Summary : Little Bets – Peter Sims

As the noted technologist and inventor Alan Kay once said, ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’ After all, life is a creative process. It all begins with one little bet.

“Seasoned entrepreneurs will tend to determine in advance what they are willing to lose, rather than calculating expected gains. Using a little bets approach facilitates operating according to the affordable loss principle.”

To become more creative, get into the habit of iterating your ideas. Keep on improving them by polishing your thinking, grafting in new twists and coming up with better, more robust versions over and over.

“Success hides problems. The measure is how we respond to crises as they happen. We have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.”

“The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency –feeling like we’ve got it all figured out. We want you to shake things up. We will give you a good argument if you think what we’re doing doesn’t make sense, but if you can convince us, we’ll do things a different way.”

“People will frequently disagree with me and frequently I am wrong. If they disagree with me or with John Lasseter or with the directors, the directors don’t take it personally. There’s no penalty for criticizing the work, and because there’s not a penalty, people are more likely to say what they think.”

To be creative, you’ve got to be flexible in your thinking. One way to make this happen more often is to make it your habit to learn a little from a lot of small wins along the way

One of the key benefits of the agile approach or smallifying is it’s a great method for failing fast. Small development teams can figure out what customers like and what they don’t like quickly and inexpensively

agile development.” Under this model, a software development project is broken down into smaller problems, each of which are prioritized and then completed and released based on actual user needs. Teams collaborate to solve the small problems one at a time rather than tackling the large scale problem.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.