46: Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking with Shane Snow

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast. If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am really excited to have my friend Shane Snow here today. Shane is an award winning journalist, celebrated entrepreneur, and the best selling author of Smart the Surprising Power of Lateral Thinking that just got released in paperback. He is the co founder of the content technology company Contently, which helps creative people and companies tell great stories together. And he serves on the board of the Contently Intently foundation for Investigative Journalism. Shane's writing has appeared in Fast Company, Wired, the New Yorker, and dozens more top publications. He's been called a wonderkind by the New York Times, a digital maverick by details, and his work insanely addicting by gq. Though as he writes in his bio, he wishes they had been talking about his abs. Shane, welcome to the show.

Thanks Jenny. Thanks for having me.

I love that, love the fun little bio editions. Those are always great.

You know, I'm a big fan of GQ and I write for them more once in a while, which I think guarantees that they will never attempt to take a picture of my stomach.

You never know, they could have a hot author's issue. In fact, I think they should.

So the original version of Smart Cuts, when it came out on hardcover in 2015, the subtitle was How Hackers, Innovators and Icons Accelerate Success. And for the paperback release you changed it to the Surprising Power of Lateral Thinking. What is lateral thinking and why did you kind of hang your hat on that as the key ingredient for accelerating success?

Yeah, it's a good question. So, you know, book titles are primarily about marketing and selling the book and secondarily about telling you what the book's about. And you know, sometimes those line up together and sometimes they don't. You know, the original idea of the book was I was a journalist. I was writing about primarily technology companies and fast growth businesses, innovation.

Usually what I was writing about was how business happens and reaches goals and grows quickly. And then I started writing about similar patterns that you see in people's careers. And that sort of led me to what became Smart Cuts, which is how do breakthroughs happen in history in art, science, business, entertainment, and our personal lives. And what patterns are there and so that original title, How Hackers, Innovators and Icons Accelerate Success is sort of getting at that idea. But part of it was this calculation that, you know, when you split test what people will click on. They clicked on the title that had the word hacker in it a lot. But it's, you know, what the hacker part of it is. And actually the underlying theme that I found in researching this topic, which is pretty big, you know, how do people make breakthroughs and speed up the process of making a difference and making change, regardless of industry? And the underlying theme is this thing that psychologists call lateral thinking, which is, if you read the book, the first, you know, the introduction is basically setting that up that this is what we're really talking about is lateral thinking. And here's a bunch of patterns in history across industries that we do this, that shows how this works. But basically, lateral thinking is about approaching a problem or a situation from an unconventional angle. And it's, you know, it kind of comes from the 70s, and it's related to the cliche of thinking outside the box. And.

You know, again, back to the hacker thing. Finding unconventional routes to success or to, you know, a goal. But lateral thinking is basically the art and science of looking at a problem and then figuring out how to look at it differently so that you can approach the problem and solve the problem in a way that has never been thought of before. So instead of playing the same game that everyone's playing, creating a different game or changing the game, and that's how innovation happens. The simplest example that people probably know about is, is in the Olympics. We have the Olympics right now. The Olympics just happened this summer. The high jump. People used to jump over the bar. They'd sort of dive over the bar. And that was just the conventional way of doing it. But there was no rule on how you had to jump over the high jump bar. So in 1964, I believe a guy jumped over the high jump bar backwards, like back first, and he won the gold medal. And everyone kind of freaked out because they said, that's not allowed. And then they looked at the rules and they said, that's actually not not allowed. And that changed the whole sport. And so the next Olympics, everyone was jumping over the high jump bar backwards. But that's often how breakthroughs happen, is we reassess our situation and the assumptions that we're making about the world and about the problems we're working on and the sort of conventional way of thinking about something when you can force yourself, trick yourself, or just train yourself to get in that habit of reassessing the situation, you can open up a lot of possibilities. And that's what the book ended up. Up being about. So the long answer to that, why has the title now been changed now that it's going into paperback to the Surprising Power of Lateral Thinking? Is really, it's about the way we think. And that can lead to either accelerating success, like the first title mentioned, or what the book is really about, which is breakthroughs.

You did some really interesting research on the career trajectories of US Presidents, and it's not what one would expect. Say more about that.

Yeah, I love this one, especially right now. Right. We're in election season, so the first thing that I found, I was looking at. I love data, and I like to look at, you know, at things that we sort of take for granted from a data perspective. So I looked at US Presidents and I broke down their career paths, what they did and how many years they did it in order to get to president, presuming that most presidents had this sort of typical climbing the ladder sort of route where you start in local politics, you go to state politics, you become a congressperson and then a senator and then maybe governor, maybe vice president and then president.

And so what happened, though, when you look at the data of what really happened with the US President's, something interesting emerges. You have this whole spectrum of there are a couple of presidents that have zero experience in politics at all. And you have some presidents that have been in politics since they got out of high school.

And that spectrum does not. It's not directly correlated with a couple of things. First of all, how long you spend in politics does not correlate to how good of a politician you are, how popular you are, how likely it is that you'll win another election in, like, a higher sort of plane. But the more fascinating thing I found is that when you look at how historians rank U.S. presidents and map that to their past experience, there's an inverse correlation between how much time you spent in politics and federal politics in particular, and how good of a president you were. So basically, presidents that had the top 10 presidents, I think all of them except for one Kennedy, who happens to be the youngest president, all of them have, like 10 years of experience or less in politics. And when you look at the 10 worst presidents, they all had much more experience, you know, 20, 30 years of experience, with the exception of one or two that had no experience or very little. And so in digging into that, basically I mapped, you know, what did these presidents who were Successful who are, you know, the best at making change, at steering the country, at being, you know, the kind of leader and making the impact that would lead historians to say that they're the best. What did they do in their lives that led up to that, and how did they behave as president? And those two things are very linked, that, you know, you have these best presidents that were war heroes and police captains and philanthropists and businessmen that eventually got into politics. And.

The most extreme example is Eisenhower. He led the Allied forces in World War II, never held an elected office, and then became president based on that leadership skill. And actually, one of the things that comes from this is that people vote based on perceived leadership ability, not based on experience. We talk a lot about experience when we're promoting leaders, but really what people will actually punch in the ballot for is who they think would be a good leader, regardless of experience. So you can have that show leadership experience in something like leading US Forces to victory, allied forces to victory in World War II, and that might actually be a better show of leadership to people who would vote for you and follow you than having sat in Congress for 30 years. So that's one thing. But the most important thing is that a great leader, clearly, and the president showed this, has to be able to be flexible. They have to be adaptable. They have to listen to people and make decisions and make fairly weighty decisions and pretend like they're opinionated on something after very little time of being briefed by, you sit in this room and the nuclear people come in and need your opinion on this. And then the, you know, the Farm Bureau act, people come in and you can't be an expert at all of this. So you have to be flexible, and you have to be good at learning and looking outside of yourself and taking advice. And the worst presidents, the thing that does correlate to lots of experience in politics is stubbornness. So a lot of these presidents that were really bad, they had spent so much time inside the federal machine that, you know, not jumping into business and, you know, and going from state to federal and all these other things, getting involved in different stuff, they had sort of stuck to one track. So by the time they got to president, they would say things like, this is the way it's done, or we're going to do it my way because I have the experience or because I've earned this. And they wouldn't listen. And. And the best presidents are the ones that had the humility to listen, had the bravery to change their minds and to change course and to be flexible and actually drew from their experience in business, in the military, in local policing and philanthropy to do that. I think the interesting thing right now with that, with this election is we have two candidates who have very sort of strange career paths to becoming president. You know, Hillary has spent two terms in the Senate and then the rest. She's been around politics and she's been, you know, part of the political game for a long time, but she's done a lot of different things, which is interesting. And then you have, of course, Donald Trump, who's never been a politician, but has done a lot of different things also in business. And so I think the amount of time spent in politics will matter less, I think, in this than the thing, again, that underlies it all, is who's going to be the best president, is who's going to be the most flexible, the most able to adapt and think outside of their own experience and be willing to admit that they're wrong when they're wrong and not be stubborn. I think that that's a lesson that applies not just to politics, which is interesting right now, because the election, but also to us as leaders and as people who want to be leaders. That being smarter doesn't make you a better leader, being more experienced doesn't make you a better leader, but being more flexible does.

I completely agree. I think flexibility is one of the killer apps of pivotability, of being able to be agile and change. And particularly on this show, I talk about career change and business. One thing that surprised me was in the introduction, you say you'll show where the fashionable fail fast and fail often mantra of the lean startup movement breaks down. I thought that was an interesting comment. Can you say more about that? Where does it break down when it comes to the concept of smart cuts?

Yeah. So the lean startup and a lot of the sort of Silicon Valley technology culture sort of glamorizes this idea of failure being necessary and great and admirable. And there's actually. It's a tricky thing because we don't want people to be afraid of failing because then they will be afraid of starting. Right. You can't change anything if you don't do anything, and you won't do anything if you're afraid.

But the pendulum has swung a little bit too far in many cases. And I think the lean startup.

Some would say that it's nuanced and they're not actually saying failure is good, but they actually do come out and say that. A lot of times they throw these parties when the Companies fail. Or there's sort of this common advice that we hear that says, well, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And if you fail, that means you've learned. But actually, when you look at it and when you look at research and the way that people actually behave and the way, you know, people who are unsuccessful in business, what happens in their next business, there's actually no data to support either of those things that you learn from your mistakes, or that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

And so what matters is the way that you handle failure, but even more importantly, the way you set things up so that failure doesn't actually mean failure, that you can turn failure into feedback sort of both before and after something you try works out or not. And so there's a couple things that I get into in this. You know, one of the best studies that sort of illustrates the point that I like is when there was this very complicated heart surgery that got an upgrade. So it's a cardiac artery bypass grafting, where basically your artery is clogged with cheeseburgers. And so they need to install a new tube to pass the blockage. It's a common surgery that they do well, they used to have to stop your heart and install the new tube and then restart your heart. And this caused a lot of problems. People would die or there would be blood flow to the brain. They have problems. And they figured out a new surgery the medical industry did, where they don't have to stop the heart in order to do it, had a higher sort of survival and recovery rate. And so these researchers had this interesting opportunity to watch for 10 years, surgeons around the world learn this new surgery and what happened when they screwed it up. And they found a couple interesting things. One was that if you manage to succeed at this surgery in the first few times, you would continue to get better, and you would have a much lower chance of ever failing at the surgery. If you screwed up the surgery early on, you actually had a very good chance of continuing to screw up the surgery and to not get better for a long time or at all. The interesting thing, though, was that if you saw your buddies screw up in the surgery, you saw another doctor do it, then you would be more likely to do better over time. And if you saw another doctor do the surgery, well, it wouldn't have an impact on you. And what this. And it's sort of counterintuitive, right? Like, the doctors that did bad, they continue to do bad. They didn't learn. The doctors that were already good they just continue to do better. They saw someone who sucked, you got better. What this points to is something that's part of human nature, which is when we fail, when we make a mistake, we in our brains, our subconscious brains, know that we have to live with ourselves. You go home after the surgery or whatever it is that you failed at, and you have to sleep at night. And so we rationalize to ourselves the reasons for our failures in ways that allow us to live with ourselves. And so the more sort of important something is to our identity or our livelihood or our life, the more likely we are to externalize the reason for our failure. So what was happening with the surgeons is if you screwed up on the surgery, you are likely to blame it on circumstance. Well, the patient was unstable. It was hard to see, you know, it was this or that. There wasn't enough time. And you're unlikely to hone in on the things that you could have done or that you could do differently. It's kind of like when you're rooting for a sports team. If the team that you are rooting for loses, you blame it on the ref or the wind or something else not on, they weren't good enough and they should have passed this play instead of ran this play. It's the same thing. But when you win, you're like, yes, we're the best. We practice. You hear these victory speeches. You know, we just like brought it onto the field. I don't watch sports, so I don't, you know, can't parody the victory speech. But if you, you know, in surgery, you'll, if you do well, you'll notice. You'll be more likely to notice the things that you could improve because you succeeded and because you, you know, you can live with that and you feel good about that. And this very same thing happens in business, and it happens in careers where if we have a setback in our career or if we have a business fail, we're not any more likely the next time around to do better percentage wise. You know, it's still that same roll of the dice, the same percentage odds that you'll succeed or lose if you failed before. So failing doesn't make you better because so often. And when you look at what a lot of the things sort of people talk about when they talk about the failures and what they've learned, those things that they've learned don't really apply to the next thing that you're going to do. They often are about investors or market forces or whatever things that are actually not inside your control.

Or you can pretend like they're in your control, but really they're not. And also, you know, a new type of business is going to be. Have so many. There's so many different complexities and unknowns and assumptions for any business to be successful and in any career, honestly, that moving from one to another is going to introduce a new set of those things which all inherently have risk. And so, you know, the best way to.

To not fail is to be successful and to take the bright spots, learn the things that worked really well, and apply those and have confidence in those, and then work honestly on the things that you did or could have done that weren't wrong. But that's hard to do. The other thing about the failure thing is really what it all points to is that if we can.

In our heads or in our. Whatever structure we've set up, if we can make it so that what we would call a failure is actually seen as feedback on not us as our identity or who we are or how good we are, but on the actions that we can take, then that becomes really interesting. And I don't want to ramble too long on this, but you look at the ways that people who have very risky jobs get good at those jobs, and it's through practice and trial and error in situations that, where failure is not actually failure. So, for example, if you are training to become a fighter pilot, you don't want to practice landing the airplane the very first time on an aircraft carrier, because the chances of failure and the consequences of failure are catastrophic. You know, you break the plane, you die, you break the aircraft carrier. But that's why they invented flight simulators, so you can play a video game where if you die in the game, you fail in the game. It's not actually failure, it is feedback. And it's a lot easier to depersonalize failure or success in a video game than it is when actual stuff gets broken or people get hurt. You know, you'll blame yourself if you injure someone, but you don't blame yourself nearly as bad if you die in the game. You figure out what you can do. So the idea with failure and, you know, and the whole lean idea is that we're all going to have setbacks. We're all going to experience things that we might call failure. But we need to figure out how to set ourselves up so that we can not make that personal, so that we can focus on the actions we can take. And often that is about changing sort of the, the try and fail and Learn mentality, to try and get feedback and learn mentality. I know it sounds subtle and it sounds like it's just semantics, but from a kind of a psychological level, it makes a big difference because deep personalization is what helps us focus on what we actually can control.

I'm curious about your career because you've had a really interesting path yourself and you were a reporter. I don't even know what you were doing prior to that. But I'm curious if failure has played a role, like if there was a moment in your career where a failure led to the next thing. And also shifting from reporter into founding a startup seems like a massive jump. So I'm just curious how you applied some of these smart cuts, maybe even unknowingly, to your own career.

Yeah, well, I can say that I'm not good at all of these things, even though I know a lot about them now from having studied it. And what I've tried to do, my reporting and writing career is to tell stories and look for patterns of people and, you know, in companies and organizations that do things really incredible or, you know, or otherwise, to learn from them, but to share their stories. Not claiming to be, you know, I'm not at the point yet where I can write the book about how I made it and you can too, but I can write about how these people in history have done it and what you can learn. So with that caveat, I mean, my career's been, you know, interesting and varied and sounds a little like add, but I think all of the different steps that I've taken have added up to something that's been become more interesting than just a linear career path. And I talk about this and obviously this is what, you know, what pivot's all about. I started out building websites for people at a, like a web design company and some e commerce websites in high school. Really nerdy stuff. I went to undergrad for first computer science, then business. Then by the time I realized that I loved writing, sort of this point of no return. So I finished a business degree in undergrad, but then I got a master's degree in journalism so that I could write about business and computer science. And what happened though is throughout this whole period, I had been trying to put myself through school and survive and rent an apartment by being a freelancer. And I would kind of do whatever I could that was in those veins. So I learned to do Photoshop and so I started combining Photoshop and computer science and eventually Photoshop and storytelling and journalism to do infographics. And things and I would sort of sell those wares. But it was never the same project, which was interesting and it was hard to become the best in the world at any of the things I was doing. But it all added up to something that I think has been really useful with the business that I currently run. But all along the way I was always launching these different business projects again, more E commerce websites. At an online printing company, I tried to make an IMDb for video games. A friend of mine and I, we built an app that basically was an early version of Pinterest. And then Pinterest came out and was much better than ours. So worked on all of these different things, kind of indulging curiosity while trying to learn skills and sort of survive at the same time. So there's sort of this side career as a website and app developer and kind of this main career as a wandering through this freelance designing, coding and eventually writing. And then when I got out of journalism school, I was freelancing for first Mashable and then eventually Fast Company and Wired magazine and now a bunch of other cool places. And instead of getting a full time job, which I was fortunate to be offered, a full time job at Inc. Magazine to be their tech editor.

And I ended up turning it down because I liked the flexibility of being freelance and also because I wanted to start a business of my own.

And so when you bounce from gig to gig, it's stressful because you have to be a salesperson in addition to being good at the actual gig itself. But you end up being able to kind of accelerate your own journey. When you ask for gig to gig, you can sort of reach for and grab bigger gigs, more prestigious gigs faster than if you sort of climb through the traditional way of. The example I always use is you want to write for Wired magazine. You can apply to be an intern, maybe get the internship and then work for years there, sort of slowly getting bigger and bigger opportunities until you eventually can be a feature writer for Wired or you can do what a lot of great freelancers have done. And what I ended up doing, which is bounce from blog to blog to blog to slightly bigger blog to slightly bigger blog to magazine to magazine and in six months get to Wired and show off. Here's the work I've done that becomes an equivalent sort of stamp of credibility as having worked inside of Wired for five or six years. So all of that kind of boomerang experience sort of adds up.

But you know what's interesting is, well, so I started this company contently, which is sort of combining all these things. We help freelancers get work. We help businesses create content and publish and measure content marketing. And it's sort of a combination of all those things that I had done throughout my career, kind of adding together, which is really nice. And I think one of the reasons we've been successful is because I and my partners are coming at this business from very disparate angles. Even I am coming at it from three or four different angles. But even then, I started writing books. I'm working on another book. I'm hoping to start working on some television stuff. And at every juncture, there's always the sort of the looming specter of failure. And.

We have 100 employees and a lot of revenue and a very fast growing company. But talking investors into giving you that next round of funding, you get 20 no's before you get that one yes. And selling another book to publishers after you've had a successful book, you get 20 no's before you get that one yes. And I think it'd be the same in everything, I think, in part because I. And we are going after bigger things. And it's easy to play in the lower leagues once you've conquered the lower leagues, but you'd have just as hard a time in the higher leagues. But this is what causes us to stretch. So I think where I personally have an interesting time is when, you know, I'm pitching this book around to publishers, and publishers say no. My instinct is to say, but I'm a good writer. And, you know, my mom says I can do anything. And, like, I am good, and this is my identity. And if I can't, you know, if no one wants my writing, then who am I? I'm like Zoolander when he freaks out, right?

But really the hard part, and despite writing about this, and despite knowing the psychology, it is still hard to take feedback and to take setbacks and to come into them prepared so that there's no, you know, that a no from a publisher actually can become something actionable for me to do, you know, to either change my pitch, change the, you know, the proposal or the story or the writing itself, or to change the way that I think about the publishing industry. But parsing that feedback in a way that doesn't leave me depressed for a weekend, not getting anything done, that's tough. So, I mean, I think it never ends.

And there's a great example of taking the internal piece of feedback. You could easily say, oh, traditional publishing's dead anyway. They don't know what they're doing. And instead you are asking all the questions you're asking about your proposal yourself. You know, I love what you said. That it's not that we become immune to failure and rejection and we don't care when it happens.

We do.

But that you are looking for feedback and continuing on your path. And I couldn't help but imagine back to the opening of Smart Cuts, the Super Mario Brothers video game. Like as you were describing, your non lateral moves and reaching for bigger and bigger opportunities and your non traditional approach even to working your way into a magazine like Wired. And it just strikes me as like finding those secret warp pipes and magic mushrooms.

You know.

For anyone who's listening that hasn't read. I opened the book with the story of my roommate who randomly turns out to be the guy who won the world championship for the fastest Super Mario time ever. And the thing about that, that actually gets back to what we're talking about with failure, is you have to be really good to be the best. The champion of Super Mario. But he did it by finding all the secret pipes, by not going through every level, but by jumping through clever ways of getting past a lot of levels at once. But it didn't mean that it was easy. I watched this guy for days walking through the living room practicing Super Mario, not realizing why he was practicing Super Mario, but watching, practicing for days and dying over and over and over again.

I think the better that you get at what you're doing.

The more likely it is that you're going to want to or that you should go, reach, stretch a little more where it's uncomfortable, where you're not going to be quite as good, you know. And if you can get to that last level of Super Mario in 30 seconds, you have to be really good to get there. But then you have to beat that next level. And actually once he. I'm sort of making up this metaphor as I go, but once he beat that, he tried to beat like Zelda in the fastest time. But I used to actually make fun of a friend of mine who was a skateboarder who he would never, he would land like one out of three tricks he would try. And he'd been skateboarding for 10 years and we'd make fun of him because we're like Billy, you never actually land on the skateboard. Like one out of three times you land on the skateboard. But then you noticed, we noticed year after year that he was not landing on the skateboard one out of three or two out of three times on harder and harder Tricks over time. So he would. He could land on the skateboard 100 times out of 100 for, like a dumb trick that I couldn't do. But he was always trying the, like, absurd stuff that was pushing him. And, you know, career wise, actually, you know, another back to the, you know, the current election. Think about what it must be like to be a successful lawyer, to be the first lady of the United States, to be married to the president and to, you know, beyond this world stage, world famous, to be the Secretary of state, to have been elected senator and won both times. And now it's the hardest thing you've ever done is getting your next job. Right. And Hillary Clinton could probably win as senator again, but she's going for something bigger. And she might not win, she might not get it, but she's pushing that new level. And it's like, how absurd must it be to be one of the most famous and successful people in the world? And yet you might not. You might get rejected by those 20 publishers, so to speak, you know, on your next gig. And I think it's.

You know, for me, when, again, I'm using way too many sort of mixed analogies, but the stuff that I'm working on, that is.

I always mix analogies too. That's always my feedback when I'm writing. They're using 10 metaphors in one sentence.

Hopefully the audience is smart, they can, they can decipher.

Yeah. These are our conversations. Smart guts. So, you know, keep up everything.

But, you know, but for me, if I was, if the next book that I'm writing, if the next thing that I'm trying to do with my business, if it was as easy as the last one, if it was just, you know, I was just sort of flat, like on the plateau, I'd be able to get, you know, make it all happen. It would be probably relatively straightforward to, you know, to sell smart cuts to.

But what I want to do is smarter cuts. Yeah. But what I want to do is something that's exponentially bigger, which means that it's going to be harder and, you know, and I might not be prepared. And some of the feedback that I might get might point to the things that I need to develop in order to get there. But, you know, I think anyone who's listening to this podcast, anyone that's reading your stuff, Jenny, is gonna be motivated to keep moving and to keep pushing forward and not to just stay in a comfortable, moderately successful place.

Yes. And that, that is actually, that in itself is an illusion that the comfortable place is somehow the easier one, as you say in the book. You say traditional paths are not just slow, they are no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate. That's something I think that so many people are coming to realize. And you know how they say, oh, the air is thinner at the top. And Tim Ferriss actually wrote about this in the four hour workweek that you might as well reach super high. And for, as you're saying, exponential growth and impact because maybe not as many people are going for that or trying to play at that level. Oh, yeah, go ahead. I want to hear what you're gonna say.

I was gonna say there's cool research. I can't remember where I wrote about it. There's cool research on how because we are competitive species, that when we're in competitive situations with fewer competitors, where it's more possible for us to be number one just by the law of numbers, that we actually will work more creatively. Will you engage more of our creative thinking when we do problem solving? Basically, we'll use lateral thinking, be more likely to do that. So they put, you know, kids in rooms to take competitive tests. Room of 10, room of 100, room of 1000. Same kids will do better in the room of 10 than in the room of a thousand. And it's because where there's fewer competitors, even if it's harder stuff, we will subconsciously push ourselves in a way that you don't. When there's just so many people, you're a cog in this machine. You're trying to start a restaurant in New York and there's a billion other ones, you're likely to be a lot less creative. It forces you psychologically to be more creative and you're more motivated to do that. When you're, as you say, sort of at the top, where the air is thin and there's fewer people working on something, doesn't mean the problem's easier, but it means that you will be psychologically pushed past your own boundaries.

That's really interesting. I think some degree of stubbornness is also helpful. I remember at ucla, people said, oh, you're just gonna be a small fish in a big pond. There was this feeder class for communications and it had 400 people and they said, only 10 get an A, so don't even bother for me. I was like, we can quote Mindy Kaling's book title, why not me? Why not be one of the 10? Why not go for it? And lo and behold, I got an A. By the end of the Quarter. Because I was just determined. Nobody can tell me what's possible or not. And that doesn't mean you get it, like you said. But why not me? Why not you? Why not reach for these? We would be so bored, like you said, if you were just going to write Smarter cuts. Smart cuts, too. You would be so bored. And I don't even think you could do it. You probably would.

Fold that and go double down on the TV show that you're working on.

Yeah, it's true.

One thing that you say that I found interesting is momentum, not experience, is the single biggest predictor of business and personal success. I'm biased because I also think momentum is critical and that when people get better at pivoting, the turns are not so sharp. And that. Actually, I think, you know, once someone's through a pivot point, what they really care about is just a sense of forward motion. But I'm curious to hear why you think that it's momentum and not experience is the biggest predictor of success.

Yeah, there's a couple of areas where this stands out, especially, by the way.

Sorry to interrupt. But the other, to throw another metaphor in the mix, I kept thinking of Tarzan when you were talking about your pivots and your career path, and that Tarzan also gets momentum or the monkey bars. So, anyway. Okay, continue.

Yeah, no, I mean, the momentum bit in Smart Cuts is really kind of building on a layer on top of the kind of the idea of what you flesh out in much better detail of pivoting, of being flexible.

There's a couple areas that illustrate why momentum can be a bigger predictor of success. And again, it kind of boils down to psychology. And I would say the caveat is it's a bigger predictor of success in.

Bigger, weightier, harder things, especially things that require support and help from other people. So things that, you know, I think the most important things that we can work on require collaboration or support in some form. You know, the reason we have businesses and not everyone is a solo. Every business is run by one solo person is because some things we need a lot of us to work on. So I would say those are the cases where momentum becomes really helpful, is when you need other people, because momentum is about that perception that motivates you and motivates people around you to want to support. So, example, if you look at two companies that have the exact same.

Revenue and.

Costs. So I actually wrote about this. I believe in the book, you ask an investor, there's company A and company B. Both companies have $20 million in revenue and $10 million in costs. So they're both making $10 million.

One company two years ago was making $1 million, and one company two years ago was making $5 million. Which company will you invest in? Which company is worth more? And an investor will say, the company that has gone from 1 to 20 versus is a better company than the company that's gone from 5 to 20. Even though they are right now at the same level, an investor will perceive the company that's growing faster even if tomorrow and for the rest of the company's lives, they stay at the same spot.

The company that had grown faster will be much more likely to get support from an investor, get an investment from an investor. At a certain point, if you're not growing at all, no one's going to invest in you. But comparative momentum gets people excited, and it is a signal that something's going right or going more right.

In someone's career, say, on a team. I talk about this concept of small wins a lot in the book and kind of in my speeches, that if you have a big goal, you break it down into a bunch of different steps. It makes it easier so that you get through those steps more quickly. And the risk of failure is low, because failing at a tiny step is actually not a big deal. You can't really call it failure.

And the same thing with lots of small pivots along the way, that if you break a course down into that, it's going to go faster by nature, for all these reasons, but also it's going to be more likely to keep you motivated, to keep going, because our brains get this little jolt of excitement. You know, the neurochemicals that we get from achieving something, even if it's small, are powerful. And achieving something small from a neurological perspective is just about the same amount of exciting as achieving something big.

In terms of those chemicals. And so having lots of small wins along the way will keep you motivated, keep you excited, and that helps, but it also helps those around you to want to support you as well. So if you hear the story of someone who's climbing very quickly or who has a lot of momentum or who's, you know, think about. Let's mix another metaphor. There's a race, a car race, and the car in the back that's been losing suddenly starts catching up. People get the most excited about that car versus the car that's just been in the lead for the whole time. You know, the sort of the momentum story of the gaining ground, the moving sort of acceleration That's a really exciting story. That's something that you pay attention to, that you want to support. And, you know, to accomplish anything, you know, in your career or in a business, you're gonna need other people. Like, unless you have this crazy, crazy life of, you know, living on elance and, you know, not talking to anyone, you know, being fine with the same, like, none of us are in that boat. Like, we all need other people, or we could use other people, other people's help in order to get somewhere. And so momentum will get people psychologically motivated to support you, even if you haven't made it. So I think it's really powerful and that the reason it's a predictor of success is one, if you're moving quickly, you can draw the dotted line to where you'll get to and, you know, and that predicts success. But also it's a predictor of success because it makes it more likely for other people to join you, support you, write about you. You can hire people a lot more effectively. You can get the press to cover you a lot more if you have something that's growing fast versus if you just have something that's big or smart.

I love how you break down how to get momentum, which is through those small wins. And that's the same reason I create such detailed to do lists is probably that exact dopamine hit that you described.

Yeah.

Last question. I wrote pivot to help people answer the question, what's next? I'm wondering if you have a smart cut for people to answer that question, or we could even throw in the power of lateral thinking. How does that relate to people trying to map their next move?

Yeah, I don't know that I have the best answer for this, but the exercise that I like to do is.

Kind of. And I do a lot of stuff on, like, sticky notes and whiteboards and paper, but sort of draw out where you are now and what sort of skills and perspectives and, you know, heuristics you have developed in your career or business, whatever it is that you have right now that you want to find that what's next sort of catalog what are all the things that you're bringing from that? And then the second list to the side of that is, what are all of the things kind of that come to mind in the world related or not to your field? And you can start with what's kind of adjacent to my field or what I'm doing, or you can just sort of make a random list. And then the exercise is, how might you Apply your unique skills, experience and perspective to these other things that are different. And this is again, often how innovation happens.

And lateral thinking happens is you apply the perspective or the toolkit from one thing to an area that hasn't really had that applied. And so this exercise of where could I go next? That's not straightforward. What would a sideways step be? And sometimes those can be pretty far afield. I talk once in a while about people with obscure career paths. Zoe Saldana, the Golden Globe winning actress, she's an avatar in Star Trek and all these great films. She was a ballerina, not an actress. And she ended up getting into acting because she joined the set of some movie that needed a ballerina. She applied her ballet skills to the film business, which is not an intuitive move, but it actually kind of makes sense. And that was her entry point, and she was providing something that a regular auditioner couldn't. So what are the skills that you have? And if, say, for example, I write for books and magazines can make a list of how I could apply that writing skill, and the top of the list might be television or theater or other sort of writing things. But it might also be there might be other industries well outside of what I think of as writing, that I could apply the same thinking that I do now and become a game changer. So that's sort of the exercise that I would do, is mapping that out. And just it's almost like a brainstorm of if I had to get a job as a pit crew boss for a Ferrari pit crew team using what I have now, how could I apply what I have to that? And that kind of exercise will open up, you know, other veins of thinking that might get you somewhere. And it's also kind of fun to daydream.

I love that.

I recommend.

Oh, I love the going totally sideways, like picking some really different career and asking how your skills could apply. Shane, this has been awesome. Thank you so much. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Everything's just at my website, shanesnow.com kind of find everything there.

Awesome. And make sure to grab your copy of Smart the Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking. Shane, thank you so much for being on the Pivot podcast.

Thank you so much. This is so fun.

All right, that wraps up this episode of the Pivot podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And Pivot is officially out, so grab your copy wherever books are sold. Even better, tell a friend and leave a review on Amazon Reviews. Help other readers decide whether to purchase a copy, and it helps build a lot of momentum in these early days of the launch. Thank you all so much in advance. I couldn't do this without you.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates, and by signing up for PivotList, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.