Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success - by Ron Friedman
Date read: 2023-08-23How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
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Techniques on how to reverse engineer from the best, including how to improve through reflection, better practice, and how to ask experts for advice. Recommended for anyone looking to become experts in their given field.
Contents:
My Notes
To reverse engineer is to look beyond what is evident on the surface and find a hidden structure-one that reveals both how an object was designed and, more important, how it can be re-created. It's the ability to taste an intoxicating dish and deduce its recipe, to listen to a beautiful song and discern its chord progression, to watch a horror film and grasp its narrative arc.
Both King and Hill were utilizing forms of copywork, a technique popularized by Benjamin Franklin and practiced by literary greats F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, and Hunter Thompson. It involves studying an exceptional piece of writing, setting it aside, and then re-creating it word for word from memory, later comparing your version to the original.
Popular among nonfiction writers, is to leaf through the endnotes section at the back of a book and examine the original sources an author used to construct their piece. It's the writer's equivalent of enjoying a delicious meal at a restaurant and then raiding the chef's pantry to uncover the ingredients.
Vonnegut believed that the world's most popular stories-including those featured in the Bible, literary classics, and blockbuster films-fit neatly into one of six trajectories: Rags to Riches (a rising emotional arc) Riches to Rags (a falling emotional arc) Man in a Hole (a fall followed by a rise) Icarus (a rise followed by a fall) Cinderella (rise, fall, rise) Oedipus (fall, rise, fall).
Observing the greats opens your mind to fresh possibilities.
Successful entrepreneurs also excel at something else: pattern recognition. They possess an extraordinary capacity for identifying profitable opportunities by linking successes they've observed in the past with changes now taking place in the market.
The defense against reverse engineering killing creativity: First, creativity comes from blending ideas, not isolation. When we're exposed to new ideas and fresh perspectives, we are at our most generative. This is why one of the best predictors of creativity is openness to experience. Those who actively seek out novelty, embrace curiosity, and plunge down rabbit holes are far more creative than those who shut themselves off from the outside world.
Second, originality is not the same thing as creativity. Often, those who introduce new concepts are locked into certain ways of thinking, preventing them from identifying important and novel applications for their "original" ideas. The business world is bursting with examples of "first movers" being outmaneuvered by scrappier, more creative rivals. As the creators of the PalmPilot, Atari, Alta Vista, Friendster, and America Online will all readily admit: being first is not the same as being best.
Simply put: the alternative to reverse engineering isn't originality. It's operating with intellectual blinders.
In the short term, replicating a work won't result in creativity. It's afterward that the real magic happens.
The process of copying-of carefully analyzing a particular work, deconstructing its key components, and rebuilding it anew-is a transformative mental exercise that does wonders for our thinking. Unlike the experience we get when we passively consume a work, copying demands that we pay meticulous attention, prompting us to reflect on both subtle details and unexpected techniques
Why is collecting outstanding examples so important? Because the first step to achieving mastery is recognizing mastery in others.
Studies indicate that simply consuming examples with an underlying structure leads you to detect their patterns, even when you're not consciously trying to learn a thing. It's a process cognitive psychologists call implicit learning.
Creativity Is What Happens When Ideas Have Sex - taking ideas from different disciplines and combining them together to create something unique.
Example: Steve Jobs didn't invent the MP3 player or the cell phone. But he led a team that found a way of combining the two, leading to the iPhone. Back in 1995, two Stanford University students took the way academics cite research articles and applied it to organizing information on the World Wide Web, resulting in Google.
One of the ways Marvel has managed to prevent a formula from feeling stale is by introducing a novel element into its films: a director whose expertise lies outside the superhero genre. Instead of relying on the same accomplished team over and over again, Marvel deliberately places a leader with limited genre exposure at the helm for the purpose of introducing a fresh perspective. Harrison calls this approach "inexperienced experience."
One clear application we can draw from Marvel's approach is to inject new team members and marshal their influence to evolve a formula in a new direction. Instead of enjoying the comfort of working with the same team of colleagues, no matter how successful you might be, if you're looking to produce creative work, it pays to seek out new team members every few projects. That can take the form of introducing new colleagues into an existing group, making a new hire, or engaging an outside freelancer or consultant on a project basis.
By actively reflecting on a particular model, we spark ideas that blend its attributes with our thinking, stimulating our creativity. Channeling personas by asking "What would 'X' say or do in this situation?"
Being proudly selective about the information you consume and intentionally excluding influences.
Sturgeon's Law = 90% of everything is crap.
Clearly, 90 percent represents a somewhat arbitrary and extreme estimate with which not everyone will agree. But Sturgeon's Law does provide a useful figure in one respect: as a benchmark for determining whether or not your taste is adequately dialed in, particularly when evaluating work in a field you wish to master. If half of everything you encounter seems absolutely spectacular, chances are, you are not yet sufficiently attuned to what it is that you truly love.
The value of tracking and monitoring metrics to keep you motivated and focused on your goals: In contrast, how many employees keep track of the metrics driving their career? To be sure, most organizational cultures make it impossible to shun meetings, no matter how well aware a worker might be that they are not a productive use of time. Yet the question remains: Would meetings be so common if all employees had real-time metrics reflecting the outcomes they need to achieve to secure their next promotion?
The dangers of obsessing over metrics: Surrogation: It occurs when people become so consumed with hitting a number that they forget the outcome that number is intended to promote.
Three Secrets of Personal Scoreboards That Work:
Reverse Innovation: By creating products specifically designed for the developing world, where requirements are tougher and testing is inexpensive, it could generate solutions that are also likely to resonate with industrialized markets.
By testing new ideas in emerging markets, companies are able to collect rapid, inexpensive feedback from a population that is often more difficult to appeal to than those they eventually plan to target.
Discovering the next step can be as easy as reflecting on the question: If I executed this successfully, what would I do next? The answer can range from creating a sales page like Nick Swinmurn, to setting up a meeting like Bill Gates, to approaching someone you know with a daring proposal.
As the Zen monk Shunryū Suzuki noted, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities but in the expert's mind there are few." MRI studies of artists, radiologists, and chess grand masters bear this out. Romo's extensive knowledge of football enables him to eliminate plays with a low probability of transpiring, limiting his focus to a small universe of likely options, resulting in both lower cognitive load and sharper predictions.
Reflective Practice - the concept of reflecting back on lessons learned from recent past experiences.
Writing about daily events has also been shown to help us process emotions, quiet anxiety, and diminish stress. By placing our own narrative spin on events, we no longer feel as if events are happening to us. Writing about our lives tips the scales, restoring our sense of control. Also, journaling by hand helps you slow down your thinking.
Why would visualizing a positive outcome lead to a worse grade? The emotional payoff we experience when we imagine ourselves achieving a desired result diminishes our appetite for doing the work necessary to be successful. We're temporarily sated, even when we're logically aware that the entire experience is a fantasy. Yet that's not the case when our mental simulation is focused on process. Mentally rehearsing the specific actions we need to take in advance reliably elevates our performance.
Mental Practice - make your imagery more vivid by alternating between first- and third-person perspectives.
Another useful tip is to occasionally picture yourself faltering or encountering an unexpected hurdle. The key is to keep going and think through exactly how you might navigate that momentary setback and then resume your typical routine.
Effective imagery does not require a major outlay of time. Research suggests that the optimal length is no more than twenty minutes, with some studies reporting benefits after as little as three minutes of focused simulation.
Keep your practice routine fresh and new to learn faster. Toggling between tasks forces us to think about the appropriate response each time, instead of mindlessly repeating the same action. It also teaches us to notice subtle differences in our execution, which fosters deeper understanding.
The most effective practice regimens avoid extended repetition, even if that means spending less time working on a target skill. Instead they harness the power of novelty and shake things up by blending an assortment of tasks, which results in sharper learning and stronger performance.
By identifying elements of our performance that we hope to improve and asking ourselves what other (fun) activities require similar skills, we can make more strategic decisions about which tasks are worth mastering outside the office. Example: CEO's attending improv classes.
When talking to experts, three categories of questions are worth considering: journey questions, process questions, and discovery questions.
Journey questions are designed to achieve two objectives: unearth the experts' road map for success and remind them of their experience as a novice.
Questions focused on an expert's journey can include:
Process questions get at the nitty-gritty of execution. They're designed to illuminate the experts' approach by drilling down on the specific steps they apply to bring their work to life.
Questions focused on an expert's process can include:
Discovery questions focus experts on their initial expectations and invite them to compare those naive beliefs with what they know today.
Questions focused on an expert's discoveries may include:
No single expert can teach you everything you need to know. Like creativity, mastery is achieved through combining ideas. The more experts you study, the clearer the road map gets.
When feedback is specific, it speaks to a particular element of a complex work. In so doing, it temporarily ignores the totality of a performance in favor of isolating a single component. It's the difference between telling Tarantino that his script is "a piece of shit" and explaining that his protagonists are not relatable. It's the precision that makes the feedback instructive.
The best feedback does more than tell us whether or not we've succeeded. It helps us uncover opportunities for getting better.
Ironically, one approach to soliciting better feedback is to avoid asking for feedback altogether. Instead, ask for advice.
Comedian and playwright Mike Birbiglia has colleagues review his script and then asks, "When were you bored?" It's a question that is easier for reviewers to answer than "What didn't you like?," yet for Birbiglia, it serves a similar purpose in pinpointing elements that warrant revision. Business example: "Where did I lose you?"
We're better off avoiding high-quantity, low-quality feedback, no matter how convenient or tempting it may be. Getting feedback from the wrong audience is worse than getting no feedback at all.
To paraphrase Ansari, it doesn't mean you don't have what it takes. It simply means you tried something daring and found the limits of your ability. And while receiving negative feedback may not be pleasant in the moment, after a certain level of experience, it's a positive sign. One that tells you that you are continuing to stretch, learn, and grow.
"If you want to avoid criticism, it's better to be good than it is to be great."