The document discusses various strategies for achieving success in a non-traditional or "smart" way. These include hacking the ladder by approaching problems laterally, training with masters to learn from those who came before, and using rapid feedback to push yourself forward from failures. Other strategies are finding existing platforms to build upon, catching emerging trends to ride waves of success, superconnecting through generous networking, breaking challenges into smaller tasks to build momentum, focusing through simplicity, and having a noble large-scale vision through 10X thinking. The overall message is that non-traditional routes that incorporate these smartcut strategies may be faster to success than traditional approaches.
2. The hard way, the cheap
way or the smart way?
1. Hacking the ladder
2. Training with masters
3. Rapid feedback
4. Platforms
5. Catching waves
6. Superconnecting
7. Momentum
8. Simplicity
9. 10X thinking
3. Hacking the ladder
Approach a problem laterally. Companies
that pivot, switch business models or
products while on the upward swing,
perform better.
4. “Bigger or Better
illustrates and
interesting fact:
people are
generally willing
to take a chance
on something if it
only feels like a
small stretch.”
“the key to the bored Mormon students’ success
was not just their rapid cycle time. It was the
direction they traded: sideways
8. The Second City manages to accomplish
three things to accelerate its performers’
growth:
1. It gives them rapid
feedback
2. It depersonalizes the
feedback
3. It lowers the stakes and
the pressure, so
students take risks that
force them to improve.
14. "No matter the medium or the method,
giving is the timeless smart-cut for
harnessing superconnectors and
creating serendipity."
- Shane Snow, Smartcuts
