Book Review: Smartcuts

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success By Shane Snow

Buy on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3TeRrU8

Pulling together some of my highlights from this book and loosely organizing them into a few common themes.

Mentorship

Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history.

…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.

There’s a big difference, in other words, between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey.

Mentors are critical, not only for proving insights for things to practice or to develop, but to make sure you’re working on the right things. The things that actually matter. If you’re looking for a new mentor, make sure you’re asking questions to get to the core of what matters. This doesn’t mean you need to recreate their path. Ideally they learned some lessons the hard way, and perhaps you don’t *need* to learn things the hard way. There are plenty of works discussing the value of grit, but we may not need to choose the difficult path at every fork we come across.

Feedback

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.

THE SECOND CITY MANAGES to accomplish three things to accelerate its performers’ growth: (1) it gives them rapid feedback; (2) it depersonalizes the feedback; and (3) it lowers the stakes and pressure, so students take risks that force them to improve.

Similar to mentors, actionable feedback is critical to growth and improvement. Sure, it may be nice to hear about how brilliant you are, but that doesn’t help you move the ball forward. You need to find ways to get the feedback you need – the critical feedback. And you need to build the system (both internal and external) to focus on depersonalizing it. Just because the speech you gave sucked doesn’t mean you suck. Disconnect the feedback from yourself.

Problem solving

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.

…momentum—not experience—is the single biggest predictor of business and personal success.

The two ingredients are hard work—not quitting when things get tough—and luck—spots opening up on the rungs above you.

“We’ve always done it this way” should set off alarm bells in your head. Maybe things are done a certain way for a reason, but that is an opening to start testing some of the assumptions that are in place to support those processes.

Education

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.

Finnish education reflects that: it focuses on teaching students how to think, not what to think. That, says Wagner, is core to making school both interesting and valuable.

Instead of standing passively on an education assembly line and being handed reams of facts and figures, they are

This section was an interesting application of the smartcut methodology. Instead of focusing on continuing the educate students the way they always (depending on your definition of always) been educated, Finland took a look at what would produce a better end result, and reverse engineered their way to the classroom.

Making your own luck

Luck is often talked about as “being in the right place at the right time.” But like a surfer, some people—and companies—are adept at placing themselves at the right place at the right time. They seek out opportunity rather than wait for it.

A superwave can show up on a regular surf day when random smaller waves align. When that happens, the only people who can possibly ride it are the ones who actually went to the beach that day. The ones who actually got in the water.

Deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience.

The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring.

They don’t have to do something Bigger or Better to be happy. They just have to keep moving.

Just like the quote “the harder I work, the luckier I get” here we saw a lot of focus on making your own luck. You can’t always make the end result materialize, but what you can do is put yourself in the best possible position to be present and ready when the opportunity opens up. The narrative here was all about surfing and catching the rare superwave. Obviously you need to put in the work to be a strong surfer, but that doesn’t make the wave appear, and that doesn’t put you in the water at the right time and at the right place. The wave will appear when it does, and if you’re not studying how to spot them and how to position yourself, you won’t be in the right spot to catch it. Of course all of this requires you spending time in the water too.

Additional resources can be found on the books landing page: https://shanesnow.com/smartcuts