Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

by Shane Snow

If you think “I’m gonna connect the entire human race to the Internet” sounds crazy, you’re right. When you realize that he may have already done it for half a million people before age 30, Grammatis’s story becomes a mini case study of the smartcut that makes Elon Musk world class. It’s called “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 apostle of 10x Thinking is a man with perhaps the coolest name ever: Astro Teller. Teller is the goatee-and-ponytailed head of a rather secret Google laboratory in California called Google[x]. He holds a PhD in artificial intelligence. Teller’s job is to dream big. 10x big.