Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success

We’re multiplying our capabilities as a civilization and yet we still accept the notion that important societal progress, like combating inequality and crime—or even innovating in government and medicine—must take generations.

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.

Some among us manage to build eBay in the time it takes the rest of us to build a house.

New ideas emerge when you question the assumptions upon which a problem is based.

Lateral thinking doesn’t replace hard work; it eliminates unnecessary cycles. Once they’ve shortened their path, overachievers tend to look for ways to do more with their effort.

Leverage is the overachiever’s approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck.

Good fortune and talent are both ingredients of success, but like any recipe, they can be substituted with clever alternatives. The one irreplaceable ingredient I’ve found, however, is work.

It’s clear that switching ladders can help bypass “dues” and accelerate the Bigger or Better cycle.

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

Jimmy Fallon’s mentor, one of the best-connected managers Jimmy could have for his SNL dream, served him up on a platter to SNL auditions in a fraction of the expected time it should take a new comedian to get there.

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.

Two people can study the same business model, watch the same video, or even take the same advice from a mentor, and one person might pick up critical details that the other misses.

Mentorship doesn’t always yield success. But when we look at superlative success stories throughout history, the presence of an in-person mentor (in Jimmy’s case his manager) or a world-class, long-distance mentor (in Jimmy’s case, great comedians whom he copied) with whom the mentee has a deep, vulnerable relationship is almost always manifest.

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

After you adjust for statistical margin of error, an entrepreneur who’d failed in a previous venture was not likely to do better than someone who’d never run a business in her life.

Successful entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are 50 percent more likely to succeed in a second venture. The more you win, the more likely you are to win again. So, failing in business doesn’t make us better or smarter. But succeeding makes us more likely to continue to succeed.

People explain their successes and failures “by attributing them to factors that will allow them to feel as good as possible about themselves.”

We tend to pin our successes on internal factors. Think back to the last competition you won. It was your hard work, your skill, your quick thinking in the heat of the moment that won the day.

“Even though an individual failure experience may contain valuable knowledge,” Staats says, “without subsequent effort to reflect upon that experience, the potential learning will remain untapped.

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.

The second city manages to accomplish 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, so students take risks that force them to improve.

Isaac Newton attributed his success as a scientist to “standing on the shoulders of giants”—building off of the work of great thinkers before him.

In the world of high tech—like in racing—a tiny time advantage can mean the difference between winning and getting passed.

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.

Instead of forcing kids to learn code through lectures and drills and mandatory classes, she built a toy that kids actually download and play with because they want to.

Studies show that students who use calculators have better attitudes toward math, and are more likely to pursue highly computational careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) than those who don’t or can’t.

To get kids to become interested in an academic subject on their own, they have to play. Building with LEGOs, visiting museums, experimenting with tools.

And while we may need deep expertise in our industries to become innovators, we actually need only higher-order thinking and the ability to use platforms to do everything else.

After studying decades of calculator usage in classrooms, researchers warn, “If schools do not teach students to use these devices from an early age, the rising generation will lack necessary work skills.”

Today’s children should be taught to use Excel spreadsheets—and all their calculations—instead of times tables. Rather than teaching a mile wide in every subject, we ought to first teach kids to use platforms, then let them go deep in the areas that interest them.

Finnish schools cut curricular fat, so they could dedicate time to training students vocational skills. Instead of abstract theory, students got hands-on practice. Instead of a surface-level understanding of every topic ever, they went deep in fewer.

By teaching tools and problem solving instead of memorization and by hiring only teachers with master’s degrees, Finland created a higher educational platform that gave its kids an advantage. That’s how its school system shot to number one.

Effort for the sake of effort is as foolish a tradition as paying dues. How much better is hard work when it’s amplified by a lever? Platforms teach us skills and allow us to focus on being great, rather than reinventing wheels or repeating ourselves.

Luck is often talked about as “being in the right place at the right time.” But like a surfer, some people—and companies—are adept at placing themselves at the right place at the right time. They seek out opportunity rather than wait for it.

In a given domain—be it surfing or accounting or political fund-raising—the familiarity that leads to pattern recognition seems to come with experience and practice. Fencing masters recognize opportunities in opponents’ moves because of the sheer amount of practice time logged into their heads. Leaders and managers who use their gut to make decisions often do so based on decades of experience, archived and filed away in the folds of their cerebrums.

Deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience.

This explains how so many inexperienced companies and entrepreneurs beat the norm and build businesses that disrupt established players. Through deliberate analysis, the little guy can spot waves better than the big company that relies on experience and instinct once it’s at the top. And a wave can take an amateur farther faster than an expert can swim.

Like Twitter, both Gmail and AdSense started off as side projects. Google was in the water when the waves of Internet traffic came because it was tinkering with new ideas under the umbrella of Google’s famous “20% Time.”

Companies that are too focused on defending their current business practice and too fearful to experiment often get overtaken.

Startlingly, the research showed that 47 percent of first movers failed. Only about half the companies that started selling a product first remained the market leader five years later, and only 11 percent of first movers remained market leaders over the long term. By contrast, early leaders—companies that took control of a product’s market share after the first movers pioneered them—had only an 8 percent failure rate. Fifty-three percent of the time in the Golder and Tellis study, an early leader became the market leader in a category.

Fast followers benefit from free-rider effects. The pioneers clear the way in terms of market education and infrastructure and learn the hard lessons, so the next guys can steal what works, learn objectively from the first movers’ failures, and spend more effort elsewhere. The first wave clears the way for a more powerful ride.

Conventional thinking leads talented and driven people to believe that if they simply work hard, luck will eventually strike. That’s like saying if a surfer treads water in the same spot for long enough, a wave will come; it certainly happens to some people, once in a while, but it’s not the most effective strategy for success. Paradoxically, it’s actually a lazier move.

Which is easier—making friends with a thousand people one by one or making friends with someone who already has a thousand friends? Which is faster—going door to door with a message or broadcasting the message to a million homes at once?

The radio had superconnected the revolutionaries with the Cuban people, and together they achieved victory in astonishingly short time.

Sonny remixed artists like Lady Gaga or Avicii or Nero, he gave their tracks a boost and helped them reach new fans. This in turn superconnected Moore to audiences larger than his own and led to surges in his popularity. And after winning six Grammys, Moore started paying things forward, incubating new and young artists in his recording warehouse and promoting their music to his fans.

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.

The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring.

Amabile found that minor victories at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as major breakthroughs. To motivate stuck employees, as Amabile and her colleague Steven J. Kramer suggest in their book, The Progress Principle, businesses need to help their workers experience lots of tiny wins.

To get out of the funk, depressed successes simply have to start the Olympic rings over. Some use their money to create new businesses. Others parlay sideways and get into philanthropy. And others simply pick up hobbies that take time to master. Even if the subsequent endeavors are smaller than their previous ones, the depression dissipates as they make progress.

Investors see momentum and future success as so highly correlated that they will take bigger bets on companies with fast-growing user bases even if the companies are bleeding money.