9780062351074
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Smartcuts audiobook

  • By: Shane Snow
  • Narrator: Shane Snow
  • Category: Business & Economics, Management
  • Length: 5 hours 55 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: September 09, 2014
  • Language: English
  • (5349 ratings)
(5349 ratings)
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Smartcuts Audiobook Summary

Entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow (Wired, Fast Company, The New Yorker, and cofounder of Contently) analyzes the lives of people and companies that do incredible things in implausibly short time.

How do some startups go from zero to billions in mere months? How did Alexander the Great, YouTube tycoon Michelle Phan, and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon climb to the top in less time than it takes most of us to get a promotion? What do high-growth businesses, world-class heart surgeons, and underdog marketers do in common to beat the norm?

One way or another, they do it like computer hackers. They employ what psychologists call “lateral thinking: to rethink convention and break “rules” that aren’t rules.

These are not shortcuts, which produce often dubious short-term gains, but ethical “smartcuts” that eliminate unnecessary effort and yield sustainable momentum. In Smartcuts, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like “paying dues” prevent progress, why kids shouldn’t learn times tables, and how, paradoxically, it’s easier to build a huge business than a small one.

From SpaceX to The Cuban Revolution, from Ferrari to Skrillex, Smartcuts is a narrative adventure that busts old myths about success and shows how innovators and icons do the incredible by working smarter–and how perhaps the rest of us can, too.

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Smartcuts Audiobook Narrator

Shane Snow is the narrator of Smartcuts audiobook that was written by Shane Snow

Shane Snow is a New York City-based journalist and Web entrepreneur, and the cofounder and chief creative officer of the media technology company Contently. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. Snow contributes regularly to Wired magazine and Fast Company, and has written about innovation for numerous publications, including the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Advertising Age. Snow is a sought-after speaker at technology and advertising summits, and writes for LinkedIn's Influencer program. His work in technology entrepreneurship has been recognized by the United Nations, the New York Times, Inc., Forbes, Details, and New York City's Economic Development Council.

About the Author(s) of Smartcuts

Shane Snow is the author of Smartcuts

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Smartcuts Full Details

Narrator Shane Snow
Length 5 hours 55 minutes
Author Shane Snow
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date September 09, 2014
ISBN 9780062351074

Subjects

The publisher of the Smartcuts is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Business & Economics, Management

Additional info

The publisher of the Smartcuts is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062351074.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Aaron

October 11, 2014

This is a meticulously researched book that flows with beautiful storytelling. Snow develops nine principles of working smarter, and illustrates each one with a chapter that weaves together several mini-histories and mini-biographies, which seem to always dovetail perfectly by the end.Smartcuts brings together a lot of the ideas I've been reading about in other books, plus some I haven't, and it builds a strong framework that I am excited to explicitly follow.What fascinated Snow was how certain people and companies have been able to achieve amazing things in hardly any time -- he became obsessed with finding the uniting principles behind their success. He calls them Smartcuts.The Nine SmartcutsSnow shows how the most well-regarded presidents Hacked the Ladder by moving laterally into the White House from top positions in other fields, instead of paying their dues in lower elected offices. Indeed, lateral thinking is the thread that ties all the smartcuts together: this is the ability to question the basic assumptions of a problem and approach it sideways, and in an unconventional way.Training with Masters is an essential method for learning a skill rapidly. The cases of Jimmy Fallon and a team of heart surgeons show that the best mentors are in it for the long haul, and are personally invested in your success. But you can also have mentors that you never meet. Jimmy Fallon studied his favorite comics for years. And anyone can watch videos online, read books, and imitate the masters.Another way to make progress that sticks is to employ Rapid Feedback. This technique is all the rage in tech startups who are "running lean" (see Eric Ries' Build-Measure-Learn loop in The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses), and Snow also shows how The Second City uses it to pump out brilliant young comedians. The best feedback is depersonalized, so you see your efforts as experiments instead of referendums on your ability. Experiments can fail, but you can't.Leverage is power, and Platforms are one of its most powerful forms. The Ruby on Rails web framework has enabled newbie coders to develop their apps at blistering speeds, and the result is an explosion in useful software. Just like cars use the platform of a road (which is made of dirt, gravel, tar and asphalt) for smooth rides, you don't need to reinvent the wheel in your work; use all the existing infrastructure you can to save effort and focus on innovation and creativity.How are pro surfers like the electronic artist Skrillex? They're both brilliant at catching waves. Surfers study the ocean for hours before a competition, so they can understand how the waves are breaking and catch the right ones. Skrillex did the same with EDM and the disruption of the recording industry. Research shows that you can learn to spot waves in markets, too, and you can prepare yourself to jump on them fast by always keep a toe in the water -- in other words, experimenting with lots of ideas, like Google does with its well-known "20% time."Superconnectors are another way to gain leverage -- these are people (influencers) and platforms (social media) that allow you to spread messages to millions of people in no time. Snow uses the clever example of Radio Rebelde, which enabled the Cuban revolutionaries Castro and Guevara to galvanize the country against a dictator despite being terribly outnumbered and outgunned. Superconnectors provide amplification, and if your message is authentic and enticing, it will resonate (see All Marketers Are Liars: The Underground Classic that Explains How Marketing Really Works - and Why Authenticity is the Best Marketing of All).In order to make enormous gains, you need to achieve and maintain Momentum -- after all, "an object in motion tends to stay in motion." This means never resting on your laurels when you do hit it big, and not doing the same thing over and over (like a band that has a hit and then re-writes it again and again).Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. A lot of the greatest innovations come from re-envisioning existing models by taking a step back to first principles (lateral thinking at its finest). Take Embrace, a famous solution to the high death rates of premature babies in developing countries. Instead of trying to make cheaper incubators like a NICU has, some smart entrepreneurs realized that babies just need to be kept warm. So they created a "sleeping bag for babies" that costs thousands of times less than a fancy incubator.The final Smartcut is 10x thinking, which is one of the central ideas in another recent book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. This principle says that it's actually easier to create a ten-times improvement in something than to make it only 10% better. Because such problems are so hard, there's little competition, and it's easier to keep going toward a solution. And if you can get others on board with your ambitious vision (like some superconnectors), you can create massive leverage -- people are much more likely to support an audacious plan with strong ideals than a run-of-the-mill incremental improvement. Elon Musk and Space X provide the canonical example of this.Smartcuts is the kind of book that will give you ideas for your own work on every other page, and you'll leave the book feeling smarter indeed.

Suzanne

January 25, 2015

Failure and how it's OK to fail repeatedly as long as you learn from it is a mantra these days. Graduation speeches are full of "Fail fast and fail often!" exhortations. While the encouragement to experiment and push yourself beyond what's safe and known still holds true, one of the things I learned from Smartcuts is not all failure is equal. By using the rather scary research study about doctors learning a new way to do coronary artery bypass grafting (result of failure = death for patient), Shane Snow shares the "paradox of failure." Doctors who failed at the surgery got worse, whereas doctors who observed the surgeons who failed learned from their mistakes and got better. Using this and other examples, Snow goes on to show how to set things up so if you fail, you still learn and grow from this. (I'm being cagey but I think it's worth reading it for yourself.)Failure is just the topic of one chapter. There's a whole lot more in the book. Some of the examples were familiar. Most of the information was new. What Smartcuts does is bring it all together in a framework of different principles that can contribute to success. One thing to note is that this book is not called "Shortcuts" as Short notes that "the one irreplaceable ingredient I've found, however, is work."Smartcuts scored on three of my "this is a good book" criteria: - I found myself sharing information from the book with others as I was reading it- It was memorable, to the point that I ended up spotting principles from the book in the Discovery TV show "Gold Rush"(what can I say, I live in a house surrounded by testosterone!)- It was an engrossing read. I read in an interview of Shane Snow where he quoted one of his favorite editors, Paula Span, saying, “Great writing speeds you along.” Snow believes that the best writers in the world are those who can whisk you through 1,000 words in what feels like 10 seconds, or 100,000 words in 30 seconds. He certainly accomplishes it with this book.

Sue

February 02, 2015

I’ve been somewhat remiss on writing a review on this book, but it hasn’t been far from my mind since I finished it a week or so ago.First, let me start with how great this book was. It was clever and concise without the endless drivel that these books can sometimes produce. Actually, a lot of books about this sort of lateral thinking come off sounding more like a blog/podcast session that has been stretchhhhhhed to fill the pages. (See Think Like a Freak and after you read it, tell me this wasn’t a podcast they stretched into a book). This book gave excellent and interesting examples of what ‘smartcuts’ were and how they came into being – and ultimately, how to create the atmosphere and circumstances to create them yourself. It has a great quick list at the end that summarizes the whole premise of what a smartcut is and how it happens. It’s really up to you but it will be the actions that you take as to the when occurs. It’s not a book about shortcuts to the top, it’s a book about how to get to the top using your smarts.Great book.

Aditya

March 26, 2016

Smartcuts adalah sebuah hasil observasi yang dilakukan oleh Shane Snow, seorang jurnalis yang telah menulis di Wired dan Fast Company, tentang bagaimana orang-orang sukses meraih kesuksesannya dengan cepat.Dalam buku ini, Snow menjelaskan kalau kita akan menghabiskan waktu bila hanya bekerja keras seperti banyak orang lain, dan menunggu keberuntungan datang pada kita. Harus ada hal yang berbeda dari apa yang kita lakukan, agar bisa meraih kesuksesan dengan cepat.Snow menceritakan beberapa kisah menarik, mulai dari perjalanan Elon Musk membangun SpaceX, bagaimana pendidikan di Finlandia menjadi yang terbaik di dunia, bagaimana cara paling efektif menjadi presiden Amerika, hingga bagaimana Skrillex bisa meraih puncak kesuksesan di bisnis musik elektronik.Menurut Snow, ada 9 kunci kesuksesan mereka:1. Hacking the Ladder, coba cari cara yang berbeda dengan kebiasaan untuk meraih kesuksesan.2. Training with Masters, cari guru yang bisa membantu mempercepat proses belajar.3. Rapid Feedback, dapatkan masukan yang banyak dan jujur dari orang lain.4. Platforms, buat sebuah sistem untuk mempercepat kamu melakukan sesuatu.5. Waves, pelajari waktu yang paling tepat untuk melakukan sesuatu.6. Superconnectors, bantulah orang lain niscaya mereka akan membantu kamu.7. Momentum, jangan sekali-kali berhenti berinovasi.8. Simplicity, fokus pada hal-hal yang penting saja.9. 10x Thinking, ubah paradigma agar biaa mencapai prestasi yang sangat besar.

J.F.

September 13, 2014

Interesting stories about ladder hacking and people who don't just pay their dues, work hard and expect to get to the top quickly.

Dmitry

January 22, 2020

Good read.

Phil

January 07, 2020

Shane Snow presents a framework on lateral thinking for breaking convention in our complex lives. Smartcuts is defined by nine principles such as Hacking the Ladder to Rapid Feedback to Momentum to Simplicty to 10x Thinking in order to achieve work, and progress faster. I enjoyed Shane’s thoughts, and in conclusion his challenge to the reader to impact the world, help others along, and make a change.

Vladimir

February 08, 2015

concrete advice wrapped in interesting storiesUnlike many books about accelerating success, this book gives very concrete and actionable advice. For example, the book recommends making side-way career moves instead of gradually climbing; it recommends seeking role-models and mentors, etc. What's more important, the book explains the subtleties (depth of mentor-mentor relationship, being prepared for "big breakthrough") as being crucial to success.This book is very well written and is easy read. The author supports a lot of the advice with references to research studies, and wraps everything with inspiring and easy to remember stories. The author also switches back and forth between captivating stories and research findings thus making the book feel like a cliffhanger ( what happened during the third SpaceX launch? What happened after? )This a book worth reading, however, much like many of the books of this kind it suffers from a survivorship bias. The book describes the commonalities between what successful people do and is very inspirational. Unfortunately, I suspect that there are many people who tried to make side-ways career moves and/or had great mentors, but never truly succeeded, so these people are not described in this book. The author does address a portion of this bias with a convincing anecdote in the chapter on Momentum. However, other parts of the book are somewhat one-sided. Keep this in mind. Regardless, this book is likely to inspire you to try thinking and acting in a new way.

Yael

August 09, 2014

This is a really important book! If you've ever wanted to get from point A to point B quickly, but worried that doing so would mean giving up your integrity--or not having the requisite skills you'll need at your end point--then this book is for you.Shane Snow's colorful narrative and compelling analysis demonstrates, point by point, how to bypass unnecessary steps in getting to your goals, and even how pattern recognition can sometimes eliminate years of paying your dues. His wide-ranging examples from classic literature/mythology, popular culture, art, comedy, science, business, medicine, technology, politics, education, and even activities such as surfing and car racing help drive the main idea home--that there are ways to bypass busywork, as long as you are smart about it.What I like most about Smartcuts is that it isn't gimicky. Time and time again, Snow regularly highlights the differences between when smartcuts worked and when they didn't. True to character, he addresses ways to stay in balance and act with integrity while also working smarter. And the end goal isn't just about saving time or getting rich and famous--the stories told often include world-changing elements. Overall, the book was brilliantly written and very well-researched, and gave me a lot of great food for thought.

Viktor

July 18, 2016

An easy read that helps entrepreneurs to advance their career via lateral thinking. From innovators to politicians, artists and all the way to the Finish educational system, the book is full of concrete examples of how to utilise the so-called smartcuts i.e. lateral thinking. Perhaps the biggest wake up call for me was that hard work is irrelevant if you do not learn how to apply smartcuts. I used to be a strong supporter of "hard work pays off", the book changed my mind on the topic. Having said that, hard work will be always important no matter what, but applied through the lens of lateral thinking.Other key learnings were, to what extent and under what circumstances mentors help, spotting and making use of "momentum" as well as the importance of aiming high. I definitely recommend Smartcuts to all early-stage entrepreneurs.

Dan

August 14, 2014

(I read an advance e-copy)Very enjoyable and digestible anecdotes that tie into a strong overall thesis. The lateral thinking he touts is clear in every example, and not only is each story educational but also inspirational in its own right.In particular as someone who grew up in the 80s and follows the tech industry, this book gripped my attention from start to finish. I gained further insight into stories I already knew (Elon Musk and SpaceX, Brian Lam, etc.), and then there were others who I'd heard of but knew little about, such as David Hansson, whose story is incredible. Highly recommended for anyone interested in business, disruption and technology, but I also think anyone who likes good stories would enjoy this book.

Kacper

January 26, 2020

An easy, not much time-consuming book that you can read with little effort. Written in a light, intellectually non-exhausting way, it's a great piece with some of the cool stories of interesting individuals and their way to the top. Definitely not fundamentally life-changing, but just a nice read :)

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