Little Bets
by Peter Sims
Read: 2018-01-19, Rating: 5/10.
You can’t put into a spreadsheet how people are going to behave around a new product. Jeff Bezos will say
David Galenson
Two types of Innovators:
Conceptual – Mozart, bold new ideas, breakthroughs early in life
Experiential innovation – experimental, iterative, trial and error, persistence, accept failures and setbacks
Entrepreneurs and MBA trained managers use two different approaches when doing something new
Experiment
Play
Immerse
Define
Reorient
Iterate
Cofounder Bill Hewlett loved to make what he called small bets to uncovered unpredictable opportunities
Calculator HP35
Seasoned entrepreneurs will tend to determine in advance what why’re willing to lose rather than to calculate expected gains.
Affordable loss principle
The subject of affordable losses highlights a key issue with the little bets approach, it inevitably involves failure.
Understand and accept failure and being imperfect is essential for success.
Carol Dweck
Fixed Mindset – believe abilities and intelligence is set in stone
Growth Mindset – believe intelligence and abilities Allan be grown through effort and view setbacks as opportunities for growth
Praising ability alone reduces persistence. Praising effort or processes to learn leads to growth Mindset. Dweck found this regardless of age.
It is not about not caring about failure.
The key is to think differently about mistakes, see it as opportunity for growth
Practicing little bets frees us from the expectation that we should know everything we need to know before we begin. Redefining problems and failures as opportunities focuses our attention on insights to be gained rather than working about false starts or the risks we are taking.
Every good writer writes “shitty first drafts”
Just get it down on paper.
Prototyping jump starts our thinking
Confront deep cultural inclinations for detailed planning and error minimization
Place an emphasis on doing to be able to think, rather than thinking in order to do.
Doing things, however imperfectly at first, opens is creatively.
Kids don’t have the self censoring part of they’re brain well developed.
Stop consciously monitoring and create
Take a proactive approach to problem finding, we are more likely to discover unique possibilities
Questions are the new answers.
Throw out the theory and experience things first hand. Fresh problems, ideas, needs, desires, are hidden beneath the service. We can’t know what questions to ask until we reach beyond what is known, through a true process of discovery.
We can make our own luck, by lowering our expectations and being open to new ones.
What you know, they’ll never know and what they know, you can learn.
The value of getting out in the world and asking many questions
Life is a creative process, it all begins with a little bet. What will yours be?