BOOK
SUMMARY (2)
Smartcuts
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Summary written by: Jill Donahue
"…the fastest route to success is never traditional…"
- Smartcuts,
page 6
Imagine you are driving in a storm. Between
the furor of the windshield wipers, you make out the figures of three people
waving you down. You cautiously slow down and realize that one of them is a
frail old woman, who looks on the verge of collapse. Another one is a friend
who once saved your life. The third is the romantic interest of your dreams,
and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet him or her. You have only
one other seat in the car. You have to choose. It’s a tough one. There is good
reason to choose any one of them.
Who do you pick up?
The old woman of course. Then give the car
keys to your friend and stay behind with the romantic interest to wait for the
bus!
And this is the kind of lateral thinking that
Shane Snow says overachievers have used throughout history. The world’s biggest
successes have resulted from people who refused to follow the expected course
and rather buck the norm. Smartcuts is about bucking the norm.
In Smartcuts, Shane Snow
shares his discoveries of what people and businesses do that achieve rapid
success and breakthrough innovations. He catalogues their patterns and culls
them down to nine principles. These nine principles comprise a framework for
breaking convention and explain how successful people do more with less.
He admits, however, that the one
irreplaceable ingredient is work. This book is not for people who are averse to
hard work. Rather he tells edge-of-your-seat stories of successful people who
didn’t want their hard work to end up in vain. He then illuminates the patterns
that led to their success. Lateral thinking, he says, doesn’t replace hard
work; it eliminates unnecessary cycles.
The Golden Egg
The hard way, the cheap way or the smart way?
"Too many
of us place our hopes and dreams in the unreliable hands of luck, but the
world’s most rapidly successful people take luck into their own hands..."- Smartcuts, page 14
Does this classic success advice sound
familiar? Work hard, believe you can do it, visualize and push yourself harder
than anyone else. This is the hard way. Or maybe you’ve been schooled with
other common success advice. Outsource the tough stuff, and try to profit from
the arbitrage. This is the cheap way. Shane teaches us the smart way. He claims
that the fastest route to success is never traditional and that anyone can
speed up progress with the following nine principles.
1.
Hacking the
ladder: Approach
a problem laterally. Companies that pivot, switch business models or products
while on the upward swing, perform better.
2.
Training with
masters: Learn
from those who have gone before you.
3.
Rapid feedback: Use
failure to push yourself forward.
4.
Platforms: Find the ‘paved roads’. Build on top of things that
already exist.
5.
Catching
waves: Like a surfer who watches the waves for just the right
one, watch the horizon to see what trend is coming and jump on.
6.
Superconnecting: Build
a powerful network and be generous in serving them.
7.
Momentum: Break
the challenge into smaller tasks so you can feed off the energy of the small
step wins.
8.
Simplicity: Eliminate the clutter so your hard practice is focused
and targeted.
9.
10X thinking: Have
a noble big vision.
Gem #1
Momentum – success breeds success
"…momentum
– not experience – is the single biggest predictor of business and personal
success."- Smartcuts, page 13
Only one third of Americans are happy in
their jobs. Why do you think that is? What affects your happiness most
dramatically? The answer was deduced from Harvard Business School professor
Teresa Amabile from her study of 238 white-collar workers. It is simply
progress; a sense of forward motion; regardless of how small.
Do you remember the story from Greek
mythology about Sisyphus? As the story goes, as punishment for chronic
deceitfulness Sisyphus was condemned to push a rock up a mountain. Upon
reaching the top, the rock would roll down again, leaving him to start over.
Yesterday I wasn’t happy with my work-day. I
had spent days preparing to shoot an educational video. Finally, with minutes
remaining before the kids would come clamoring home from school, I did it! I
shot the perfect take. Progress! And then discovered the memory card was full
and it wasn’t captured. All those hours of work down the drain.
Are your happiest days when you see progress,
regardless of how small? So make your days (or your team members’ days) happier
by setting up lots of tiny wins. When I teach how to influence behavior change,
for example, we break the influence into five steps. Ascending the “staircase
of behavior change” by merely one step is cause for celebration. It makes a
huge difference for people. Instead of saying “we failed” when the person
doesn’t change a behavior, they can say “We saw progress”. The person moved up
one step! It makes the world of difference in their momentum to make the next
call. Success breeds success. How can you set up more wins in your day?
Gem #2
Superconnectors – you just might be the
catalyst to something big!
"No matter
the medium or the method, giving is the timeless smart-cut for harnessing
superconnectors and creating serendipity."- Smartcuts, page 138
The most successful people in any industry
are extremely generous. Adam Grant’s research proves this. (Enjoy the summary
of his book Give and Takehere.) But don’t worry, this generosity doesn’t
need to involve huge acts of sacrifice. The generosity simply comes from a
focus on acting in the interests of others, such as by giving help, providing
mentoring, sharing credit, or making connections for others.
A friend of mine lost her job this week. In
fact her entire sales team lost their jobs. She sent me a note describing her
colleagues and what a great team they were and how they could just be the best
thing a growing company came across. She extolled the virtues of her peers and
that yes, by the way, she would also be looking for a job.
I was impressed by her act of generosity and
I know she will succeed. Contrast that to her peer, who when my friend called
him about the openings she found advertised in his part of the country, pleaded
“don’t tell the others”. Having a mindset of abundance will feed your
generosity whereas a mindset of scarcity starves it.
Shane Snow shares nine smartcuts to help us
improve our lives and careers. What conventions do you need to reject to work
smarter. What mindsets do you need to alter? What smartcuts do you need to add?
To have the breakthrough change you desire, maybe you need to break some of the
rules.
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