"Smartcuts" by Shane Snow

• New ideas emerge when you question the assumptions upon which a problem is based.
• The fastest route to success is never traditional. The conventions we grow up with can be hacked.
• Lateral thinking doesn’t replace hard work; it eliminates unnecessary cycles.
• Leverage is the overachiever's approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck.
• Lateral thinking is how the most successful people have always made to.
• Momentum--not- experience--is the single biggest predictor of business and personal success.
• The one irreplaceable ingredient is work.
• People are generally willing to take a chance on something if i only feel like a small stretch.
• Don’t parlay up a linear path (ladder). Climb various ladders of success and then switch to a different ladder.
• Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history.
• The mentor story is so so common because it seems to work--especially when the motor is not just a teacher, but someone who’s traveled the road herself.
• We can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly.
• Data indicated that those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster.
• One-on-one mentoring in which an organization formally matched people proved to be nearly as worthless as a person having not been mentored at all. However, when students and mentors came together on their own and formed personal relationship, the mentors did significantly better.
• [Mentor ship must come from an organic bond and a deep relationship.]
• There’s a big difference between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey.
• [A first-class noticer can spot the important details in a piece of information or advice.]
• The benefit of an in-person relationship is that the mentor can help the student focus on the most important elements.
• “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
• The more you win, the more likely you are to win again.
• People explain their successes and failures “by attributing them to factors that will allow them to feel as good as possible about themselves.” (e.g. Failures are because of extrinsic factors, and success is due to intrinsic factors).
• Experts vastly prefer negative feedback to positive.
• The Second City manages to accomplish three things to accelerate its performer's growth: (1) it gives them rapid feedback; (2) is depersonalizes the feedback; and (3) it lowers the stakes and pressure, so students take risks that force them to improve.
• [You need feedback early and often.]
• You have to fail a little bit in order to improve.
• Computers are layers on layers of code that make them increasingly easy to use. Computer scientists call this abstraction.
• Abstraction [...] made the act of using computers faster.
• A tiny time advantage can mean the difference between winning and getting passed.
• Get the thinking right and the skills come largely for free.
• By learning the tool first, we actually master the discipline faster.
• 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.
• In an age of platforms, creative problem solving is more valuable than computational skill.
• 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.
• To truly raise an educational system, every educator must be extremely educated.
• A better-trained teacher is more adept at teaching children how to learn, whereas the [worse teacher] will often teach how to memorize.
• Teach students how to think, not what to think.
• Once you stop thinking you have to follow the path that’s laid out you can really turn up the speed.
• You can accelerate your training if you know how to train properly.
• The platform amplifies the effort and teaches skills in the process of using it.
• Effort for the sake of effort is as foolish a tradition as paying dues.
• Platforms teach us skills and allow us to focus on being great, rather than reinventing the wheels or repeating ourselves.
• There are two ways to catch a wave: exhausting hard work and pattern recognition.
• Intuition is the result of nonconscious pattern recognition.
• Conventional thinking lead talented and driven people to believe that if they simply work hard, luck will eventually strike.
• A disproportionate number of the most successful people in a given industry are extremely generous.
• The number one problem with networking is people are out for themselves.
• Super-connecting is about learning what people need, then talking about “how do we creating something of value.”
• No matter the medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing super connectors and creating serendipity.
• The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops.
• Momentum isn’t just a powerful ingredient of success. It’s also a powerful predictor of success.
• The secret to harnessing momentum is to build up potential energy, so that unexpected opportunities can be amplified.
• Simplification often makes the difference between good and amazing.
• Innovation is about doing something differently, rather than creating something from nothing (invention) or doing the same thing better (improvement).
• The key ingredient behind the scenes of every disruptive product is simplification.
• Often, the thing holding us back from success is our inability to say no.
• Hackers trip the unnecessary from their lives. They zero in on what matters.
• Creativity comes easier within constraints.
• 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 transformers good to incredible.
• 10x Thinking is the art of the extremely big swing.
• It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.
• Incremental progress depends on working harder. More resources, more effort. 10x progress is build on bravery and creativity instead. Working smarter.
• Human nature makes us surprisingly willing to support big ideals and big swings.
• The thing about big swings is they come with increased odds of failure.
• People are generally willing to support other people's small dreams with kind words. But we're willing to invest lives and money into huge dreams. The bigger the potential, the more people are willing to back it.
• 9 principles:
• Hacking the ladder
• training with masters
• rapid feedback
• platforms
• catching waves
• super connecting
• momentum
• simplicity
• 10x thinking
• We can do incredible things by rejecting convention and working smarter.
• You can make incremental progress by playing by the rules. To create breakthrough change, you have to break the rules.