PNTV - Little Bets by Peter Sims

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today, another great book, Little Bets by Peter Sims. Little Bets subtitle How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. It's a great fun read looking at how great ideas emerge from small discoveries via little bets, small wins, forward progress, etc. Peter Sims profiles everyone from Chris Rock the Comedian, talking about how he develops his routines. It's awesome. He'll go into a tiny little comedy club with a stool with a notepad on it and, and he'll try jokes out and he'll pick up his pad of paper and go, oh, that didn't work too well. Oh, that one got a chuckle. And he'll make little bet after little bet after little bet, testing a ton of things as he creates his hour long performance that he'll wind up doing as a result of all these tiny little experiments. Peter also talks about Pixar and their process, the Google founders and, and how they all went through this process of little bets. So Philosopher's Note here with a bunch of big ideas. The book isn't a self help book per se, but there are a ton of ideas that we can apply to our lives. That's what we're going to focus on. Of course. Start with these five. The first one, big plus little. So little bets are basically little experiments we can run that give us data that can improve how, how we innovate and how we move forward. Peter makes the important point that we want to juxtapose little bets against big bets. Big bets are the I'm going to go for it all. Let it rip. I think I know what the future is going to hold and I'm going to put it all out there and go for it. Not a good idea. Much better to iterate your way to little bets. Now that doesn't mean that you don't have a huge vision. It just means that you take that big, bold, audacious, ambitious vision and you connect it to current reality. And rather than have one big swing at that big vision, you make little bets and you iterate your way to understanding what the market needs, what you need to do to actually achieve that. One of the models we use a lot is this idea of a rubber band stretching between your ideal and your big and you're bold and all that good stuff. And today and make little tiny bets in the process as you hold the tension between that big dream and your current reality, do so via the little bets that's the essence of the book. Second big idea is growth mindset muscles. We want to build our growth mindset muscles. If you want to engage in little bets, you need to be willing to engage in small failures. One of the reasons why people want to have this big vision and they want to figure it all out in their heads is because they're scared it may not work, and they would rather just kind of go for it or just dream about it than actually put themselves out there. So it takes a certain level of courage, and it takes a mindset Carol Dweck describes as the growth mindset in order to reorient our relationship to failure, such that we're trying to learn, not try to prove that we're smart. And now Peter referenced Carol Dweck's Self Theories book. We have a Note on Mindset by Carol Dweck, which is fantastic, but he talked about self theory, so I went out and got that. That's the next book I'm working on, the Next Note finished it this morning, and it's amazing. Mindset is kind of a popular book where Carol Dweck, the leading researcher in growth mindset theory, describes it for kind of a lay audience. Then, of course, there's all the research she's done for decades. And this book, Self Theories, is kind of in between. It's essays about her research in a very dense, precise communication. There's just a ton of wisdom in it. And I'm more inspired by this idea of growth mindsets than ever before. The basic idea is. And again, it's a theme we come back to again and again and again and again and again. But we've got to get it. If you have a fixed mindset, she used to call it an entity mindset. If you think that your intelligence or your ability is fixed, whatever you were born with is what you have. If that's your mindset, you're not going to engage in little bats, because every single moment of your life essentially is a test of whether you have it or not, you're really vulnerable. But if you have a growth mindset, which he used to call an incremental mindset, where you see that, look, the ability to do great things is incrementally built over time. It's not fixed. If that's your mindset, the growth mindset, or the incremental theory mindset, where you get a little bit better, you can grow over time, then you're not so upset about failure because you're not trying to prove yourself, you're trying to learn you're trying to get better every single day. So really, really important distinction. And if you always need to be perfect, you're never going to do the things that are going to allow you to learn, that are going to allow you to bring this big vision to life. That via the little bets. So we want to cultivate our growth mindset muscles. And one great way to do that is via little bets where you're not putting a ton on the line, you're just testing little things in your business or in your creative life or in your personal life. And we build our growth mindset muscles. We're going to talk about that a lot more in the next episode, but think about that for now. Third big idea is to unsuck, to go from suck to unsuck. The team at Pixar basically says the way they do their films is they go from suck to unsuck. Now, you may think of a Pixar film and you see its perfection, right? It's just this awesome, huge, dramatic, beautiful animated film. Well, first of all, Pixar, Steve Jobs and other owners and investors lost tens of millions of dollars in Pixar as it figured out what it was as a business. It started out as a hardware business, then a software, then an animated ad company. And then they finally got to do what they really wanted to do, which was full length animation. But it took them forever to get there. A ton of little bets and iterations and pivots allowed them to get to this point where they now make animated films. But the culture is all about little bets. And they don't start with this grand vision and then crush it linearly with just a few tweaks. They iterate and iterate and iterate. And Peter tells us that Wall E, for example, had something like 98,000, I think it was 173 storyboards, almost 100,000 storyboards where they made little bet after little bet. They tweaked and tested and saw, well, this scene. No, that's not how it needs to go. New storyboard. Try something else. So that's a little bit better. Let's lean into that. But that doesn't work. A new storyboard. And they incrementally built this movie. 98,173 storyboards, so you can watch Wall E suck to unsuck. And the head of Pixar says, we never finish our films. We release them. They get to a point where they just have to ship it. But they're perfectionists in a healthy sense. They want to do as Great as they can. But they know you can never perfect yourself ultimately. So they iterate via these little bets, moving from suck to unsuck. That's what we want to do with our lives. So when you think of your life, think of certain aspects that might suck a bit. Whatever habits you want to build, look at them and rather than be upset that they suck, just be honest about it. Wow, okay, well, that's not where I want it to be. And then think about one tiny way that you can unsuck it, which is our next big idea. Smallifying. Another one of the executives that Peter covers, he was the former head of Electronic Arts. He now does a ton of other things. Or creative officer of Electronic Arts talks about smalifying huge project. Break it down into as small of components as you can. Find the little issue that you can solve, a little problem that you can solve. Smallifying. In the note I talk about how it reminds me of small habits, mini habits. Minifying your habits. If you're trying to build a positive habit, exercise, for example, then maybe you want to do 50 pushups a day or you want to meditate for 20 minutes a day. Steven guys, in his great book Mini Habits, smallifies those habits, minifies them, right? He says, look, rather than trying to do 50 pushups, why don't you do one? Rather than trying to meditate for 20 minutes, try to meditate for one smallify it. Create little wins, which create small wins is another one of the ideas we cover in the note we're not going to talk about right now. But you create small wins. Little small wins create momentum that lead to greater wins, which lead to more wins, which lead to more wins, which leads to goodness. Smallifying is a good idea. Think about how you can smallify certain habits that you have and move from suck to unsuck. Finally, fifth big idea here is we need to do things in order to discover things. This is the essence of the book. We need to do things in order to discover things. We can't think that we're going to come up with this in a vacuum. The perfect grand vision. It's not how creativity business life works. You need to do things. You need to be in the game in order to get the data and realize, oh wait, actually we want to go over here. That's our target. Oh wait, no, actually it's over here, wherever it is, right? And you only discover those things by being willing to do things. So remember that. Do things to discover things. If there are certain things in your life that you've been kind of holding back on because you wanted to get it all perfect. What if you ran some little bets, right and just tested different things and got a little bit better? And as you walk through some of these big ideas, cultivated your growth mindset, embraced the suck as you moved to unsuck, doing thanks, qualifying, etc. There you go. Little bets. What little bet can you place in your life today in whatever domain you feel most inspired to do? Think about that. Get on it. Hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. 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