As they say, records are meant to be broken. But how to completely break the previous world record of 33 minutes and 24 seconds and set the new best time to 6 minutes and 28 seconds? Sound impossible? It's a feat Nathan Parkinson accomplished in 2007 when he broke the world record for completing Mario on the classic Nintendo game system. I'm not talking about cheating with shortcuts; I'm talking about accelerating success, leveraging lateral thinking, and leveraging "Smartcuts." Shane Snow distills his growth philosophy in his book Smartcuts, offering insights on how to do it.
I want to take the three philosophies I find most useful and elaborate on them so you can apply them to your career to accelerate your success and rocket your growth. 1) Fast feedback - why failure isn't what people say it is Romanticized by the incisive Silicon Valley quote, failure is becoming more industry mailing list more socially acceptable. People and companies are willing to push boundaries and take more risks. In fact, I could even say that stigma has become something that people fight for; the Medal of Honor. Let's all go out and try crazy, risky things without fail! not so fast... Let's dig deeper into data and numbers. A group of Harvard researchers did just that, comparing entrepreneurs who had failed in previous businesses to those who had never had any business experience.
Surprisingly, experienced people have no advantage. However, research shows that having one successful adventure will increase your chances of succeeding on the next adventure by 50%. Now the dilemma arises - how do you succeed without succeeding? It turns out that the distinguishing factor of failure, whether failure leads to success, is what we attribute failure to. This fundamental attribution error occurs when we place too much emphasis on internal factors rather than irrelevant external forces to explain the outcome of a situation. In other words, we internalize our failures. Another key factor is when we get feedback. Many times, you don't get immediate feedback. For example, high-risk and high-stress long-term investments. Hiten Shah was a bit of a Silicon Valley celebrity, the first people I met after moving out of the West. A key takeaway from our conversation: go beyond fail fast; fail in the smallest possible chunks and with low risk.