Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success

Serial entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow delves into the reasons why some people and some organizations are able to achieve incredible things in implausibly short time frames, showing how each of us can use these "smartcuts" to rethink convention and accelerate success.

Why do some companies attract millions of customers in mere months while others flop? How did Alexander the Great, YouTube phenom Michelle Phan, and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon dash to the top in less time than it takes most of us to get a midlevel promotion? How do high-growth businesses, world-class heart surgeons, and underdog marketers beat the norm?

Like computer hackers, a handful of innovators in every era use lateral thinking to find better routes to stunning accomplishments. Throughout history, the world's biggest successes have been achieved by those who refuse to follow the expected course and buck the norm.

Smartcuts is about bucking the norm.

In it, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like "paying dues" prevent progress, why kids shouldn't learn multiplication tables, and how, paradoxically, it's easier to build a huge business than a small one.

Smartcuts tells the stories of innovators who dared to work differently and lays out practical takeaways for the rest of us. It's about applying entrepreneurial and technological concepts to success, and how, by emulation, we too can leapfrog competitors, grow businesses, and fix society's problems faster than we think.

About the Author

Shane Snow is an award-winning entrepreneur and journalist based in New York City. Originally from Idaho, he studied journalism at Columbia University.

Snow's writing has appeared in Wired Magazine, The New Yorker, Fast Company, Advertising Age, The Washington Post, and others. He has been named one of Details Magazine's "Digital Mavericks," one of Forbes's "30 Under 30 Media Innovators," a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, and a member of LinkedIn's exclusive Influencer program, where he blogs alongside Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Martha Stewart.

Snow is currently the Chief Creative Officer of Contently, a technology company he co-founded in 2010 with the mission to create a better media world. And though he loves business and journalism and science, his real passion is good old fashioned New York pizza.