8. Smartcuts By Shane Snow

This is the big idea. Best-selling books in15 minutes on Himalaya learning today, we'll be reading smart cuts by Shanesnow.

[00:00:23] Have you ever read Forbes?Magazine's 30, under 30 and asked yourself, how do they move so fast? Wheremany of us leave our dreams to luck the most rapidly successful people somehowseem to take their luck into their own hands. How do they do that? The exactstep-by-step method that catapulted Alexander the great from exile to empire iseffectively useless to a 21st century business.

[00:00:49] And the exact methods that onestartup uses to grow today will be totally irrelevant to another startup fiveyears from now, but patterns of lateral thinking deployed throughout historysuggest principles that can be harnessed by anyone seeking an edge. Combiningscientific research with incisive profiles of some of the world's greatestinnovators, Shane snow uncovers, proven techniques that can help you smartcircuit your path to achieving the increases

[00:01:25] students at the Mormon Brighamyoung university are prohibited from drinking alcohol. Instead of spending freetime drinking many BYU students play a game called bigger or better startingwith something small, like a toothpick, they traveled door to door, askingsurprised families to trade them something.

[00:01:43] You guessed it a little biggeror a little better. They repeat the process with the new item. And then againand again, and again. Participants in bigger or better might end a night of playingthis game with a set of golf clubs or even a TV in one extended online versionof the game. A player wound up with a whole house.

[00:02:06] This is possible in part becausethese college students, aren't trying to trade up from a toothpick to increasinglylarge pieces of wood. Instead they trade sideways. The toothpick becomes apiece of gum, which becomes a magazine, which becomes an old hat, which becomesan unwanted lava lamp. And so on this game, bigger or better helps to explainwhy us presidents are generally younger than us senators and have less directexperience in federal politics.

[00:02:36] Senators tend to pay their duesand climb the ladder conventionally rung by rung from state legislature, upthrough the house of representatives. For example. By contrast almost all ofthe most highly regarded presidents of the United States have come fromelsewhere. Woodrow Wilson was the president of Princeton university.

[00:02:56] Dwight Eisenhower was afive-star general during world war II. They earned it, their credibility asleaders in other sectors. And then drew upon that credibility to perform acareer pivot by climbing sideways, they actually hack the ladder. According tothe 2011 startup genome report, quote startups that pivot once, twice raised2.5 times more money, have 3.6 times better user growth and are 52% less likelyto scale prematurely and finding ways to apply your experience in a differentdirection can help you to hack the ladder and shorten your path to the top.

[00:03:36] A good mentor can also provide aboost on the way up, someone who has traveled the path ahead of you can guideyour own practice and cut the time it takes to achieve mastery. Where would thekarate kid be without Mr. Miyagi research affirms the benefits of mentorshipentrepreneurs with mentors. Raise seven times as much capital for theirbusinesses than those without mentors and experience 3.5 times faster growth.

[00:04:04] Few entrepreneurs managed toscale a profitable business model without a mentors aid. There is a catchthough. Formal mentorship programs where an organization assigns veteranassociates to rookies arbitrarily only have a modest effect on outcomes.Significant gains were observed only when students and mentors cultivated apersonal relationship on their own intentionally and organically businessowner.

[00:04:31] Charlie Kim suggests that thekey difference is vulnerability. Students and mentors who build trust,accelerate learning by creating an environment where the student is more likelyto listen to difficult advice and more willing to focus on pesky success,crucial details that might otherwise have been ignored.

[00:04:50] A productive mentorship can alsooptimize growth in another crucial way. It helps the student zero in on theright kind of feedback.

[00:05:10] Conventional wisdom says thatevery failure can help us learn to succeed. But a study of surgeons learning anew life or death, heart procedure revealed that surgeons who failed at theprocedure in the past were actually more likely to fail in the future. Thesurgeons, more likely to succeed, where the ones who'd already succeeded in thepast is conventional wisdom wrong then.

[00:05:33] Not entirely that study alsofound that surgeons who saw their colleagues fail, had improved rates ofsuccess. Social psychologists explain this phenomenon with attribution theory.People generally attribute personal failure to external causes so they canmaintain a positive self image when they see someone else fail.

[00:05:54] However, they attribute thatfailure to an internal cause. In other words, you can only examine the mistake.Clearly, if you didn't experience the failure personally, in the world renownedtraining program, the second city Chicago's famed improv and sketch comedycompany, students are put in front of audiences early and often this inoculatesthem to the personal sting of bombing on stage.

[00:06:19] The sooner the students stoppedtaking the failure of a joke personally, the more efficiently they can learnfrom it and move on. Bill Mary, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert,countless comedians have belly flop their way to fame on the second city stage.That's why the Silicon Valley adage goes fail fast and fail.

[00:06:40] Often. If years of planning gointo a product launch and nobody buys it that hurts. If you try a thousand badheadlines on small groups of subscribers before you find one that will work onthe public, then you didn't really fail. You got feedback. Mentors can also bemembers of a special class of people that help their friends amplify theirreach socially.

[00:07:03] By putting them in contact withpotential customers or collaborators or religiously re-tweeting their content.These are the world's super connectors. People who happily act as social hubson behalf of others. If you've ever gone to a party with a friend and relaxed,while they introduced you to a dozen people, you absolutely have to know.

[00:07:23] Then you've enjoyed a superconnectors generosity. In his rigorously researched book, give and take Dr.Adam Grant reveals that a disproportionate number of the most successful peoplein any given industry possess this kind of extreme generosity. Businesses canbe super connectors too. In the infancy of the personal accounting service mintowner, Aaron pats are focused on making mince blog, a helpful resource forpeople offering explainers and infographics that broke down financial conceptsin simple friendly terms.

[00:07:56] As blogs and influencers saw thevalue of this resource and shared it with their audiences mince reach and itssubscriber base expanded exponentially by super connecting, you can fortify abroad support network for yourself while also helping provide social platformsfor others to leverage and multiply their impact.

[00:08:16] If you look for them. You canbegin to find other platforms to leverage everywhere.

[00:08:33] In computer programming, aplatform is a layer of code built on top of other more basic languages toautomate tedious tasks and eliminate repetition platforms, make it faster andeasier for small teams of coders to do really interesting things, just likelayers of gravel and tar and asphalt. Make it easier for formula one racers.

[00:08:54] To drive it more. Interestingspeeds. One popular platform called Ruby on rails is at the heart of Twitter,Hulu and Airbnb, as well as many other apps that you may use every day in amore general sense. Actors who moved to LA are also trying to leverage aplatform. The proximity makes auditioning for roles and making connectionseasier.

[00:09:17] Harvard, as another example,provides a platform to graduates who leverage their Alma maters credibility tolevel up in their careers. Sometimes leveraging platforms can be controversial.For example, 15th century Italian scholars. Argued over the switch from theAbacus to pen and paper. From our point of view today, the choice is ano-brainer.

[00:09:38] And the reality is that pen andpaper allowed mathematicians to develop more sophisticated and powerfulalgorithms and formulas. On top of the underlying numbers today, school systemsare having similar arguments about the use of calculators in the classroom, inthe U S three-fourths of math education before high school consists ofmemorizing and practicing rules.

[00:10:00] But in Finland, the focus hasswitched instead of teaching their students. What to think. Finland teaches itsstudents how to think and how to use platforms like the calculator tofacilitate that thinking what good is memorizing the capital of Botswana. Ifyou have a smartphone in your pocket and you know how to get to Wikipedia owinglargely to the shift in focus toward high order thinking and its adoption ofplatforms like the calculator.

[00:10:26] Finland's education system isnow ranked as one of the best in the world, whatever your view. There's nodenying that they've caught on to something, but the phrase catching ontosomething still contains the discouraging implication that some part of oursuccess depends on being in the right place at the right time.

[00:10:44] Can you really manufacture thatkind of ceremony?

[00:10:54] In surfing the differencebetween catching a wave and missing it is a matter of centimeters and seconds.Inexperienced surfers tire themselves out racing to catch every wave they can,but professional surfers can recognize a good wave on the horizon and driftcasually to where the wave will pick them up.

[00:11:13] How can you teach someone thatkind of intuition? Research into organizational behavior suggests thatintuition is the result of non-conscious pattern recognition. Deliberatelylooking for patterns can help less experienced people or businesses take thelead. That's why some professional surfers get to the beach hours early to sitwatching for patterns in how the good waves develop.

[00:11:36] And that's why a lot of Vanguardcompanies observed some version of the policy that Google calls. 20% time bygiving employees a little time to experiment with new ideas. They make surethat when a wave comes, they are in the water to catch it, but you don't haveto be a cutting edge player to leverage the power of a wave though.

[00:11:56] The first mover has theadvantage in markets with steady growth research shows that in more uncertainmarkets. 47% of first movers failed. Fast followers can take control of theirshare of the market more reliably because they enjoy the trailblazed by thepioneers supply chains have already been set up.

[00:12:15] Regulations have already beennegotiated. And of course the fast follower can collect feedback from themistakes of the guys who went first. But what do you do after you've caught thewave? many.com millionaires who retired at the age of 35 have asked themselvesthis same question, a Harvard business school study of white collar employeesfound that the main factor that affected white collar employees satisfactionwith their work lives was progress forward.

[00:12:43] Motion, momentum. However smallcan make the difference. Remember that BYU game bigger or better. If thosecollege students tried to swap a toothpick for a TV all at once, they'd beunlikely to get very far. Instead, the game provides a series of small wins.Each success is parlayed toward even greater success.

[00:13:06] All too often, what appears tobe overnight success is actually supported and sustained by time spentgathering momentum when YouTube makeup mogul, Michelle fan went viral with ameticulously timed tutorial video for lady Gaga's bad romance. Look. What kepther new viewers around was a backlog of quality work spanning years.

[00:13:27] Plus the new content shecontinued to release regularly. Build momentum is one useful directive forapproaching your goal. Keep it simple is another

[00:13:41] in a vanity fair interview.Barack Obama revealed that wherever possible. He eliminated decisions aboutwhat he wore and ate because he had too many other decisions to make. And Stevejobs famously had his black turtlenecks and blue jeans. This instinct issupported by scientific experiments at the university of Minnesota, which showedthat when subjects had to make lots of tiny choices, they showed lessself-control when performing difficult tasks afterward.

[00:14:09] Willpower patients. And evencreativity are exhaustible resources and simplifying life, wherever possible,saves those resources for where they count most. In fact, committing tosimplicity often stimulates creativity. A haiku flows easier than a sonnetdisruptively, innovative products change markets because they fulfill a demandin a simplified way that saves time, money or effort.

[00:14:36] Email was simpler than postalmail. USB flash drives were handier than CDs. When a team at Stanford committeditself to the goal of eradicating premature infant mortality in the developingworld, they were initially daunted by the task of reducing the cost of a modernneonatal incubator. These are intricate machines which cost over $20,000 apiece.

[00:14:59] A breakthrough came when theyrealized that the primary function keeping a baby warm was actually quitesimple. The resulting device, a kind of heated sleeping bag for babies costonly $25 and has been responsible for saving thousands upon thousands ofinfants around the world that otherwise. Would have died.

[00:15:20] Of course the Stanford teamwould have been unlikely to arrive at such a successful elegant solution. Ifthey hadn't set a challenging goal for themselves in the first place, accordingto the head of the Google X lab, making something 10 times better is ofteneasier than making something 10% better.

[00:15:38] This is 10 X thinking. It's amoonshot mentality. Pursuing maximalist goals, forces us to challenge basicassumptions and spurs creative innovation. When you aim to get fromPhiladelphia to Chicago in one day, you stop trying to breed a stronger horseand you start sketching out. Internal combustion engines.

[00:16:00] Setting high goals hasquantifiable advantages as well. Research has found that when people arecompeting in a larger playing field, when they are fighting over low hangingfruit, for example, they consistently underperform and to study of marketperformance for major brands between 2001 and 2011 found that brands whichoriented themselves around causes larger and nobler than mere profit reliablyoutperform an S and P index by 400%.

[00:16:29] As Kennedy said about the actualmoonshot quote, we choose to go to the moon in this decade and to do otherthings. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard because that goalwill serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills andquote, 10 X thinking encourages us to set our sights high.

[00:16:51] It invites us to envision waysto make our world. The best it can possibly be. And it challenges us to useevery smart cut in our arsenal to make that world right. Reality.

[00:17:06] This episode was co-produced byHimalaya and campfire. If you want to use this book at your company to buildskills and culture, you need a new way to host your corporate book club. Visit.Get campfire.com to learn more.