Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

by Shane Snow

The mentor story is so common because it seems to work—especially when the mentor is not just a teacher, but someone who’s traveled the road herself.

Road

The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us.

equal amounts of research support both assertions: that mentorship works and that it doesn’t.

Harvard Business Review articles with titles such as “Why Mentoring Doesn’t Work.”

Sometimes this ends up producing Aristotle. But sometimes it produces Icarus, to whom his father and master craftsman Daedalus of Greek mythology gave wings; Icarus then flew too high too fast and died.

a large number of fatalities occurred due to problems during the handovers

The pit crew meticulously planned out every possible scenario of what could go wrong during a handover and practiced each scenario until it became habit;

Ferrari pit crews had a dedicated overseer who ran the show.

They turned the handover scramble into a routine,

Contingencies for various scenarios were mapped out, then practiced.

Before long, the hospital had reduced its worst handover errors by 66 percent.

The Formula 1 mentorship clearly worked out for them, and probably better than if the doctors had asked handover experts from another hospital for help.

Christina M. Underhill,

Like most of us, she’d grown up with Star Wars and other heroes-with-mentors storylines.

Underhill compiled 25 years of mentorship research—more than 100 studies—and looked at the data.

“Informal mentoring,” Underhill found, “produced a larger and more significant effect on career outcomes than formal mentoring.”

difference between structured mentoring programs, which were less effective, and mentorship that happened organically.

one-on-one mentoring in which an organization formally matched people proved to be nearly as worthless as a person having not been mentored at all.

when students and mentors came together on their own and formed personal relationships, the mento...

“Young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after.

we are teaching women to be too dependent on others.”

GOSH doctors did something very right: They managed to build an organic bond with the Formula 1 pit crews.

Ferrari’s process for tire replacement didn’t map exactly to unhooking and rehooking ventilators, but its masterful approach to teamwork in tight spaces did.

long-term success of the hospital was accelerated by the deep relationship.

The racers became invested in the success of Great Ormond Street as a whole.

There’s a big difference, in other words, between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey.

Guide

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.

Business owner Charlie Kim, founder of Next Jump and one of my own mentors, calls this vulnerability.

It’s the key, he says, to developing a deep and organic relationship that leads to journey-focused mentorship a...

the teacher and the student must be able to open up about their fears, and that builds trust, which ...

“It drives you to ...

The best mentors help students to realize that the things that really matter are ...

a mentor with whom we have that kind of relationship will be more likely to tell us “no” when we need it—and we’ll be more likely to listen.

Aristotle was privileged to study at Plato’s Academy, but some kid on the other side of the world was probably just as promising as young Aristotle and never got the mentorship.

We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.”

Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, studied and stole moves from master retailers fabulously well.

Saul Bellow would call someone with the ability to spot important details among noise a “first-class noticer.”

mentor can help the student focus on the most important elements.

mentors who were invested in their success, who showed vulnerability and cared enough to tell them what they didn’t want to hear when they needed to hear it, forced them to examine success-crucial details

Siegel cared more about his long-term journey than his short-term paycheck;

she screened every offer through the lens of, “Will this help Jimmy get SNL one day?”

Siegel believed in Jimmy’s fanatical dream as much as he did, and Jimmy preferred to work hard with someone like her,

Jimmy was after a small win this time: not a spot in the cast, but just to make Michaels laugh.

You can feel the depth of that relationship when C.K. speaks about Carlin. “He was a beacon for me,”

Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Religion without sacrifice. Politics without principle.

The most popular stuff on the Web was at best benignly entertaining, at worst degrading.

Upworthy. Mission: “To make important stuff as viral as a video of some idiot surfing off his roof.”

“My name is Leo,” he boomed. “Welcome to Startup Funeral.”

“Putting the Fun in Funeral.”

“Startups are afraid to talk to people about what went wrong,” Pastor Leo continued. “If you don’t learn anything, appreciate the fact that these people are brave enough to come up and talk.”