful people practice mind-clearing meditation and stick to rigid daily routines: to minimize distractions and maximize good decision making.
Creativity comes easier within constraints.
“Less is more” and “small is beautiful” are common aphorisms in Finland, and Finnish schools injected them into the curriculum.
The lack of in-school athletics allowed Finland to focus minds and resources and sprint forward academically.
Students start learning vocations like engineering and business as soon as they hit high school. They skip many of the general education courses most of us forget.
Perhaps that’s why Steve Jobs referred to simplicity as “the ultimate sophistication.” Holmes, on the other hand, would simply call it elementary.
“10x Thinking.” 10x Thinking is the art of the extremely big swing. To use a baseball analogy: instead of trying to get on base—or even aiming for a home run—it’s trying to hit the ball into the next town.
No amount of weight lifting or swing practice will get you there. Such a goal requires you to think radically different.
The secret sounds a bit crazy. Says Teller, “It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.”
“In order to get really big improvements, you usually have to start over in one or more ways. You have to break some of the basic assumptions and, of course, you can’t know ahead of time. It’s by definition counterintuitive.”
In other words, 10x goals force you to come up with smartcuts.
Most “innovation” inside industries and companies today focuses on making faster horses, not automobiles. That’s why so many of us fall victim to the innovator’s dilemma, wherein competitors usurp while we think we’re being innovative.
Academic research actually shows that we’re less likely to perform at our peak potential when we’re reaching for low-hanging fruit. That’s in part because there’s more competition at the bottom of the tree than at the top.
In 2009 behavioral psychologists Stephen M. Garcia and Avishalom Tor showed that merely knowing there are more competitors in a competition decreases our performance.
The diminished number of competitors in the upper branches (not to mention the necessary expertise of those that make it that high) provides fuel for 10x Thinking, and brings out our potential.
Brands with lofty purposes beyond making profits wildly outperformed the S&P 500.
From 2001 to 2011, an investment in the 50 most idealistic brands—the ones opting for the high-hanging purpose and not just low-hanging profits—would have been 400 percent more profitable than shares of an S&P index fund.
Why is this? The simple explanation is that human nature makes us surprisingly willing to support big ideals and big swings. That means more customers, more investors, and more word-of-mouth for the dreamers.
This explains brands like Red Bull and Whole Foods that manage to convey their values so loudly; they tell good stories. This explains Gaga, Alexander, and other revolutionary types; they tell fantastic stories.
People who realized that striving toward a massive goal and rallying people around a rethinking of life’s rules and expectations and conventions were actually easier than working for small change.
“Generally speaking, if you’re gonna make something ten percent better than the way things currently are, you better be great in sales and marketing, because you’re gonna have to talk people into changing their behavior for a very marginal increase in value,” explains Astro Teller.
“If, on the other hand, you make something ten times better for a large number of people—you really produce huge amounts of new value—the money’s gonna come find you. Because it would be hard not to make money if you’re really adding that much value.”
Big causes attract big believers, big investors, big capital, big-name advisers, and big talent. They force us to rethink convention and hack the ladder of success. To engage with masters and to leverage waves and platforms and superconnectors. To swing and to simplify, to quickly turn failure into feedback. To become not just bigger, but truly better.
They brought Jackie up because of not just his physical abilities, but his mental strength. He would have to endure more than other players would have to. He wouldn’t be allowed to speak up; he had to just let his play speak for him.
“He patted me on my back and said, ‘People say it’s all about who you meet, but to me it’s about who you make part of your circle that really matters.’”
The 9 Principles:
#1: HACKING THE LADDER
#2: TRAINING WITH MASTERS
#3: RAPID FEEDBACK
#4: PLATFORMS
#5: CATCHING WAVES
#6: SUPERCONNECTING
#7: MOMENTUM
#8: SIMPLICITY
#9: 10X THINKING
Create terrific products. But I hope we can do something 10x bigger than that. What stops us from applying the principles of Smartcuts to macro problems? To lifting societies out of oppression and the poor out of poverty? To making each generation a little bit better than the last?