Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success [9780062302458]

Overview

Entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow (Wired, Fast Company, The New Yorker, and cofounder of Contently) analyzes the lives of people and companies that do incredible things in implausibly short time.

How do some startups go from zero to billions in mere months? How did Alexander the Great, YouTube tycoon Michelle Phan, and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon climb to the top in less time than it takes most of us to get a promotion? What do high-growth businesses, world-class heart surgeons, and underdog marketers do in common to beat the norm?

One way or another, they do it like computer hackers. They employ what psychologists call "lateral thinking: to rethink convention and break "rules" that aren't rules.

These are not shortcuts, which produce often dubious short-term gains, but ethical "smartcuts" that eliminate unnecessary effort and yield sustainable momentum. In Smartcuts, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like "paying dues" prevent progress, why kids shouldn't learn times tables, and how, paradoxically, it's easier to build a huge business than a small one.

From SpaceX to The Cuban Revolution, from Ferrari to Skrillex, Smartcuts is a narrative adventure that busts old myths about success and shows how innovators and icons do the incredible by working smarter—and how perhaps the rest of us can, too.

How do you break the rules, rethink convention, and achieve more in less time?

• Hacking the Ladder: Learn why US presidents are often younger than senators and how to bypass the traditional career path by creating your own.
• Rapid Feedback: See how the world's best comedians and fastest-growing media companies turn small failures into the fuel for massive growth.
• Leveraging Platforms: Discover how to stand on the shoulders of giants—using existing tools and networks to amplify your effort and eliminate repetitive work.
• 10x Thinking: Explore why aiming for a 10% improvement is often harder than a 10x breakthrough, and how setting impossibly big goals attracts the resources to achieve them.