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by
Shane Snow
Read between
February 23 - February 27, 2017
PRETEND YOU ARE DRIVING a car in the middle of a thunderstorm and you happen upon three people on the side of the road. One of them is a frail old woman, who looks on the verge of collapse. Another is a friend who once saved your life. The other is the romantic interest of your dreams, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet him or her. You have only one other seat in the car. Who do you pick up? There’s a good reason to choose any of the three. The old woman needs help. The friend deserves your payback. And clearly, a happy future with the man or woman of your dreams will have an
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Lateral thinking doesn’t replace hard work; it eliminates unnecessary cycles. Once they’ve shortened their path, overachievers tend to look for ways to do more with their effort,
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. That’s how a group of bored students transformed a toothpick into a TV, and remarkably quicker than if they’d worked their seven-dollar-per-hour college-town jobs and saved up for
The players didn’t simply parlay toothpicks for pieces of wood of increasing size; they traded toothpicks for pens and mirrors for old bikes. They didn’t wait around for the owners of a vacant house to show up, so they could ask for a trade, and they didn’t knock on the same door over and over until a “no” became a “yes.” When a door was shut to them, they immediately picked another one. When the ladder became inefficient, they hacked it. And that is what made them successful so quickly. The key to Bigger or Better, in other words, is the “or.”
But to be successful, we need to start thinking more like hackers, acting more like entrepreneurs. We have to work smarter, not just harder.
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; GOSH staff, on the other hand, handled surprises on the fly.
waiting for luck to strike is the antithesis of lateral thinking. And the research shows she’s right.
There’s a big difference, in other words, between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey.
most feedback interventions were indeed not actually helpful to bettering performance, and much feedback indeed made things worse; however, some feedback was very helpful to boosting performance, and it had nothing to do with bedside manner. The difference was how much the feedback caused a person to focus on himself rather than the task.
the closer feedback moves our attention to ourselves, the worse it is for us.
experts—people who were masters at a trade—vastly preferred negative feedback to positive.
The tough part about negative feedback is in separating ourselves from the perceived failure and turning our experiences into objective experiments. But when we do that, feedback becomes much more powerful.
The Office star Steve Carell once had an audience storm out of the theater on him for a joke gone too far. Political satirist Stephen Colbert was begged off the stage one night when his bit about dial-up Internet nearly put the audience to sleep. The Second City teaches its students to take such things in stride, to become scientists who see audience reaction as commentary on the joke, not the jokester.
THE 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.
By embracing all these tiny failures, there is no actual failure.
Like The Second City, Upworthy turned its work into rapid, scientific experiments. It turned tiny failures into depersonalized feedback and created an environment where total failure was nearly impossible.
conventional coders considered such repetition a rite of passage, a barrier to entry for newbies who hadn’t paid their dues in programming. “A lot of programmers took pride in the Protestant work ethic, like it has to be hard otherwise it’s not right,” DHH says. He thought that was stupid. “I could do a lot of other interesting things with my life,” he decided. “So if programming has to be it, it has to be awesome.”
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.
Moursund says that before high school, we devote roughly three-quarters of our math education to memorizing and practicing the use of rules. This leaves too little time, he believes, for higher-order thinking: applying math to solving problems, creating models, or enhancing our understanding of the world. “Calculators and computers can replace some of the memorizing,” he says.
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.
while we may need deep expertise in our industries to become innovators, we actually need only higher-order thinking and the ability to use platforms to do everything else.
In an age of platforms, creative problem solving is more valuable than computational skill.
Perhaps the most important benefit of having supereducated instructors is that a better-trained teacher is more adept at teaching children how to learn, whereas the coach-turned-geography-teacher will often teach how to memorize. Finnish education reflects that: it focuses on teaching students how to think, not what to think. That, says Wagner, is core to making school both interesting and valuable. As the saying, attributed to Dr. Seuss, goes: “It is better to know how to learn than to know.”
“Once you stop thinking you have to follow the path that’s laid out,” he says, “you can really turn up the speed.”
Effort for the sake of effort is as foolish a tradition as paying dues. How much better is hard work when it’s amplified by a lever?
Deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience. But we often don’t even give it a shot.
This explains how so many inexperienced companies and entrepreneurs beat the norm and build businesses that disrupt established players. 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.
when market and technology growth are smooth and steady, the first mover gets the inertia and an advantage. When industry change is choppy, the fast follower—the second mover—gets the benefits of the first mover’s pioneering work and often catches a bigger wave, unencumbered.
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. “I think that being able to pick and read good waves is almost more important than surfing well,” Moore tells me. “If you don’t have a good or better platform to perform on than your opponent, you are going to
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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 wave...
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Guevara became a successful superconnector not because he broadcast, but because he managed to build a relationship with the people.
“If you do it only to succeed,” Grant says, in the long run, “it probably won’t work.”
Building relationships through giving is more work than begging for help, but it’s also much more powerful.
Their countrymen’s basic needs had to be met, and trust had to be gained. So, Guevara started teaching peasants how to read. The revolutionaries, largely an educated bunch, walked into villages and set up classes. They taught the poor how to farm, how to be self-sufficient. They taught them self-defense. The villagers began to see the rebels as their allies—people actively improving their immediate circumstances. The rebels’ service spoke much louder than Batista’s pompous speeches.
No matter the medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing superconnectors and creating serendipity.
trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring.
“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.”
keep going wheb lightning strikes...
Let’s step back for a moment and talk about innovation. Over the last several years, we’ve bastardized the word. Today, we equate it with change or general improvement, a buzzword meaning “bigger” or a synonym for creative. But the word used to mean “upheaval” or “transformation.”
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.
Holmes was a first-class noticer. The police leveraged him as the highest platform, if you will, in criminal profiling. His legendary powers of observation and deduction earned him the distinction of Britain’s finest criminal investigator. He got to be the best by focusing on what he needed to know, knowing how to figure out what he didn’t know, and forgetting about everything else.
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.
making lots of tiny choices depletes one’s subsequent self-control.
Creativity comes easier within constraints.
Over the decades, Finnish education, in fact, had gotten simpler. Instead of teaching kids a little about a lot of things—like most schools do—the Finns started teaching deeply in fewer subjects. Rather than emphasizing general knowledge students would promptly forget, they cut filler and taught vocational skills.
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. And they actually like school.
Geniuses and presidents strip meaningless choices from their day, so they can simplify their lives and think.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
