Bold

Author: Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

ISBN:  9781476709581

Read: 6/12/22

Recommendation Rating: 6/10

Summary

I read this book to gain inspiration for a big idea.

As I work on starting my own business, I’ve felt the need to expand the scope of my thinking.

This book delivered. Although, it is very heavy on crowdfunding ideas.

I gave this a lower recommendation rating just because it has a narrow appeal and for a specific subset of people.

I enjoyed it and left with a more expanded view of what maverick businesses can do.

Notes/Highlights

To teach the hallmark characteristics of exponentials, I have developed a framework called the Six Ds of Exponentials: digitalization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization.

Either disrupt yourself or be disrupted by someone else.

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

It is a book for entrepreneurs looking to harness the power of exponentials to start building new, bold legacies.

Recognizing when a technology is exiting the trough of disillusionment and beginning to rise up the slope of enlightenment is critical for entrepreneurs.

Thus the goal of part two of this book is to provide you with an attitude upgrade—a series of battle-hardened, time-tested psychological strategies for going big and bold.

One of the most important is commitment. “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. Organizational

As Burt Rutan, winner of the Ansari XPRIZE, once taught me: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”

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

Money, it now appears, is only an effective motivator until our basic biological needs are met, with a little left over for discretionary spending.

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.

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.

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

This perspective shift is key. It encourages risk taking and enhances creativity while simultaneously guarding against the inevitable decline. Teller explains: “Even if you think you’re going to go ten times bigger, reality will eat into your 10x. It always does. There will be things that will be more expensive, some that are slower; others that you didn’t think were competitive will become competitive. If you shoot for 10x, you might only be at 2x by the time you’re done. But 2x is still amazing. On the other hand, if you only shoot for 2x [i.e., 200 percent], you’re only going to get 5 percent and it’s going to cost you the perspective shift that comes from aiming bigger.”

My suggestion is that you write them on your wall, use them as a filter for your next start-up idea, but above all, don’t ignore them. Let’s take a quick look: 1. Focus on the User. We’ll see this again in chapter 6, when Larry Page and Richard Branson speak about the importance of building customer-centric businesses. 2. Share Everything. In a hyperconnected world with massive amounts of cognitive surplus, it’s critical to be open, allow the crowd to help you innovate, and build on each other’s ideas. 3. Look for Ideas Everywhere. The entire third part of this book is dedicated to the principle that crowdsourcing can provide you with incredible ideas, insights, products, and services. 4. Think Big but Start Small. This is the basis for Singularity University’s 109 thinking. You can start a company on day one that affects a small group, but aim to positively impact a billion people within a decade. 5. Never Fail to Fail. The importance of rapid iteration: Fail frequently, fail fast, and fail forward. 6. Spark with Imagination, Fuel with Data. Agility—that is, nimbleness—is a key discriminator against the large and linear. And agility requires lots of access to new and often wild ideas and lots of good data to separate the worthwhile from the wooly. For certain, the most successful start-ups today are data driven. They measure everything and use machine learning and algorithms to help them analyze that data to make decisions. 7. Be a Platform. Look at the most successful companies getting billion-dollar valuations . . . AirBnb, Uber, Instagram . . . they are all platform plays. Is yours? 8. Have a Mission That Matters. Perhaps most important, is the company you’re starting built upon a massively transformative purpose? When the going gets hard, will you push on or give up? Passion is fundamental to forward progress.

Clear goals, our first psychological trigger, tell us where and when to put our attention. They

Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly.

Immediate feedback, our next psychological trigger, is another shortcut into the now. The

Clear goals tell us what we’re doing; immediate feedback tells us how to do it better.

The challenge/skills ratio, the last of our psychological flow triggers, is arguably the most important. The idea behind this trigger is that attention is most engaged (i.e., in the now) when there’s a very specific relationship between the difficulty of a task and our ability to perform that task.

It’s about getting to choose your own challenges and having the necessary skills to surmount them.

Start your bold project with a much smaller effort aimed at letting others see you pull it off.

“People who pursue their passions inevitably create beacons that attract others who share their vision,”

At the end of this chapter, you’ll find a full list of my laws, but first here are a few favorites, with some story and explanation to back them up and hopefully make them more useful. Steal from me, borrow from others, modify at will, but most important, take action and create a list of your own.

#2: WHEN GIVEN A CHOICE—TAKE BOTH!

The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind a great number of things become impossible.”

Exponential technologies added physical leverage, psychological tools provided a mental edge, and the combination allows entrepreneurs to become true forces for disruption.

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

“I think it looks like entrepreneurs have a high tolerance for risk. But, having said that, one of the most important phrases in my life is ‘protect the downside.’ It should be one of the most important phrases in any businessperson’s life.

keynote: “Being negative is not how we make progress.”

The toothbrush test is simple: Do you use it as often as you use your toothbrush?

Really, as with all things in entrepreneurship, it’s really just a matter of giving it a go and proceeding through trial and error.

Crowdfunding is the exponential crowd tool that lets you tap this new resource, allowing you to mine the world for like-minded individuals and fast-track passion projects like never before.

Klein believes that no matter who you are, there’s usually an untapped $100,000 floating around your social network.

With any project, the most dangerous period is the zest-sucking stretch between “I’ve got a neat idea” and “I’m actually doing real work on that idea.”

community, it isn’t for everyone. My research shows that the best crowdfunding campaigns have five key characteristics in common: • The product is usually in late prototype phases, sufficient to show prospective backers what they’re supporting. • The team is correctly assembled and capable of executing. • The product is community focused and consumer facing. • The team has access to a large community of followers who can be pitched directly, or has the ability to marshal significant public relations/media resources to attract attention. • The product aims to solve a problem, improve an existing product, and/or tell a new story. Seven Reasons to Consider Crowdfunding Crowdfunding has a variety of benefits beyond raising capital.

First, find something you feel deeply passionate about creating. Second, choose something the crowd is passionate about seeing come into existence.

The success of the campaign is wholly dependent on creating early excitement and offering urgent, exclusive, and value-added incentives.

if you appear credible and able to meet your target goal, then people are more likely to back you.

The best perks offer rewards that customers would not be able to purchase under any other circumstances, meaning they’re unique, exclusive, and authentic to your campaign.

The key was to make the rewards simple, meaningful, and valuable to our backers.

The Celebrity (the Face). This person will act as the face of the campaign. He or she will be featured in the main pitch video, will be the voice of your campaign updates, and will lead all other public-facing efforts to garner support. This person has to be emotionally invested in the project, intelligent, eloquent, humble, and genuine. Being funny is an added bonus.

Translated into standard organizational language, the “celebrity” could be the CEO of your company or possibly one of the more charismatic and passionate members of the founding team.

Super-connectors are influential individuals who have access to a vast network of important people, money, and ideas. They usually have large followings themselves and thus know a lot about idea distribution and success. They can help brainstorm marketing strategies for the campaign, internally motivate and inspire the team, implement some of the more ambitious goals, lead behind-closed-door fund-raising efforts, and really build momentum during the campaign.

Every element of a crowdfunding campaign must appeal to the masses. What’s the best way to do that? Simple. Use the same technique employed by the very best books, movies, and songs—tell a great story.

Tips for Telling a Meaningful Story Make it cohesive. The best tales follow a logical progression. There’s a beginning, middle, and end. There are only a few main characters. Confusing potential backers with too much information—too many facts, figures, and spokespeople—does not make for a viral campaign. Fill a need or desire. In storytelling, never underestimate the power of emotion. Even if the idea seems silly—like, say, a space selfie—if it’s deeply compelling and fulfills a basic need, the crowd will listen. People want to be associated with cool stuff, significant events, and inspirational people. Humans make purchasing decisions largely based on emotional impulses. Focus on the why, not the what. With a product or service, the easiest way to tell a story is to focus on the why. Don’t worry so much about explaining what it is and how it works. In other words, remember that the view is different on the inside. If you’ve been working on a product or service for years, of course all the nitty-gritty details are fascinating to you. But they are perhaps not so fascinating to your audience. Instead, what most people want to hear is why your product/service/idea will improve their life—why it is significant, cool, and important to them and the world. Think solutions and improvements, not explanations or specifications. Connect with your vertical. Craft your story to target your ideal audience. If your audience is technical, go technical; if they’re humanitarian, emphasize the world-changing nature of your solution. However, as mentioned above, even the most technical of ideas needs to be framed inside a greater narrative. If you can’t come up with one, tell the story of how and why you came to create the product you’re selling. The truth is always the very best story. Use the right words. In 2014, researchers at Georgia Tech published a study in which they examined over nine million words and phrases used on Kickstarter to determine which language leads to success.25 The most important lesson is that the words and phrases associated with reciprocity and authority produce the best responses, while projects that focus too much on the need for funds fail. The

For simplicity’s sake, let’s break down this community into three parts: affiliates, advocates, and activists.

Launching with super-credibility. As we discussed in chapter 5, when you launch above the line of super-credibility, people instantly accept your project as real and believe in their hearts that it is going to work.

Early donor engagement.

According to research conducted by Indiegogo in 2012, projects with regular updates—blog posts, videos, and so forth—raise 218 percent more money than those without.

A DIY community is a group of people united around a massively transformative purpose (MTP),2 a collection of the passionate willing to donate their time and their minds to projects they truly believe in. These folks work for free. They work long hours. They remain committed. And they do so because they feel the work is meaningful and important. An exponential community, meanwhile, is a group of people who are immensely passionate about a particular exponential technology (machine learning, 3-D printing, synthetic biology), and who unite to share techniques and experiences.

As Bill Joy famously pointed out, the smartest people on the planet usually work for someone else.

People join communities for the ideas; they stay for the emotions.

All communities are at risk of becoming stale when they don’t challenge themselves.”24

The best communities are run by benevolent tyrants.

“People like talking to one another,” author Seth Godin (who himself has an enormous community) once said. “We evolved to want to do that. So one of the most highly leveraged and powerful ways to grow a tribe is to connect people to each other. But, if you just have that, you have nothing but a coffee shop. On top of that, there needs to be a message from you, the leader, about where you want to go, about the change that you want to make in your world. You need a mission, a movement, a place that people want to get to.”

nothing brings people together like, well, actually bringing people together.

A well-designed incentive competition provides teams with a “whole is bigger than the sum of the parts” mindset.

When I speak to executives, there are six key points I stress. 1. 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.

The ideal competition is designed so that there is a back-end business opportunity for teams to exploit once the prize is won. For example, the Ansari XPRIZE required a three-person spaceship rather than a one-person ship. This opened the possibility of space tourism, allowing for a commercial business model that made it easier for teams to raise funding and was one of the main reasons they were willing to spend far more money than the purse in their attempts to win.

Prize Lead. Someone to be the face of the competition, who can speak about the vision and the mission and field the hard questions that always emerge. • Community and Team Manager. The person who engages with the teams and the community as a whole. They’re there to answer all questions and ensure the competition produces maximum impact. Note:DAO parallels

Ultimately, that has been the point of this book. The exponential technologies discussed in part one give us the physical tools for radical change, the psychological strategies described in part two are the mental framework for success, and the exponential crowd tools that fill part three provide all of the additional resources (talent, money, and so forth) needed to cross the finish line.

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.

To navigate the turbulent times ahead, we will need a new breed of ethical leaders who are not corrupted by such absolute power.”