Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

by Shane Snow

IT TOOK THE OIL tycoon John D. Rockefeller 46 years to make a billion dollars. He clawed his way to the top of the 19th-century business world. Starting with a single oil refinery in 1863, over two decades, he constructed oil pipelines and bought out rival refineries until he’d built an empire. Seventy years later, the 1980s computer baron Michael Dell achieved billionaire status in 14 years; Bill Gates in 12. In the 1990s, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo each earned ten figures in just four years. It took Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, three years to do it. And in the late 2000s, Groupon’s Andrew Mason did it in two.

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 enormous long-term impact on your life. So, who should you pick? The old woman, of course. Then, give the car keys to your friend, and stay behind with the romantic interest to wait for the bus! This dilemma is an exercise in lateral thinking. It’s the kind of puzzle in which the most elegant solution is revealed only when you attack it sideways. 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). In

WHEN BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WAS 16 years old, he was a fantastic writer. He worked at his older brother James’s printing shop for the newspaper the New-England Courant. Because his brother wouldn’t print a boy’s story, Ben began writing cultural essays under a pseudonym, Mrs. Silence Dogood, leaving them under the printshop door. James published the letters in short order, and they were, in colonial terms, a smash hit. James and his friends thought a clever peer was writing the essays. The letters became important to both the community and the paper. When

I’m convinced that true success has more to do with our becoming better people and building a better world while we do these things than it does with the size of our bank accounts.

As a budding reporter with time on my hands, I shadowed fast-growing startups like Foursquare as over the course of six months they grew from three guys with laptops to a million users, and Tumblr, whose 26-year-old founder cashed out for $1.1 billion after growing it to 100 million users.

“overachiever clubs,” such as the Young Entrepreneur Council and the Sandbox Network (who actually call themselves “Overachievers Under 30”)—kids who quit PhD programs and investment banking jobs to live on ramen and build things that could change the world.

I found myself—a star-struck kid from Idaho—hanging out with incredible people, from the founders of world-changing companies to inventors whose life work was to solve unemployment in India or topple dictatorships. I was in a unique spot to observe—from the inside—people who were doing crazy things at implausibly young ages or in surprisingly fast times.

Leverage is the overachiever’s approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck. It’s how brand-new startups scale and young sci-fi geeks become movie directors. It’s how below-average school systems turn around and revolutions are won. It’s how surfers take championships and artists go from homeless to the Grammys.

momentum—not experience—is the single biggest predictor of business and personal success.

it’s easier to build a huge business than a small one.

Ignoring state politics, the average president spent just seven years as an elected official before reaching the White House. Five were never elected to any office before becoming president. 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.

Throughout history, fast-rising companies, rock-star executives, “overnight” movie stars, and top-selling products have outrun their peers by acting more like ladder hackers than ladder climbers.

Bigger or Better is a scavenger hunt, a sort of trick-or-treating for (young) adults. Players divide into teams and begin with a small object, like a toothpick, then disperse and knock on neighborhood doors, one house after another. At each answered door, the players introduce themselves with something on the order of, “We’re playing a game called Bigger or Better. Do you have something in your house that’s slightly bigger or better than this . . .” (display object) “. . . that you would trade with us?” The first few houses are the toughest. People relaxing at night in their homes aren’t often searching for toothpicks. Even in the friendly Rocky Mountains a homeowner can be put off by such a request. But before long, a stranger will good-naturedly offer a piece of gum for that toothpick, and the game is on. At the next house, the gum becomes a ballpoint pen. At the next: a pack of Post-it notes. Then: a copy of last month’s Nylon magazine. The magazine becomes a bouquet of flowers left by an unwanted admirer. The flowers get swapped for an old hat, and the hat is exchanged for a novelty T-shirt. In this phase of the game, the players benefit from a bit of curiosity, a little charity, and the fact that people were planning on getting rid of most of these objects anyway. But after enough trades, the players hold objects of significant value in their hands. Now the boy who opens the door sincerely wants the T-shirt. He trades his lava lamp for it. The girls next door like the...

“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,

the key to the bored Mormon students’ success was not just their rapid cycle time. It was the direction they traded: sideways. 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.”

The key to Bigger or Better, in other words, is the “or.”

opportunity in the emerging American arcade scene. The novelist James Patterson, whose books have sold 275 million copies at last count, was an ad executive before switching over to literature (and leveraging his marketing expertise to become a bestseller).

Award-winning actress Zoe Saldana was a ballet dancer before becoming a movie star. (Her first role was a ballet dancer.)

This is often how “overnight success” happens for entertainers and public figures; they work hard in their field, then switch ladders...

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. The 2011 Startup Genome Report of new technology companies states that, “Startups that pivot once or twice raise 2...

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. 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?

US president who stayed the course, it was Andrew Johnson.

Though he spent more time in politics than nearly any other president, historians rank him as the second worst ever. Clearly, paying his dues did not qualify him for the job.

“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” New York was the yardstick.

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.

yardstick the public uses when judging a presidential candidate, it turns out, is not how much time the candidate has in politics. “It’s leadership qualities,”

polls indicate that being “a strong and decisive leader” is the number one characteristic a presidential candidate can have.

What shows leadership like commanding an army (Washington), running a university (Wilson), governing a state for a few years—even if you started out as an actor (Reagan)—or building a new political party and having the humility to put aside your own interests for the good of the whole (Lincoln)?

Dwight D. Eisenhower led the United States and its allies to victory against Hitler. He had never held an elected office. He won by a landslide with five times the electoral votes of his rival. “If he can make it there, he can make it anywhere,” US voters decided.

They acquire leadership experience in disparate fields, then use Frank Sinatra–style credibility to switch ladders to politics.

switched ladders multiple times. They continuously parlayed their current success for something more, and they didn’t give up

Sinatra-style credibility and ladder switching—always parlaying for something more—are the foundation for how the most interesting people and companies in the world succeed.

It’s how entrepreneurs create life-changing products in record time and inventors parlay dreams for bigger dreams. Hacking the ladder is the mind-set they use to get places. The rest of this book is about becoming good enough to deserve it.

How did he climb so much faster than the guy Rolling Stone calls the funniest man in America—and what does this have to do with Jimmy Fallon? The answer begins with a story from Homer’s Odyssey. When the Greek adventurer Odysseus embarked for war with Troy, he entrusted his son, Telemachus, to the care of a wise old friend named Mentor. Mentor raised and coached Telemachus in his father’s absence. But it was really the goddess Athena disguised as Mentor who counseled the young man through various important situations. Through Athena’s training and wisdom, Telemachus soon became a great hero. “Mentor” helped Telemachus shorten his ladder of success. The simple answer to the Bieber question is that the young singer shot to the top of pop with the help of two music industry mentors. And not just any run-of-the-mill coach, but R&B giant Usher Raymond and rising-star manager Scooter Braun. They reached from the top of the ladder where they were and pulled Bieber up, where his talent could be recognized by a wide audience.

Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history.

adventure stories often adhere to a template in which a protagonist forsakes humble beginnings and embarks on a great quest. Before the quest heats up, however, he or she receives training from a master:

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.

The mentorship slip is illustrated well by family businesses: 70 percent of them fail when passed to the second generation. A business-owner parent is in a perfect spot to mentor his or her child to run a company. And yet, sometime between mentorship and the business handoff, something critical doesn’t stick.

perplexingly high mortality rate

determined that a large number of fatalities occurred due to problems during the handovers between the operating room and the intensive care unit.

the morning, and we were both pretty knackered,” said Elliott. “The Formula 1 came on TV just as we were sitting down.” The doctors watched the drivers zoom around a racetrack at 300 kilometers per hour. 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 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.

Ferrari crewmembers operated with lots of physical space between each other; the hospital staff constantly got in each other’s way—by virtue of the small space, they claimed. But a dozen grown men with power tools managed to gather round about as small a space during every race without bottlenecking anybody. Ferrari pit crews had a dedicated overseer who ran the show. This overseer, often called a “lollipop man,” would stand back to watch and direct the operation holistically. Only when he waved his flag would the car be allowed back onto the track. In a hospital room full of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses, there was no conductor, no lollipop man. Each staff member simply helped out where he or she thought help was needed. Finally, the GOSH doctors noted that the Ferrari technicians worked in silence. In contrast, hospital handovers were full of chatter; they not only talked through what was happening (“Ventilator is reattached!”) but just chatted during the procedure.

When the doctors returned to London, they hired a dance choreographer to practice movements and add space to the small working area around a hospital bed. They turned the handover scramble into a routine, where each staffer had a prescribed set of actions. Contingencies for various scenarios were mapped out, then practiced. The head anesthesio...

The statistics showed that businesspeople who were mentored in the workplace tended to achieve slightly more at work, on average, than those who didn’t. Counterintuitively, however, “Informal mentoring,” Underhill found, “produced a larger and more significant effect on career outcomes than formal mentoring.”

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 mentored did significantly better, as measured by future income, tenure, number of promotions, job satisfaction, work stress, and self-esteem.

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and the au...

asking someone to formally mentor you is like asking a celebrity for an autograph; it’s stiff, inorganic, and often doesn’t work out. “Searching for a mentor has become the profess...