Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

Contents

Introduction:

How Do They Move So Fast?

PART I: SHORTEN

1Hacking the Ladder:

Bored Mormons

2Training with Masters:

The Vocal Thief

3Rapid Feedback:

The F Word

PART II: LEVERAGE

4Platforms:

The Laziest Programmer

5Waves:

Moore and Moore

6Superconnectors:

Space, Wars, and Storytellers

PART III: SOAR

7Momentum:

Depressed Billionaires

8Simplicity:

Hot Babes and Paradise

910x Thinking:

The Rocketeer

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

How Do They Move So Fast?

On a blustery winter morning in early 2007, Nathan Parkinson broke the world record for the fastest completion of the classic video game Super Mario Bros. I watched him do it.*

We were in Rexburg, Idaho, a college town of 25,000 people, and Nate was definitely supposed to be in class. I emerged from my bedroom that morning, backpack in hand, to the usual sight. Blinds closed. Lights off. The unnatural glow from our 20-inch television in the corner. And Nate, about a foot away from the screen.

He would sit cross-legged, glasses fixed atop his nose, thin blond hair standing on end, held straight by weeks of oil buildup. His best friend and backseat driver, Tommy, would perch scrawny and shirtless on the armrest, after a night of snoozing rent-free on our couch in between turns at the game system.

Nate and Tommy routinely said good-bye to me at 8:00 a.m. as I left for Economics class, and I knew they still had an hour or two of GameCube left in them. But that day they were playing on an old-school Nintendo system—which was odd—and that day Tommy had video recording equipment set up.

Nate’s trying to beat the world record for Mario one, Tommy informed me.

I sat down to watch.

BUNDLED WITH THE ORIGINAL Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986, Super Mario Bros. ushered in the modern video gaming era. With 40 million copies sold, it became a staple of ’80s pop culture and held the honor of the world’s best-selling video game for two decades.

Super Mario Bros. has 32 levels, or missions, making up a total of eight worlds. Each world has new scenery, different obstacles, and progressively badder bad guys. Each level has a time limit of 400 game seconds, which are a bit shorter than actual seconds. In theory, the game should take between one and two hours to beat, assuming you don’t die.

Until moves and timing are mastered, Mario is incredibly frustrating; touching a bad guy or falling into one of the countless pits spattering the landscape resets the level. After three chances, or lives, the game restarts.

At the time I sat down to watch Nate play the game, 22 years after its release, the standing world record for completing all the levels of Super Mario Bros. was 33 minutes, 24 seconds.

When Nate cleared the final level that day in Idaho, dumping the final boss, Bowser, into a pit of lava and signifying the end of the game, Tommy’s stopwatch read six minutes, 28 seconds.

Wait . . .

HOW DO YOU BEAT the world’s most played video game in one-fifth of world-record time?

As only someone who spent his or her childhood mashing red plastic buttons together might guess, the answer is Warp Pipes.

Throughout Super Mario Bros., Mario encounters a number of large green pipes. Some pipes are stopped up. Some pipes have evil plants living in them. And some pipes go to the sewer. Naturally, as a plumber, Mario likes to climb down these pipes, which lead to underground chambers where he can collect coins and mushrooms. The chambers invariably lead to more pipes, which take Mario back to the surface.

But the game creators also made a few secret pipes. These lead not to stinky sewers and disreputable fungi, but to new worlds, allowing Mario to skip levels by the dozen.

According to video game lore, these Warp Pipes were created so game testers could evaluate later levels without having to beat early worlds over and over again. Some, however, suspect these secret pipes were left as Easter eggs for fans to discover.

Nate didn’t care about why the Warp Pipes were there; he just sent his Mario straight to them. He raced through Level 1-1, then broke a hole in the ceiling on Level 1-2 and ran full speed on top of the level, until he found the secret chamber with Warp Pipes to Worlds 2, 3, and 4.

Of course, Nate picked World 4.

Nate’s Mario kept running, pausing only to eat a power-up mushroom, so he could race past a pair of Hammer Brothers and survive (this gambit got him through the bad guys in half the time). Soon, he was climbing a secret vine that led to the Warp Pipe for World 8, which he then had to beat manually.

He beat it. By this point, I’d scurried off to Econ, but I can only imagine the victory dance that ensued in our dingy apartment. After I came home and saw the tape, I promptly told everyone I knew.

Finishing Super Mario Bros. in six minutes using Warp Pipes isn’t possible if you aren’t truly good at Super Mario Bros. The warp doesn’t mean you’re going to win, or that you deserve to. It just means you don’t have to slog through stages you already know you can beat.

This is not a book about video games, or the ensuing drama after Nate’s record was sought, and overtaken, over the next few years.

This is a book about Warp Pipes in real life.

IT TOOK THE OIL tycoon John D. Rockefeller 46 years to make a billion dollars. He clawed his way to the top of the 19th-century business world. Starting with a single oil refinery in 1863, over two decades, he constructed oil pipelines and bought out rival refineries until he’d built an empire.

Seventy years later, the 1980s computer baron Michael Dell achieved billionaire status in 14 years; Bill Gates in 12. In the 1990s, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo each earned ten figures in just four years. It took Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, three years to do it. And in the late 2000s, Groupon’s Andrew Mason did it in two.

Sure, there’s been inflation since Rockefeller, but there’s no disputing that we’ve decreased the time it takes innovative people to achieve dreams, get rich, and make an impact on the world—and this has largely been due to technology and communication.

A serious assessment of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, writes the futurist and author Ray Kurzweil in his famous essay The Law of Accelerating Returns. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). Here we come, Star Trek!

At the same time, many industries remain decidedly stuck in the past. Most large businesses stop growing after a few years. Formal education, in many cases, is so slow or out-of-date that venture capitalists pay bright people to skip school and start Internet companies. Conventional wisdom—outside of the technology industry—on innovation and career building has hardly evolved since the 19th century.

We’re multiplying our capabilities as a civilization and yet we still accept the notion that important societal progress, like combating inequality and crime—or even innovating in government and medicine—must take generations. Despite leaps in what we can do, most of us still follow comfortable, pre-prescribed paths. We work hard, but hardly question whether we’re working smart.

On the other hand, some among us manage to build eBay in the time it takes the rest of us to build a house. Pick your era in history and you’ll find a handful of people—across industries and continents—who buck the norm and do incredible things in implausibly short amounts of time. The common pattern is that, like computer hackers, certain innovators break convention to find better routes to stunning accomplishments.

The question is, can finding these better routes be taught?

PRETEND YOU ARE DRIVING a car in the middle of a thunderstorm and you happen upon three people on the side of the road. One of them is a frail old woman, who looks on the verge of collapse. Another is a friend who once saved your life. The other is the romantic interest of your dreams, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet him or her. You have only one other seat in the car.

Who do you pick up?

There’s a good reason to choose any of the three. The old woman needs help. The friend deserves your payback. And clearly, a happy future with the man or woman of your dreams will have an enormous long-term impact on your life.

So, who should you pick?

The old woman, of course. Then, give the car keys to your friend, and stay behind with the romantic interest to wait for the bus!

This dilemma is an exercise in lateral thinking. It’s the kind of puzzle in which the most elegant solution is revealed only when you attack it sideways. New ideas emerge when you question the assumptions upon which a problem is based (in this case: it’s that you can only help one person).

In this book, I’m going to show you how overachievers throughout history have applied lateral thinking to success in a variety of fields and endeavors. In doing this, I plan to convince you that the fastest route to success is never traditional, and that the conventions we grow up with can be hacked. And, most important, I want to show you that anyone—not just billionaire entrepreneurs and professional mavericks—can speed up progress in business or life.

But first, I’m going to share two quick stories to explain this book’s title word, smartcut.

WHEN BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WAS 16 years old, he was a fantastic writer. He worked at his older brother James’s printing shop for the newspaper the New-England Courant. Because his brother wouldn’t print a boy’s story, Ben began writing cultural essays under a pseudonym, Mrs. Silence Dogood, leaving them under the printshop door.

James published the letters in short order, and they were, in colonial terms, a smash hit. James and his friends thought a clever peer was writing the essays.

The letters became important to both the community and the paper. When Silence Dogood stopped writing in, James Franklin posted an ad:

If any person or persons will give a true account of Mrs. Silence Dogood, whether dead or alive, married or unmarried, in town or countrey, that so, (if living) she may be spoke with, or letters convey’d to her, they shall have thanks for their pains.

When he found out who Silence really was, James was shocked. Ben left, taking his talents and publishing experience to Philadelphia, where he went on to become the most prolific inventor and statesman of the period. Here was an overachiever who didn’t let convention—in his case, age—stand in his way. When he was blocked from doing what he was capable of, he proved himself anyway.

Three hundred years later, another American boy—Frank William Abagnale Jr.—also pretended to be someone he wasn’t. His story, made famous by Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, involved a lot of hacking: impersonating lawyers and doctors, forging checks, and traveling across continents as a fake airline pilot.

Back then it truly was survival, Abagnale tells me, reminiscing. Despite how fabulous gallivanting around the world for free may sound, as his lies piled up, his definition of success shifted from filling up bank accounts to simply not getting caught for another day.

Then, I was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison.

The difference between Franklin’s unconventional work and Abagnale’s was that the former managed to create value for others while the latter cheated others. Franklin’s approach was a lateral solution to the unfairness of present convention. Abagnale’s, however entertaining, was a con, and he paid for it.

And that’s the difference between rapid, but short-term gains, which I call shortcuts, and sustainable success achieved quickly through smart work, or smartcuts. Whereas by dictionary definition shortcuts can be amoral, you can think of smartcuts as shortcuts with integrity. Working smarter and achieving more—without creating negative externalities.

Abagnale took shortcuts and regretted it. Franklin used smartcuts and got his face on a $100 bill.

After being released from prison, Abagnale spent three decades repaying his debt to society, working for the FBI, without pay. Eventually, he started a security business, met his future wife while on undercover assignment, and had three kids. True success is not defined by how much money do I make, how well do I speak, how well do I deal with the subjects I deal with, he says. But how great of a father I am.

As we explore the unconventional behavior of history’s overachievers in Smartcuts, I hope we’ll keep Abagnale’s lesson in mind. To some people, success means wealth. To others it means recognition, popularity, or promotions; it means free time, inventing products, growing businesses, making breakthroughs at work. Those can all be good things, and in this book, we’ll look at people and companies that achieved big things in the above categories. But I’m convinced that true success has more to do with our becoming better people and building a better world while we do these things than it does with the size of our bank accounts.

I STARTED WRITING ABOUT smartcuts—though not yet by that term—for Fast Company and other publications after moving to New York at a time when the city’s tech community was starting to boom. As a budding reporter with time on my hands, I shadowed fast-growing startups like Foursquare as over the course of six months they grew from three guys with laptops to a million users, and Tumblr, whose 26-year-old founder cashed out for $1.1 billion after growing it to 100 million users. I hung out at hacker labs where people built Internet-connected robots out of used hospital machinery, and witnessed groups like the New York Tech Meetup surge from a few hundred to over 35,000 local members.

My writing led me to join several groups in that tech scene that I can only describe as overachiever clubs, such as the Young Entrepreneur Council and the Sandbox Network (who actually call themselves Overachievers Under 30)—kids who quit PhD programs and investment banking jobs to live on ramen and build things that could change the world.

You can’t hang around these kinds of people without being inspired. Inevitably, I ended up cofounding a startup company of my own, which took me even further down the rabbit hole. (You can learn more about my company, Contently, at shanesnow.com/contently if you are interested.) Through that work, I soon found myself inducted into more groups: Forbes’s and Inc.’s 30 Under 30, TechStars, and NYC Venture Fellows—programs that put ambitious innovators together.

As if without warning, I found myself—a star-struck kid from Idaho—hanging out with incredible people, from the founders of world-changing companies to inventors whose life work was to solve unemployment in India or topple dictatorships. I was in a unique spot to observe—from the inside—people who were doing crazy things at implausibly young ages or in surprisingly fast times.

So, I wrote about them.

And I asked myself, how do they move so fast?

This book comes out of countless hours of research, hundreds of interviews, and the dissection of myriad academic papers in an effort to answer that question. Initially, I set out to discover the common patterns among rapidly successful tech companies, but I soon realized that their habits were simply permutations of principles smart people had been using in a variety of contexts throughout history.

I see this book as a simultaneous hat tip and counterpoint to some of the great success and innovation literature out there (check out shanesnow.com/booklist for my recommendations). It’s a re-analysis and first codification of the ways rapid success has happened throughout history.

The step-by-step advice that made an ancient Greek hero rapidly prosperous will be entirely different from what makes a 21st-century businesswoman successful, just as the exact methods an Internet startup uses to grow today will be irrelevant in five years. But the patterns of lateral thinking (smartcuts) behind each of their success stories can be harnessed by anyone who seeks an edge—at work, at the gym, in the arts or education, from social enterprise to personal development, from big companies to small startups.

In each of the following chapters, we’ll explore one of those patterns. I’ve divided the nine of them into three classes, which make up the three parts of this book:

SHORTEN

Earlier, we discussed the scenario of the old woman in the thunderstorm. Were you surprised that the path to the most success in that scenario involved stepping outside and getting rain soaked?

This is the kind of thinking that computer scientists—and especially computer hackers—use. Got two short Internet cables but need one long one? Cut the ends off and splice the two together. Want to digitize libraries of old books without typing them up yourself? Get millions of people on the Internet to do it for you. (Ever filled out those crazy letters—called CAPTCHAs—when you signed up for something online? That’s what you’re doing.)

Increasingly in today’s culture, hacking is something done not just by criminals and computer scientists, but by anyone who has the capability to approach a problem laterally. (This is the original usage of the term, in fact.) Can’t get that horrible plastic blister pak for those headphones open? Use a can opener. (It works!)

Not enough seats for the four of you? Give yours up and weather the storm with the person of your dreams.

The first section of this book discusses how some people use such hacker thinking to shorten paths to success. It’s how some people take a few years to become president while others spend 30. It’s how unknown comedians get on Saturday Night Live and Internet companies get to millions of users in months.

Lateral thinking doesn’t replace hard work; it eliminates unnecessary cycles. Once they’ve shortened their path, overachievers tend to look for ways to do more with their effort, which brings us to our next section:

LEVERAGE

Pretend you’re fixing up an old house, and you need to pry a nail out of the wood floor in the living room. You have a claw hammer, but try as you can, the nail won’t come out.

You have a few options at this point. You could give up (maybe pulling the nail is unnecessary), but let’s assume it’s essential we get this nail out. One option is to exert more force, pull harder. Maybe if your life depended on it, you could work the nail out over a long period of time. But then you’ll be too tired to sand the floor.

This is what the classic success advice amounts to: work 100 hours a week, believe you can do it, visualize, and push yourself harder than everyone else. Claw that nail out with your bare hands ’til they bleed if necessary. This is the hard way.

Or maybe you can admit defeat and phone your biggest friend, so he can come over and give the nail pulling a shot. That’s less work for you, but suddenly, you’ve created more net work. And what if there’s not one, but 70 nails to pull? This is the other common success advice: outsource the tough stuff, and try to profit from the arbitrage. This is the cheap way.

The easiest solution in this case, however, is not to waste energy, not to bother your friend, but to find a long piece of pipe to put over the hammer’s handle and to push on the end of the pipe. The toughest nail will pop out. The law of the lever, as shown by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, says the longer the lever, the less force you need exert.

This is the smart way.

Leverage is the overachiever’s approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck. It’s how brand-new startups scale and young sci-fi geeks become movie directors. It’s how below-average school systems turn around and revolutions are won. It’s how surfers take championships and artists go from homeless to the Grammys.

SOAR

I’m not much of an athlete, but there’s one sport in which I feel it’s all right to brag about my abilities for a minute: monkey bars, circa age ten.

When I was a shrimpy, red-headed kid on the primary school playground, my arms were too short to reach the Olympic rings,