Memorable quotes
Ignoring state politics, the average president spent just seven years as an elected official before reaching the White House. Five were never elected to any office before becoming president. There’s something wrong with the great American ladder-climbing advice: presidents of the United States, some of the world’s most successful people, don’t follow it. It’s like each invented his own ladder.
It seems fair for success to be determined not by the hardworking but broken model of paying dues, but by merit and smarts.
WE LIVE IN AN age of nontraditional ladder climbing. Not just in politics, but in business and personal development and education and entertainment and innovation. Traditional paths are not just slow; they’re no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate. That’s great news, because 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. We have to work smarter, not just harder.
Research shows that Americans, in general, are more tolerant of business failure than people in any other country. They don’t have a higher rate of business success, but the low social consequences for failing make risks easier to justify, and therefore many people take them. Contrast this with many other parts of the world, where entrepreneurs and their families often face huge social stigma for having started a business and failed. In Japan, for example, a bankrupt business will often ruin its founder.
Obviously, in some settings, failure can be catastrophic if we don’t do things right the first time (for example, landing on an aircraft carrier or building a nuclear power plant), he says. But with many things, the actual, long-term consequences of failure are negligible.
“If you’re not failing you are either very lucky, very good, or not pushing the boundaries enough,” Staats says. Fortunately, as startup culture spre
When releasing a new product, a company will spend months, sometimes years, fine-tuning, building up to one critical moment: the launch. Then on launch day the product either is a success or a failure. People buy it and the company makes a profit, or they don’t and the product fails.
“Funny is right at the line. Just a little bit uncomfortable. Just at the place where it could fail,” she says. “And just like a muscle, you have to fail a little bit in order to improve.” “We do that to them over and over and over again.”
Is it any wonder that nearly two-thirds of the patents filed over the last three decades came from twenty metropolitan areas with only one-third of the US population? More innovation, creativity, and art per person happens in large metro areas than other places; what Jonah Lehrer calls “urban friction” and Richard Florida calls the “creative class” turns cities into higher platforms for success-seekers.
There’s a reason some people practice things for twenty years and never become experts; a golfer can put in 30,000 hours of practice and not improve his game if he’s gripping his clubs wrong the whole time. A business can work five times harder and longer than its neighbors and still lose to rivals that read the market better. Just like a pro surfer never wins by staying in one spot.
The self-serving Hollywood networking theory starts to break down when we look at Abrams’s credits from after he became wildly successful; it turns out that even once he was on top, he continued to cowrite, codirect, and cocreate almost all his projects. He started lending his own Sinatra-style credibility to less known but talented writers and directors and actors, so they could climb their ladders faster. Dr. Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says this is because J. J. Abrams is “a giver,” a rarity in an industry full of takers.
Initially, Abrams helped out better-connected people than himself, and doing so helped him superconnect. But once he was the superconnector, he still helped people. That’s how to tell if someone is a giver, or a taker in giver’s clothing. “If you do it only to succeed,” Grant says, in the long run, “it probably won’t work.”
Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile took on the question in the mid-2000s in a research study of white-collar employees. She tasked 238 pencil pushers in various industries to keep daily work diaries. The workers answered open-ended questions about how they felt, what events in their days stood out. Amabile and her fellow researchers then dissected the 12,000 resulting entries, searching for patterns in what affects people’s “inner” work lives the most dramatically. The answer, it turned out, is simply progress. 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.
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. Momentum, it turns out, can cover a multitude of sins.
The Oreo tweet case study proves that the perception of momentum is often as good as momentum. I didn’t personally believe it deserved all the attention it got. And yet, here I am, perpetuating the Oreo tweet even further. That’s the power of momentum.
Like Holmes, hackers strip the unnecessary from their lives. They zero in on what matters. Like great writers, innovators have the fortitude to cut the adverbs. This is why Apple founder Steve Jobs’s closet was filled with dozens of identical black turtlenecks and Levi’s 501 jeans—to simplify his choices. US presidents do the same thing. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” President Barack Obama told Michael Lewis for his October 2012 Vanity Fair cover story. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”
Apple’s iPod won the MP3 player war with breakthrough simplicity, both in physical design and how the company explained it. While other companies touted “4 Gigabytes and a 0.5 Gigahertz processor!” Apple simply said, “1,000 songs in your pocket.”
Constraints make the haiku one of the world’s most moving poetic forms. They give us boundaries that direct our focus and allow us to be more creative. This is, coincidentally, why tiny startup companies frequently come up with breakthrough ideas. They start with so few resources that they’re forced to come up with simplifying solutions.
In general, humans are good at seeking the easy path and are deeply affected by our social surroundings at a subconscious level. 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.
“We need a movement,” Kosta says, to make 10x happen. “You need to get a critical mass of people who give a fuck.” Or, as Musk likes to say, “The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
These were smart people, working and preaching desperately hard for what they believed in. People who realized that striving toward a massive goal and rallying people around a rethinking of life’s rules and expectations and conventions were actually easier than working for small change.
“Generally speaking, if you’re gonna make something ten percent better than the way things currently are, you better be great in sales and marketing, because you’re gonna have to talk people into changing their behaviour for a very marginal increase in value, if, on the other hand, you make something ten times better for a large number of people—you really produce huge amounts of new value—the money’s gonna come find you. Because it would be hard not to make money if you’re really adding that much value.”
We can do incredible things by rejecting convention and working smarter. What would happen if we looked at problems like pollution and climate change, racism and classism, violence and hunger, and instead of waiting for luck to strike, asked ourselves, “How can we use smartcuts to fix things faster?”