Smartcuts

The Book in Three Sentences

• You can do incredible things in a short amount of time.
• To rethink conventions, think “laterally”.
• “Paying dues” prevent progress.

The Five Big Ideas

• “Momentum—not experience—is the single biggest predictor of business and personal success”.
• “People are generally willing to take a chance on something if it only feels like a small stretch”.
• “Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history”.
• “Failing in business doesn’t make us better or smarter. But succeeding makes us more likely to continue to succeed”.
• “Often, the thing holding us back from success is our inability to say no”.

Smartcuts Summary

• “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”.
• Leverage is the overachiever’s approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck”.
• Momentum—not experience—is the single biggest predictor of business and personal success”.
• People are generally willing to take a chance on something if it only feels like a small stretch”.
• Weick says, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win”.
• Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history”.
• Underhill found “Informal mentoring produced a larger and more significant effect on career outcomes than formal mentoring”.
• There’s a big difference, in other words, between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey”.
• Failing in business doesn’t make us better or smarter. But succeeding makes us more likely to continue to succeed”.
• It turns out that the surgeons who botched the new procedure tended to do worse in subsequent surgeries. Rather than learning from their mistakes, their success rates continuously declined. On the other hand, when surgeons did well on the new surgery, more successes tended to follow”.
• When doctors failed due to what they perceived as bad luck, they didn’t tend to work any smarter the next time. They attributed failure in a way that made them feel as good as they could about themselves”.
• We externalize our mistakes because we need to live with ourselves afterward”.
• The difference was how much the feedback caused a person to focus on himself rather than the task”.
• The research showed that 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”.
• Innovation is about doing something differently, rather than creating something from nothing (invention) or doing the same thing better (improvement)”.
• Often, the thing holding us back from success is our inability to say no”.

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