It’s the kind of puzzle in which the most elegant solution is revealed only when you attack it sideways. (Location 100)
(in this case: it’s that you can only help one person). (Location 101)
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. (Location 104)
“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.” (Location 132)
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. (Location 140)
30”)—kids who quit PhD programs and investment banking jobs to live on ramen and build things that could change the world. (Location 145)
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. (Location 150)
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. (Location 192)
Good fortune and talent are both ingredients of success, but like any recipe, they can be substituted with clever alternatives. The one irreplaceable ingredient I’ve found, however, is work. This book is not a how-to guide, nor is it for people who don’t want to work hard or who want to build easy businesses. (Location 212)
Too many of us place our hopes and dreams in the unreliable hands of luck, but the world’s most rapidly successful people take luck into their own hands (even though many are too humble to say so). (Location 215)
A strange thing has been happening in the United States for nearly 300 years. For some reason, our presidents are younger than our senators. (Location 236)
It gets even more interesting when we look at the amount of time these men spent climbing up the political ladder. The ten oldest presidents—the ones who bring our age average up—held a federal office for nine years,* or less than two Senate terms. (Location 268)
executives, “overnight” movie stars, and top-selling products have outrun their peers by acting more (Location 278)
Bigger or Better illustrates an interesting fact: people are generally willing to take a chance on something if it only feels like a small stretch. (Location 301)
The players eliminated resistance by breaking the big challenge (acquire something valuable like a TV) into a series of easier, repeatable challenges (make a tiny trade). (Location 306)
When the ladder became inefficient, they hacked it. And that is what made them successful so quickly. The key to Bigger or Better, in other words, is the “or.” (Location 322)
Companies that pivot—that is, switch business models or products—while on the upswing tend to perform much better than those that stay on a single course. The 2011 Startup Genome Report of new technology companies states that, “Startups that pivot once or twice raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely.” (Location 334)
The common pattern among these fastest-rising US presidents’ journeys is that, like the BYU students, they didn’t parlay up a linear path. They climbed various ladders of success and then switched to the presidential ladder. (Location 398)
circumvented the system to get to the top speaks to what’s wrong with our conventional wisdom of paying dues and climbing the ladder. Hard work and luck are certainly ingredients of success, but they’re not the entire recipe. (Location 472)
It’s not just how presidents get to the top. It’s how CEOs and comedians and racecar drivers hone their skills and make it in the big leagues. (Location 483)
When Jimmy ended his three-minute bit, the audience clapped politely. True to his reputation, Michaels didn’t laugh. Not once. Jimmy went home and awaited word. (Location 532)
If you don’t live under a rock, you probably know that Jimmy Fallon eventually became one of comedy’s fastest-rising icons and the host of the prestigious Tonight Show by age 38. (Location 538)
The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach (Location 580)
History, it turns out, is full of people who’ve been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway. Indeed, (Location 587)
There was still one more ingredient, the one that makes the difference between rapid-rising protégés who soar and those who melt their wings and crash. (Location 598)
between the Ferrari routine and their own. The pit crew meticulously planned out every possible scenario of what could go wrong during a handover and practiced each scenario until it became habit; (Location 623)
Ferrari pit crews had a dedicated overseer who ran the show. This overseer, often called a “lollipop man,” would stand back to watch and direct the operation holistically. (Location 628)
The statistics showed that businesspeople who were mentored in the workplace tended to achieve slightly more at work, on average, than those who didn’t. (Location 649)
In fact, one-on-one mentoring in which an organization formally matched people proved to be nearly as worthless as a person having not been mentored at (Location 652)
All those expensive mentorship programs that corporations put on to smash strangers together in the hopes of increased success are basically just rolling dice. (Location 661)
They managed to build an organic bond with the Formula 1 pit crews. By the time the handover problems had been fixed, the relationship between the doctors and racers had developed beyond what Elliott and Goldman originally envisioned. (Location 662)
Business owner Charlie Kim, founder of Next Jump and one of my own mentors, calls this vulnerability. It’s the key, he says, to developing a deep and organic relationship that leads to journey-focused mentorship and not just a focus on practice. (Location 676)
The troubling thing about all these mentorship stories so far is they seem to depend heavily on luck. Chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin didn’t seek out a master to train him; one found him in the park. (Location 684)
Some people are naturally good at making this work. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, studied and stole moves from master retailers fabulously well. He openly admitted it. “Most everything I’ve done, I’ve copied from someone else,” he said. (Location 696)
It toughened him up. She made him rehearse his voice impressions with his back turned; if she couldn’t recognize Jimmy’s characters with her eyes closed, she cut them from the act. (Location 714)
The difference was how much the feedback caused a person to focus on himself rather than the task. (Location 992)
but because a high-pressure feedback barrage tends to make us self-conscious. We get stuck inside our own heads. (Location 999)
Crucially, experts tended to be able to turn off the part of their egos that took legitimate feedback personally when it came to their craft, and they were confident enough to parse helpful feedback from incorrect feedback. Meanwhile novices psyched themselves out. They needed encouragement and feared failure. (Location 1004)
The tough part about negative feedback is in separating ourselves from the perceived failure and turning our experiences into objective experiments. But when we do that, feedback becomes much more powerful. (Location 1006)
The Silicon Valley mantra “fail often” actually has a second part to it. More often than not, Valley startups will say, “fail fast and fail often.” This gets at the principle of rapid feedback. But failing implies a finality, a funeral, an amen. And according to The Second City, that’s not necessary. (Location 1017)
(1) it gives them rapid feedback; (2) it depersonalizes the feedback; and (3) it lowers the stakes and pressure, so students take risks that force them to improve. (Location 1020)
hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms. (Location 1176)
searching for the least wasteful way to learn something or level up, which is what DHH did. (Location 1182)
The mentality behind Rails caught on. People started building add-ons, so that others wouldn’t have to reinvent the process of coding common things like website sign-up forms or search tools. They called these “gems” and shared them around. Each contribution saved the next programmer work. (Location 1204)
Rails translated what Twitter’s programmers wanted to tell all those computer transistors to do—with relatively little effort. (Location 1214)
building off of the work of great thinkers before him. (Location 1217)
Memorization of facts and figures is the primary culprit. What we really need, he says, is to teach kids to use tools that do math for us. (Location 1244)
People get upset about it. The primary argument against calculators is a reasonable one: kids need to learn the underlying math, not just push buttons. (Location 1247)
This is what that MIT mathematician Seymour Papert calls constructionism, or learning by making and manipulating objects. It’s incredibly effective for concept mastery and recall, and it’s almost always aided by platforms. (Location 1269)
“We want students to recognize when they encounter a math-related problem that might well be easily solvable using tools including calculators and computers.” (Location 1289)
What’s important today is knowing how to use platforms to retrieve the information we need, whether it’s the capital of Botswana or the result of 124,502 divided by 8.* (Location 1303)
In an age of platforms, creative problem solving is more valuable than computational skill. (Location 1305)
For example, today’s children should be taught to use Excel spreadsheets—and all their calculations—instead of times tables. (Location 1312)
By teaching tools and problem solving instead of memorization and by hiring only teachers with master’s degrees, Finland created a higher educational platform that gave its kids an advantage. That’s how its school system shot to number one.* (Location 1347)
That’s just the way people did it. Instead, DHH compressed what normally takes five to seven years of hard work into 18 months of smart work. “Once you stop thinking you have to follow the path that’s laid out,” he says, “you can really turn up the speed.” (Location 1373)
More innovation, creativity, and art per person happens in large metro areas than other places; what Jonah Lehrer calls “urban friction” (Location 1398)
Platforms are how Twitter could build Twitter in mere days while running a separate company. (Location 1404)
There are two ways to catch a wave: exhausting hard work—paddling—and pattern recognition—spotting a wave early and casually drifting to the sweet spot. (Location 1510)
Sonny Moore seemed to have that pattern recognition; he spotted the rise of social networks and became a power user, ultimately setting himself up to front an emerging band. (Location 1513)
When Sonny recognized that the end was near, he got off the wave. (Location 1515)
This explains how so many inexperienced companies and entrepreneurs beat the norm and build businesses that disrupt established players. (Location 1540)
to compete is learn how to pick out conditions. (Location 1546)
On the other hand, sometimes the biggest waves form out of seemingly nowhere. A superwave can show up on a regular surf day when random smaller waves align. When that happens, the only people who can possibly ride it are the ones who actually went to the beach that day. The ones who actually got in the water. (Location 1550)
Like Twitter, as we learned in chapter 4, both Gmail and AdSense started off as side projects. (Location 1556)
Later researchers added that first movers receive outsize branding benefits, that a reputation for being “the original,” often enjoys a marketing advantage over copycats. (Think Tylenol versus generic acetaminophen. Or Apple’s iPad versus other tablets that came after it.) (Location 1572)
we ought to expect the first mover to win a disproportionate amount of the time. Except if we did, we’d be wrong. (Location 1576)
Unlike coloring-book waves, beach breaks are not composed of perfectly identical troughs and crests. They’re intermittent, choppy, highly variable. (Location 1602)
“Before my heats at the Open, I watched the lineup and figured out which peaks were the most consistent with good waves,” she told me. (Location 1611)
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn, then, that being the first mover is not much of an advantage in business either. (Location 1617)
“Pioneers often miss the best opportunities, which are obscured by technological and market uncertainties. In effect, early entrants may acquire the ‘wrong’ resources, which prove to be of limited value as the market evolves.” (Location 1619)
Startlingly, the research showed that 47 percent of first movers failed. (Location 1624)
By contrast, early leaders—companies that took control of a product’s market share after the first movers pioneered them—had only an 8 percent failure rate. (Location 1626)
American plains, first movers have to create their own wagon trails, but later movers can follow in the ruts. (Location 1628)
getting regulatory approvals, and making mistakes—getting feedback and adjusting. (Location 1630)
The pioneers clear the way in terms of market education and infrastructure and learn the hard lessons, so the next guys can steal what works, learn objectively from the first movers’ failures, and spend more effort elsewhere. (Location 1631)
AOL—have been fast followers in their respective spaces. As entrepreneurship scholar Steve Blank points out in his article for Business Insider, “You’re Better Off Being a Fast Follower Than an Originator,” (Location 1635)
explain that when market and technology growth are smooth and steady, the first mover gets the inertia and an advantage. When industry change is choppy, the fast follower—the second mover—gets the benefits of the first mover’s pioneering work and often catches a bigger wave, unencumbered. (Location 1644)
Sonny actively experimented with trends when they were still early—the Web, social networks, scream-singing, EDM—sticking his toe in different waters until he recognized incoming waves. (Location 1706)
That’s like saying if a surfer treads water in the same spot for long enough, a wave will come; it certainly happens to some people, once in a while, but it’s not the most effective strategy for success. Paradoxically, it’s actually a lazier move. (Location 1709)
if he’s gripping his clubs wrong the whole time. (Location 1712)
“I think that being able to pick and read good waves is almost more important than surfing well,” (Location 1714)
And if you’re in the sweet spot when that superwave does come, Sonny says, “It’s pure energy.” (Location 1718)
WHICH IS EASIER—MAKING FRIENDS with a thousand people one by one or making friends with someone who already has a thousand friends? Which is faster—going door to door with a message or broadcasting the message to a million homes at once? (Location 1780)
Now imagine that a friend of yours shows up. She happens to know everybody at the party and she decides to take you around and meet everyone whom you should know. You soon meet a dozen people, with very little effort. Your friend is a superconnector.* (Location 1786)
In three months, half the island was listening to Radio Rebelde. (Location 1817)
But with radio, those outcasts could connect to the 5 million oppressed Cuban citizens who secretly shared the rebellion’s dissatisfaction, (Location 1827)
Radios don’t come with built-in fan bases. Uneducated farmers generally won’t put their lives in some foreigner’s hands just because he says to on the radio. (Location 1831)
Guevara became a successful superconnector not because he broadcast, but because he managed to build a relationship with the people. (Location 1833)
This is the classic Hollywood networking story: make friends with people who have connections and work them to your advantage. Be nice to them when you need them, then move on. (Location 1855)
He collaborated with bigger and better writers and directors and actors, from Harrison Ford to Michael Bay, and used their credibility (Sinatra style) and networks to work his way up the Hollywood chain. (Location 1857)
Dr. Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says this is because J. J. Abrams is “a giver,” a rarity in an industry full of takers. No good TV show or film is made by one person, but whereas Hollywood bigshots are known (Location 1863)
“It just involves a focus on acting in the interests of others, such as by giving help, providing mentoring, sharing credit, or making connections for others.” (Location 1869)
in addition to his penchant for mystery. (Location 1871)
Wars. Initially, Abrams helped out better-connected people than himself, and doing so helped him superconnect. (Location 1874)
That’s how to tell if someone is a giver, or a taker in giver’s clothing. “If you do it only to succeed,” Grant says, in the long run, “it probably won’t work.” (Location 1875)
“Superconnecting is about learning what people need, then talking about ‘how do we create (Location 1888)
something of value.’” (Location 1888)
At the time, the convention was for startups like Mint to acquire users by spending heavily on advertising. But Mint tried something different. (Location 1896)
It started a blog on which it posted helpful articles about money management and savings. (Location 1898)
then it found a way to tap into a large broadcast channel: social bookmarking. (Location 1900)
Some of the most influential Digg and Reddit users fell in love with the Mint blog, which gave them content that would make them look good to their own fans. (Location 1906)
Mystic energy isn’t the secret to the success of Grant’s givers; just as we learn from Mint, when we give and teach, we build up fan bases that become more likely to support us. (Location 1911)
Bear Vasquez has posted more than 1,300 videos now, inspired by the runaway success of “Double Rainbow.” But most of them have been completely ignored. (Location 1971)
Life has stopped moving forward. When businesspeople cash out big, says wealth coach Susan Bradley, “Momentum has been building for a while. Then there’s this moment that it’s over, and all the champagne is gone, and there’s this feeling of this drop into an abyss. (Location 2005)
What do you do after walking on the moon? became a gigantic speed bump. (Location 2018)
As Newton pointed out, an object at rest tends to stay at rest. (Location 2022)
The answer, it turned out, is simply progress. A sense of forward motion. Regardless how small. (Location 2028)
@Oreo’s tweet was clever. It was the most popular tweet of the event, in fact. But for perspective, 35,000 people is only three hundredths of 1 percent of the 108.69 million people who watched the Super Bowl. (Location 2061)
Clios. Not because the ad was amazingly designed. And not because more potential Oreo buyers saw the tweet versus Oreo’s Super Bowl TV commercial. But because Oreo managed to harness momentum with it and smother the insular advertising industry with its story. (Location 2065)
Hardly anyone saw the tweet itself, but an enormous number of people heard about it later. And people within the advertising and PR industries didn’t stop hearing about it. (Location 2075)
Though they were both operating at breakeven with the same revenues, investors valued Company B at double the price of Company A, simply because Company B had more momentum. (Location 2105)
they will take bigger bets on companies with fast-growing user bases even if the companies are bleeding money. (Location 2107)
It quickly became YouTube’s most-watched. Phan decided to capitalize on the wave by posting a tutorial of how to re-create Gaga’s makeup from the video. (Location 2138)
“I would study the algorithm of YouTube’s front page” for months, Phan says. “I noticed that they only would post up videos with a lot of views [on the home page], and you only have 2 days to capitalize off of all these views.” (Location 2140)
This was the tiny nudge that got the snowball rolling. And, as the video hung on the homepage for those extra days, a writer from BuzzFeed noticed it and wrote a story about it. (Location 2144)
Her unknown older work benefited from the spillover. Scores of the BuzzFeed viewers subscribed to Phan’s channel, eager for more videos. Phan upgraded her camera and started recording. (Location 2149)
And by constantly feeding them with great new content, she transformed her video series into a career and a company. (Location 2152)
AS WE’VE LEARNED FROM Michelle Phan’s story, the secret to harnessing momentum is to build up potential energy, so that unexpected opportunities can be amplified. (Location 2155)
This is how innovators like Sal Khan (who published 1,000 math lessons online before being discovered by Bill Gates, who thrust him into the spotlight and propelled him to build a groundbreaking digital school called Khan Academy), (Location 2157)
“Success is like a lightning bolt,” Phan once declared in an interview with Mashable. “It’ll strike you when you least expect it, and you just have to keep the momentum going.” (Location 2178)
The answer, they discovered, was primarily just warmth. NICUs kept premature babies nice and toasty. Sure, they kept the kids clean and sterile, too, and they kept track of heart rate and respiration and other things. (Location 2213)
one for the baby and one for a hot pad that’s heated in a small box—something like a toaster. (Location 2220)
SOMETIMES BIGGER IS NOT better. Sometimes more of a good thing is too much. Sometimes the smartest next step is a step back. (Location 2233)
This teaches us something important about breakthrough success: simplification often makes the difference between good and amazing. (Location 2236)
The key feature of disruptively innovative products is cost savings (either time or money). (Location 2245)
But the key ingredient behind the scenes of every disruptive product is simplification. (Location 2246)
But those who hack world-class success tend to be the ones who can focus relentlessly on a tiny number of things. In other words, to soar, we need to simplify. (Location 2250)
to launch a small website called TheWirecutter, a gadget-review site that takes simplicity seriously. (Location 2259)
And then he’ll go surfing. Rather than worrying about inventories and shipping and cost-of-goods-sold and all the other headaches of a typical electronics business, his website sends you to Amazon. (Location 2263)
US presidents do the same thing. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” President Barack Obama told Michael Lewis for his October 2012 Vanity Fair cover story. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” (Location 2281)
Simplification is why Steve Jobs’s Magic Mouse doubled Apple’s mouse market share overnight. With zero buttons (the whole thing is a button, actually) and a touchscreen glass top, the mouse is both pretty and intuitive—a huge departure from the conventional “innovative” mouse arms race, which amounted to adding more bulk and more buttons. (Location 2292)
Here’s a fact: Creativity comes easier within constraints. For example, what if I asked you to do the following exercise: (Location 2301)
Constraints make the haiku one of the world’s most moving poetic forms. They give us boundaries that direct our focus and allow us to be more creative. (Location 2308)
“Less is more” and “small is beautiful” are common aphorisms in Finland, and Finnish schools injected them into the curriculum. (Location 2318)
“Walk into the typical high school in America. What do you see? The first thing you see? A wall full of trophies. Are they academic trophies? Hell no. They are athletic trophies,” Wagner says. “We don’t celebrate academic achievements,” Wagner says. “We celebrate athleticism, and I think it’s sending all the wrong messages to kids.” (Location 2320)
Students start learning vocations like engineering and business as soon as they hit high school. (Location 2328)
Their hard practice is targeted, simplified. This is the art of being a first-class focuser. (Location 2330)
Geniuses and presidents strip meaningless choices from their day, so they can simplify their lives and think. Inventors and entrepreneurs ask, How could we make this product simpler? The answer transforms good to incredible. (Location 2332)
But,” he told Wired magazine in 2012, “it seemed clear that we would send people to Mars.” That excited him. It would be an important step for humanity—he was convinced. However, when he checked NASA’s website, he found no Mars mission. (Location 2366)
Musk was piqued. He had built two businesses in an industry ruled by Moore’s law, the principle that says technology gets exponentially cheaper and more powerful over time. Space flight ought to be getting easier, he thought. (Location 2369)
“To make life multiplanetary,” he said, as often as he had occasion to talk about it. To ensure the continuation of “human consciousness.” (Location 2380)
SpaceX’s goal of getting to Mars would mean necessarily reducing the cost per kilogram of stuff launched into space from thousands of dollars to tens of dollars. (Location 2388)
A lot of R&D goes into the development of the various components used in rocket engines, so companies like Lockheed and Boeing charged a premium for them, even though the parts themselves didn’t cost much to make—sort of like drugmakers do with medication. (Location 2390)
SpaceX manufactured its own at a fraction of the cost. The happy side-benefit of this was greater control over inventory, as aerospace delivery times for parts from manufacturers were notoriously bad. (Location 2394)
making the various stages of his rocket the same diameter, with the same engines. Whereas most rockets used fuel tanks of diminishing fatness (the Shuttle, for example, had two small boosters and one big booster, which required different tools, parts, and procedures to build and maintain), (Location 2396)
“by at least a factor of two, and perhaps as much as three or four compared to similar vehicles elsewhere. (Location 2400)
Musk realized that in order to gain support for his big vision, he would himself have to step into the public spotlight. In other words, he had to get people to believe. So the geek brushed up on speaking skills and started talking big. This-is-the-future-of-mankind big. He did television appearances and magazine interviews. He told the world he was going to die on Mars. (Location 2414)
It was basically a modem. With it, Grammatis’s team hoped to use preexisting satellite networks to control SpaceX spacecraft. Essentially, hooking in to an existing platform that could save the company time and money. (Location 2434)
If you think “I’m gonna connect the entire human race to the Internet” sounds crazy, you’re right. When you realize that he may have already done it for half a million people before age 30, Grammatis’s story becomes a mini case study of the smartcut that makes Elon Musk world class. (Location 2453)
The secret sounds a bit crazy. Says Teller, “It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.” (Location 2464)
“One is the low-variance, no surprises version of improvement. The production model, if you will. You tend to get ‘10 percent,’ in order of magnitude, kind of improvements.” (Location 2467)
“In order to get really big improvements, you usually have to start over in one or more ways. You have to break some of the basic assumptions and, of course, you can’t know ahead of time. It’s by definition counterintuitive.” (Location 2469)
10x progress is built on bravery and creativity instead. Working smarter. (Location 2471)
Elon Musk calls this “getting to first principles.” In the 1800s 10 percent style thinking for faster personal transportation translated into trying to breed stronger horses. (Location 2477)
wherein competitors usurp while we think we’re being innovative. (Location 2481)
“You can trade in a ton of effort in exchange for just the right perspective,” Teller says. He uses the analogy of trying to shoot an arrow through an orchard. “You could shoot an awful lot of arrows trying to get all the way through the orchard. But the really, the best thing to do would be to move around until you got the trees lined up. That process of not spending all of your time shooting the arrows, but trying to reframe the problem . . . is really about bravery, about creativity.” (Location 2482)
At a certain point, adding more competitors dampened the effect (if you’re competing against a thousand kids or ten thousand, it doesn’t make much of a difference), but with few competitors, students pushed themselves harder, without even realizing it. (Location 2494)
Perhaps more interesting, however, is the business research on companies that aim high philosophically. (Location 2503)
expected. Brands with lofty purposes beyond making profits wildly outperformed the S&P 500. From 2001 to 2011, an investment in the 50 most idealistic brands—the ones opting for the high-hanging purpose and not just low-hanging profits—would have been 400 percent more profitable than shares of an S&P index fund. (Location 2506)
surprisingly willing to support big ideals and big swings. (Location 2509)
But not every big dream gains followers or comes true. Just because you’re righteous doesn’t mean people will support you. You have to motivate them. You have to tell provocative stories. (Location 2511)
People who realized that striving toward a massive goal and rallying people around a rethinking of life’s rules and expectations and conventions were actually easier than working for small change. (Location 2518)
The thing about giant swings is they come with increased odds of failure. (Location 2536)
The SpaceX team on the factory floor didn’t know this yet. But they knew something was wrong. For several minutes, the black screens stayed black. Mission Control’s trailer door remained shut. The members of the press who watched on site murmured. (Location 2540)
The man who friends describe as “100 brains inside one head,” who “ummed” and “ahhed” and bobbed when giving impromptu speeches, spoke clearly and resolutely. (Location 2547)
“Generally speaking, if you’re gonna make something ten percent better than the way things currently are, you better be great in sales and marketing, because you’re gonna have to talk people into changing their behavior for a very marginal increase in value,” (Location 2570)
“If, on the other hand, you make something ten times better for a large number of people—you really produce huge amounts of new value—the money’s gonna come find you. Because it would be hard not to make money if you’re really adding that much value.” (Location 2572)
Revolutionary 10x Thinking might ask a more fundamental question, such as, “Why continue to make rockets that only work once?” (Or, as Musk is fond of asking, “Would America have been colonized if they had to burn the ships when they got there?”) (Location 2582)
SpaceX is on its way to not just 10x, but potentially 100x decrease in the cost of getting to space. (Location 2586)