Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

by Shane Snow

Finishing Super Mario Bros. in six minutes using Warp Pipes isn’t possible if you aren’t truly good at Super Mario Bros. The warp doesn’t mean you’re going to win, or that you deserve to. It just means you don’t have to slog through stages you already know you can beat.

New ideas emerge when you question the assumptions upon which a problem is based (in this case: it’s that you can only help one person).

We’re told that the best way to succeed is to start young, work hard, and move up through the ranks. The two ingredients are hard work—not quitting when things get tough—and luck—spots opening up on the rungs above you. LBJ’s is that quintessential American story.

Bigger or Better illustrates an interesting fact: people are generally willing to take a chance on something if it only feels like a small stretch.

“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.”

The common pattern among these fastest-rising US presidents’ journeys is that, like the BYU students, they didn’t parlay up a linear path. They climbed various ladders of success and then switched to the presidential ladder.

New York has indeed become a global yardstick—for artists, businesspeople, and dreamers of all stripes. He was a lawyer in New York? He must be good. Doesn’t matter if he was the worst lawyer in the city. If you can make it in New York, people assume that you can make it anywhere.

To be a good president, Wead says, “You’ve got to be able to think on your feet.” Stubbornness and tradition make for poor performance—as

He says that, like C.K., 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.

One of the most tantalizing ideas about training with a master is that the master can help her protégé skip several steps up the ladder. 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.

Then, one car pulled over to the side of the circuit for a pit stop, “and we just realized,” Dr. Elliott said, “that the pit stop where they changed tires and topped up the fuel was pretty well identical in concept to what we do in handover.”

The best mentors help students to realize that the things that really matter are not the big and obvious. The more vulnerability is shown in the relationship, the more critical details become available for a student to pick up on, and assimilate.

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.”

So, failing in business doesn’t make us better or smarter. But succeeding makes us more likely to continue to succeed.

They called the results a “paradox of failure.” 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.

Working with a boss who finds fault with your work, you keep messing up

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.

“My whole thing was, if I can put in 5 percent of the effort of somebody getting an A, and I can get a C minus, that’s amazing,” he explains. “It’s certainly good enough, right? [Then] I can take the other 95 percent of the time and invest it in something I really care about.”

“Get the thinking right and the skills come largely for free.”

But to truly raise an education system, every educator must be extremely educated. Students can’t have one star teacher and a dozen mediocre instructors if they are to advance more quickly than average, as Finland’s students did.

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.* For so long, “innovation” in education has amounted to more class time, more memorization, more tests. Smaller classes, but the same classes. Finland actually got better, through lateral thinking.

WHICH IS EASIER—MAKING FRIENDS with a thousand people one by one or making friends with someone who already has a thousand friends?