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Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series)

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Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series)

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Right now, there is another asteroid striking our world, already extinguishing the large and lumbering, already clearing a giant path for the quick and nimble. Our name for this asteroid is “exponential technology,” and even if this name is unfamiliar, its impact is not.

exponential technology refers to any technology accelerating on an exponential growth curve—that is, doubling in power on a regular basis (semiannually, annually, etc.)—with computing being the most familiar example.

Yet, in stark contrast, there is a new breed of small, furry mammal starting to emerge. These mammals are today’s entrepreneurs—the ones using radically accelerating technology to transform products, services, and industries.

Right now, and for the first time ever, a passionate and committed individual has access to the technology, minds, and capital required to take on any challenge.

the world’s biggest problems are now the world’s biggest business opportunities.

the Six Ds of Exponentials: digitalization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization.

once a process or product transitions from physical to digital, it becomes exponentially empowered.

In simple terms, a disruptive technology is any innovation that creates a new market and disrupts an existing one.

disrupt yourself or be disrupted by someone else.

there are still the hard costs of the phone with which to contend. Democratization is what happens when those hard costs drop so low they becomes available and affordable to just about everyone.

Democratization is the end of our exponential chain reaction, the logical result of demonetization and dematerialization.

In his book Exponential Organizations, Singularity University global ambassador and former head of innovation at Yahoo Salim Ismail defines an exponential organization as one whose impact (or output)—because of its use of networks or automation and/or its leveraging of the crowd—is disproportionally large compared to its number of

In his book The Prime Movers,1 psychologist Edwin Locke identifies the core mental traits of great business leaders—Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Walt Disney, and J. P. Morgan, to name only a few. While a number of variables contributed to their success, Locke found one key trait they all shared: vision.

the most important telltale factor is the development of a simple and elegant user interface—a gateway of effortless interaction that plucks a technology from the hands of the geeks and deposits it with the entrepreneurs. In fact, it was exactly this kind of interface that transformed the Internet.

The creation of a simple and elegant user interface gives entrepreneurs the ability to harness this new tool to solve problems, start businesses, and most importantly, experiment.

Synthetic biology56 is built around the idea that DNA is essentially software—nothing more than a four-letter code arranged in a specific order. Much like with computers, the code drives the machine. In biology, the order of the code governs the cell’s manufacturing processes, instructing it to make specific proteins and such. But, as with all software, DNA can be reprogrammed. Nature’s original code can be swapped out for new, human-written code. We can co-opt the machinery of life, telling it to produce—well, whatever we can think of.

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Climbing Mount Bold is not just technologically difficult, it’s also incredibly psychologically difficult.

But not every goal is the same. “We found that if you want the largest increase in motivation and productivity,” says Latham, “then big goals lead to the best outcomes. Big goals significantly outperform small goals, medium-sized goals, and vague goals. It comes down to attention and persistence—which are two of the most important factors in determining performance. Big goals help focus attention, and they make us more persistent. The result is we’re much more effective when we work, and much more willing to get up and try again when we fail.”

“You have to believe in what you’re doing,” continues Latham. “Big goals work best when there’s an alignment between an individual’s values and the desired outcome of the goal. When everything lines up, we’re totally committed—meaning we’re paying even more attention, are even more resilient, and are way more productive as a result.”

isolation stimulates risk taking, encouraging ideas weird and wild and acting as a counterforce to organizational inertia.

“The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure, and this means having a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from mistakes is critical.

Enter agile design, an ideology that emphasizes fast feedback loops.9 Instead of launching a finely polished gem, companies now release a “minimum viable product,” then get immediate feedback from customers, incorporate that feedback into the next iteration, release a slightly upgraded version, and repeat. Instead of design cycles that last years, the agile process takes weeks and produces results directly in line with consumer expectations. This is rapid iteration.

Reid Hoffman famously said, ‘If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’ ”

What’s more, this isn’t the only issue with money as a motivator. Money, it now appears, is only an effective motivator until our basic biological needs are met, with a little left over for discretionary spending. This is why, in America, as the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman recently discovered, when you plot happiness and life satisfaction alongside income, they overlap until $70,000—i.e., the point at which money stops being a major issue—then wildly diverge.12 Once we pay people enough so that meeting basic needs is no longer a constant cause for concern, extrinsic rewards lose their effectiveness, while intrinsic rewards—meaning internal, emotional satisfactions—become far more critical. Three in particular stand out: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy is the desire to steer our own ship. Mastery is the desire to steer it well. And purpose is the need for the journey to mean something.

The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive (our survival needs) or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to fill our life with purpose.

Combine the rules for isolation and rapid iteration discussed in this section with the value-aligned big goals from the last and you end up with a great recipe for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

“Failure isn’t a badge of shame. It is a rite of

Creating a company with autonomy, mastery, and purpose as key values means creating a company built for speed. And this is no longer optional.

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.”

Technically, flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. And you’ve probably had some experience with this state. If you’ve ever lost an afternoon to a great conversation or become so involved in a work project that all else was forgotten, then you’ve tasted the experience. Flow describes these moments of total absorption, when we become so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. All aspects of performance—mental and physical—go through the roof.

If you’re not incentivizing risk, you’re denying access to flow—which is the only way to keep pace in a breakneck world.

If creating more flow is the aim, then the emphasis falls on clear, not goals. Clarity gives us certainty. We know what to do and where to focus our attention while we are doing it. When goals are clear, metacognition is replaced by in-the-moment cognition, and the self stays out of the picture.

As a focusing mechanism, immediate feedback is something of an extension of clear goals. Clear goals tell us what we’re doing; immediate feedback tells us how to do it better.

If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the flow channel—the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch; not hard enough to make us snap.

Our final trigger, Always say “yes, and … ,” means interactions should be additive more than argumentative. The goal here is the momentum, togetherness, and innovation that comes from ceaselessly amplifying one another’s ideas and actions.

We’re biological organisms, and evolution is conservative by design. When a particular adaptation works, the basic design is repeated again and again. Flow most certainly works. As a result, our brains are hardwired for the experience. We are all designed for optimal performance—it’s a built-in feature of being human.

In each of our minds we have a line of credibility. When you first hear a new idea, you place it above or below this line. If you place it below, you dismiss it immediately, often as ridiculous. If you place it above, you’re willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, follow it over time, and continue to make serial judgments. But we also have a line of super-credibility. When a new idea is born above this line, you accept it immediately and say, “Wow, that’s fantastic! How can I get involved?” The idea is so convincing that your mind accepts it as fact and your focus shifts from probabilities to implications.

Having the smartest folks on the planet pound on your vision can help turn dank coal into glittering diamonds.

“Big goals only increase motivation,” explains Latham,14 “when the person setting those goals is confident in their ability to achieve them. This means breaking big goals apart into achievable subgoals.”

That story of stone soup comes from an old folktale that eventually became a children’s book. I heard it in college and it’s never left me. In fact, I’ve come to think of making stone soup as the only way an entrepreneur can succeed. The stones are, of course, your big bold ideas; the contributions of the villagers, the capital, resource, and intellectual support offered by investors and strategic partners. Everyone who adds a small amount to your stone soup is in fact helping to make your dreams come true.

This is the same kind of passion that makes stone soup. Passionate people are deeply creative in seeking out and pulling in the resources they need to pursue their passion, but it goes further than that. “People who pursue their passions inevitably create beacons that attract others who share their vision,” says Hagel. “Few of these beacons are consciously created; they are by-products of pursuing one’s passion. Passionate people share their creations widely, leaving tracks for others to find them.”

You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. The same is true for ideas.

The maxims presented below are the ones that have worked for me, but that’s no guarantee they’ll work for you. So come up with your own. Borrow from anyone you like. The point isn’t to produce pretty pictures covered with inspirational quotes. The point is to trust your history. Plumb your past to plot your future. Start collecting mind hacks by examining your own life and seeing what strategies consistently worked along the way. Turn those strategies into your laws.

Why is this so important? Because fear is hell on decision making. As threat levels begin to rise, the brain starts limiting our options. The fight-or-flight response is the extreme version of this story. When we are confronting mortal terror, our choices are literally limited to three: fight, flight, or freeze. But the same thing starts to happen with lesser fears. As Emory University neuroeconomist Gregory Berns wrote in an article for the New York Times:19 “Fear prompts retreat. It is the antipode of progress.” And that’s why it’s important to write down your own laws. You’re essentially creating an external hard drive for when your internal hard drive is guaranteed to crash.

When someone says no, it’s often because they’re not empowered to say yes. In many organizations, the only person who can say yes is the one atop the food chain.

Stuff goes wrong. Expect it, learn from it, fix it—that’s how remarkable happens.

Humans don’t grok scale. Our brains evolved to process a simpler world, where everything we encountered was local and linear.

1. Risk taking and risk mitigation 2. Rapid iteration and ceaseless experimentation 3. Passion and purpose 4. Long-term thinking 5. Customer-centric thinking 6. Probabilistic thinking 7. Rationally optimistic thinking 8. Reliance on first principles, aka fundamental truths

And this is one of the first things one learns from Musk’s example—he is relentless in his pursuit of the bold and, the bigger point, totally unfazed by scale. When he couldn’t get a job, he started a company. When Internet commerce stalled, he reinvented banking. When he couldn’t find decent launch services for his Martian greenhouse, he went into the rocket business. And as a kicker, because he never lost interest in the problem of energy, he started both an electric car and a solar energy company.

Plus, doing anything big and bold is difficult, and at two in the morning for the fifth night in a row, when you need to keep going, you’re only going to fuel yourself from deep within. You’re not going to push ahead when it’s someone else’s mission. It needs to be yours.

“Physics training is a good framework for reasoning,” explains Musk. “It forces you to boil things down to their most fundamental truths and then connect those truths in a way that lets you understand reality.

It should be pointed out that first principle thinking works so well because it gives us a proven strategy for editing out complexity, while also allowing entrepreneurs to sidestep the tide of popular opinion. “[People] will do things because others are doing them,” Musk explains, “because there is a trend, because they see everyone moving in one direction and decide that’s the best direction to go. Sometimes this is correct, but sometimes this will take you right off a cliff. Thinking in first principles protects you from these errors.”

Musk, like all the billionaires in this section, fights back. He consistently strives to broaden his view by thinking in probabilities. “Outcomes are usually not deterministic,” he says, “they’re probabilistic. But we don’t think that way. The popular definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result—that’s only true in a highly deterministic situation. If you have a probabilistic situation, which most situations are, then if you do the same thing twice, it can be quite reasonable to expect a different result.”

This difference is key. Thinking in probabilities—this business has a 60 percent chance of success—rather than deterministically—if I do A and B, then C will definitely happen—doesn’t just guard against oversimplification; it further protects against the brain’s inherent laziness.

done. So even if the money was lost, it was still worth trying.” Passion, probabilities, and first principles aren’t just watchwords for Musk. He also backs up his words with deeds: “Between 2007 and 2009, I was in a world of hurt. Everything was going wrong. In 2008, we had the third sequential failure of the Falcon 1 rocket, Tesla couldn’t raise financing because of the financial market meltdown, and Morgan Stanley couldn’t honor the deal they had with SolarCity, since they were running out of money as well. There was a time when it looked like all three companies could fail. Then, on top of all of that, I was going through a divorce. That sucked. I spent my last dollar saving Tesla in 2008, and I actually went negative. I had to borrow money to pay rent.”

Fun matters more because Branson employs it as strategy for thinking at scale—both as a fuel (i.e., a way of harnessing his passion) and as a first principle, assuming that if something is fun for him—like an airline that makes you say “Wow!”—then it’ll also be fun for everyone else. And just to make sure he’s right (also because it’s fun), Branson always conducts the experiment.

“Unless you’re customer-centric,” explains Branson, “you might be able to create something wonderful, but you’re not going to survive.

Make bold moves but make sure to have a way out if things go wrong.”

When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

“The way I think about it, if you want to invent, if you want to do any innovation, anything new, you’re going to have failures because you need to experiment. I think the amount of useful invention you do is directly proportional to the number of experiments you can run per week per month per year. So if you’re going to increase the number of experiments, you’re also going to increase the number of failures.

“Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional… . We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success.”

“It’s so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is hot,” says Bezos. “Instead, position yourself and wait for the wave to come to you. So then you ask, Position myself where? Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you’re missionary about. I tell people that when we acquire companies, I’m always trying to figure out: Is this person who leads this company a missionary or a mercenary? The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money. One of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries end up making more money than the mercenaries anyway. And so pick something that you are passionate about, that’s my number one piece of advice.”

“I have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999 percent of people is no. I think we need to be training people on how to change the world.”

“When I was a student at the University of Michigan,” he said, “I took this summer leadership course. Their slogan was: ‘Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That’s stuck with me all of these years. I know it sounds kind of nuts, but it’s often easier to make progress when you’re really ambitious. Since no one else is willing to try those things, you don’t have any competition. And you get all the best people, because the best people want to work on the most ambitious things. For this reason, I’ve come to believe that anything you imagine is probably doable. You just have to imagine it and work on

Our philosophy is that the things that people use often are really important to them and we think that over time, you can make money from those

“If you work for Larry and are not thinking 10x, don’t expect to keep your job for very long. That insanity-by-design is creating a one-upmanship that hasn’t been seen in the history of mankind. Larry’s campaign, if successful, will make Caesar, Napoleon, Columbus, the Wright Brothers, the Apollo 11 Mission, the Manhattan Project, and our Founding Fathers look limited in

“the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals.

Tasks are work. Crowdsourcing tasks means getting someone somewhere to do the work for you. In most cases, you pay only if you like the result. In other cases, you can specify what you’re willing to pay per task or let the crowd marketplace compete for your business. In this taxonomy, tasks come in two basic flavors: micro and macro.

Even better, Freelancer.com is only one of a myriad of macrotask sites. For a detailed list of the latest sites with examples of how to use them, please see www.AbundanceHub.com

problem. uTest (www.utest.com) provides a massive community of “professional testers” who run functional, usability, localization, load, and security tests on your code.

Launch when you are ready. Don’t create a false deadline for yourself.

Abraham Lincoln is famous for saying, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”

Think solutions and improvements, not explanations or specifications.

The lesson? Find your most enthusiastic fans and put them to work. They love helping, and their contribution can be invaluable.

Market segmentation matters. “It’s critical to craft your message for a specific audience,”

So here, our fourth lesson is the value of paid targeted advertising through platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Be a data-driven company. If the ads help your campaign raise more money than you’re spending on advertising, then go for it.

Online, no one can see what color you are, which gods you worship, how you dress, what your hair looks like, if you smoke or smell or smile too much. This anonymity allows people who wouldn’t normally sit on a park bench together to share deeply meaningful and potentially profitable experiences.

If your community can provide a legitimate release valve for people’s incredibly frustrated passion, you are unleashing one of the most potent forces in the history of the world.

As opposed to low-friction engagement, deep engagement requires building living bridges between members of your community. A living bridge means people are connecting with you and connecting with each other, and in ways that generate real emotions. This is critical. People join communities for the ideas; they stay for the emotions.

Publically holding people accountable for their performance creates interesting social dynamics. For competitive members, these dynamics inspire them to work harder to improve their spot on the leaderboard. For the less competitive, having a leaderboard is a great way to identify areas of expertise among community members.

An incentive competition is straightforward. Set a clear, measurable, and objective goal and offer a large prize to the first person to achieve it.

The American anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever

“The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner.”

Fortunately, this is not the case with small groups. With no bureaucracy, little to lose, and a passion to prove themselves, when it comes to innovation, small teams consistently outperform larger organizations. And incentive prizes are perfectly designed to harness this energy.

“Don’t think outside the box. Go box shopping. Keep trying on one after another until you find the one that catalyzes your thinking. A good box is like a lane marker on the highway. It’s a constraint that

In a world without constraints, most people take their time on projects and assume far fewer risks, while spending as much money as you’ll give them. They try to reach their goals in comfortable and conservative ways—which, of course, leads nowhere new. But this is another reason why incentive prizes are such effective change agents. When you tell someone that they have only a tenth the budget and a tenth the resources (or put conversely, you have to achieve 10x bigger results with the same resources—aka moonshot thinking), most people give up and say it can’t be done. A few venturesome entrepreneurs may decide to give it a shot, but if they are paying attention, they’ll understand from the outset that the same old way of solving the challenge will no longer work. The only option left to them is to throw out past experiences and preconditions and start with a clean sheet of paper. And this is exactly where serious innovation begins.

The time limit of a prize competition serves as another liberating constraint. In the pressure cooker of a race, with an ever-looming deadline, teams must quickly come to terms with the fact that the same old way won’t work. They’re forced to try something new, pick a path, right or wrong, and see what happens. Most teams fail, but with dozens or hundreds competing, does it really matter? If one team succeeds within the constraints, they’ve created a true breakthrough.

Disaster is a motivator because empathy is a motivator, and empathy is never higher than when the same disaster movie has been playing on TV for over a month. But my point here isn’t about capitalizing on misfortune, it’s about capturing momentum.

The only constant is change. 2. The rate of change is increasing. 3. If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will. 4. Competition and disruption are no longer coming from some multinational company overseas. They now originate from the guy or gal in a start-up garage harnessing exponential technologies. 5. Given Bill Joy’s famous comment “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” how do you tap into these individuals? 6. If you’re dependent upon innovation only from within your company, you are dead. You must harness the crowd to remain competitive.

Today, the XPRIZE spends a lot of time thinking about fundamental objectives. How to achieve a goal without specifying the exact process and how to avoid a false wins (i.e., that micro-motor built from conventional tools).

Abundance is not a techno-utopian vision. Technology alone will not bring us this better world. It is up to you and me. To bring on this better world is going to require what could easily be the largest cooperative effort in history. In other words, there is a bold and bright future out there. But, as with everything else, what happens next is up to us.

“The coming age of exponentials will put game-changing technologies in the hands of everyone,” said Shingles. “And while this will no doubt lead us down the road to abundance, it also has the potential to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few. To navigate the turbulent times ahead, we will need a new breed of ethical leaders who are not corrupted by such absolute

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