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  • Smartcuts

  • How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
  • Written by: Shane Snow
  • Narrated by: Shane Snow, Erik Bergmann
  • Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (16 ratings)

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Smartcuts

Written by: Shane Snow
Narrated by: Shane Snow, Erik Bergmann
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Publisher's 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 an 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": rethinking convention and breaking "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.

©2014 Shane Snow (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers

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Reads like a 1st year university essay.

Filled with self-defined principles and parallels that don't really have substance or relevance, eg. President Andrew Johnson spent a long time in federal public office and was a bad president, Dwight Eisenhower had almost no political career before becoming president, therefore good presidents skip time in public office, and this somehow related to a cheetah being agile instead of fast. Explicitly excludes experience at state level of govt for other examples to illustrate the point.

Reads like the author picked the most obvious, hyperbolic examples of "success" (presidents, billionaires) and tried to link them through crude metaphors.

An honestly disappointing waste of a book credit.



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