Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

by Shane Snow

Despite leaps in what we can do, most of us still follow comfortable, pre-prescribed paths. We work hard, but hardly question whether we’re working smart.

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).

think of smartcuts as shortcuts with integrity.

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.

By the end of this book, I’d like to convince you that serendipity can be engineered, that luck can be manufactured, convention can be defied, and that the best paths to success—no matter how you define it—are different today from what they were yesterday.

Researchers call this the psychology of “small wins.” Gamblers, on the other hand, would call it a “parlay,” which the dictionary defines as “a cumulative series of bets in which winnings accruing from each transaction are used as a stake for a further bet.”

throwing out the dues paradigm leads us toward meritocracy. But to be successful, we need to start thinking more like hackers, acting more like entrepreneurs.

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

those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster.

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

The late literary giant Saul Bellow would call someone with the ability to spot important details among noise a “first-class noticer.” This is a key difference between those who learn more quickly than others.

In business, the more socially acceptable it is to fail, the more likely smart people will try crazy things, the geeks argue.

Think back to the last time you lost a competition, or your favorite sports team lost a game. Did you blame the weather or the referees?

We’re wired to think this way. On the other hand, we tend to pin our successes on internal factors.

a high-pressure feedback barrage tends to make us self-conscious.

Kluger and DeNisi found that, as with bowling anxiety, the closer feedback moves our attention to ourselves, the worse it is for us.

experts tended to be able to turn off the part of their egos that took legitimate feedback personally when it came to their craft, and they were confident enough to parse helpful feedback from incorrect feedback.

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.

become scientists who see audience reaction as commentary on the joke, not the jokester.

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,

Every laugh or lack thereof becomes a data point that the actors can use to better themselves.

She’ll give the go-ahead on scenes she knows the audience will not laugh at, because her students don’t become funnier by being prevented from taking risks.

Upworthy wrote alternate versions of the winning headline and sent it out to several other groups. It repeated the process a ruthless 18 times, for a total of 75 variations in all. Here are a few of the contenders:

In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.

“A lot of programmers took pride in the Protestant work ethic, like it has to be hard otherwise it’s not right,” DHH says.

Finland somehow managed to be the best with less effort than everyone else. Finnish students entered school one year later than most others. They took fewer classes and spent less time in school per day. They had fewer tests and less homework. And they thought school was fun.

constructionism, or learning by making and manipulating objects. It’s incredibly effective for concept mastery and recall, and it’s almost always aided by platforms.

“Once you stop thinking you have to follow the path that’s laid out,” he says, “you can really turn up the speed.”

In many fields, such pattern hunting and deliberate analysis can yield results just as in the basketball example—high accuracy on the first try.

studies show that the wealthy—especially those who fall into it through inheritance or the lottery or sale of a business—are often not happier once they’re rich. A meaningful percentage of them believe that their wealth causes more problems than it solves.

breaking up big challenges into tiny ones also speeds up progress.)

Even if the subsequent endeavors are smaller than their previous ones, the depression dissipates as they make progress.

Momentum, it turns out, can cover a multitude of sins.

those who hack world-class success tend to be the ones who can focus relentlessly on a tiny number of things.

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.

The “high-hanging fruit” approach, the big swing, is more technically challenging than going after low-hanging fruit, but the diminished number of competitors in the upper branches (not to mention the necessary expertise of those that make it that high) provides fuel for 10x Thinking, and brings out our potential.