More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Shane Snow
Read between
November 12 - December 1, 2018
The difference was how much the feedback caused a person to focus on himself rather than the task.
The research showed that experts—people who were masters at a trade—vastly preferred negative feedback to positive. It spurred the most improvement. That was because criticism is generally more actionable than compliments.
“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.”
Reflecting on his rapid ascent in racing, DHH says, “You can accelerate your training if you know how to train properly, but you still don’t need to be that special. I don’t think I’m that special of a programmer or a businessperson or a race car driver. I just know how to train.”
“You can build on top of a lot of things that exist in this world,” David Heinemeier Hansson told me. “Somebody goes in and does that hard, ground level science based work. “And then on top of that,” he smiles, “you build the art.”
The best way to be in the water when the wave comes is to budget time for swimming.
No matter the medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing superconnectors and creating serendipity.
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.” It comes from the Latin innovare, in meaning “into” and novus meaning “new”; the word innovate in Middle English meant to “renew” or “refresh.” Innovation is about doing something differently, rather than creating something from nothing (invention) or doing the same thing better (improvement).
Geniuses and presidents strip meaningless choices from their day, so they can simplify their lives and think. Inventors and entrepreneurs ask, How could we make this product simpler? The answer transforms good to incredible.
“The way of going about trying to make something new or better often tends to polarize into one of two styles,” Teller says. “One is the low-variance, no surprises version of improvement. The production model, if you will. You tend to get ‘10 percent,’ in order of magnitude, kind of improvements.” “In order to get really big improvements, you usually have to start over in one or more ways. You have to break some of the basic assumptions and, of course, you can’t know ahead of time. It’s by definition counterintuitive.”
