‘Smartcuts’ advocates adopting a hacker mind-set for speedy success

In the 19th century, it took John D. Rockefeller, the oil tycoon, 46 years to make $1 billion. In the late 2000s it took Andrew Mason two years to do the same at Groupon, the online daily deals company.

So opens Shane Snow’s new book, “Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success,” which contends the difference is not all due to inflation. The book is published by Harper Business.

Arguing that progress can be a lot speedier these days, Snow cites futurist Ray Kurzweil’s essay, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” which suggests that we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).

However, too many of us are mired in dated ways of doing things, argues Snow.

Traditional thinking goes something like this: If we pay our dues and take our time, we might earn great success. What Snow suggests instead is that we learn from people such as Mason, who “buck the norm and do incredible things in implausibly short amounts of time.”

Mason is a curious benchmark of success to set for readers. After all, the Groupon founder and chief executive was sacked in 2013 after overseeing accounting missteps, poor earnings and a falling stock price.

Notice of his dismissal went viral after his announcement that “after four-and-a-half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding — I was fired today.”

Snow, a tech journalist in New York and co-founder of Contently, which provides content for brands, believes we all need a hacker mind-set to become successful.

He is not advocating criminality or even the skills of a coder, but suggests applying lateral thinking to careers and business problems. Rather than shortcuts, he advocates ethical “smartcuts,” hence the book’s title.

Classic success advice, he writes, is “work 100 hours a week, believe you can do it, visualize, and push yourself harder than everyone else. Claw that nail out with your bare hands ‘til they bleed if necessary.” He dismisses this as “the hard way.”

He argues, for example, that mentors do not work because they are stiff and formulaic. Yet companies pay vast sums for expensive mentoring programs.

He cites what Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, wrote in her book, “Lean In.”

“Searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming ,” she wrote. “ Young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after.”

The smart mentee approaches things differently, Snow suggests. “She develops personal relationships with her mentors, asks their advice on other aspects of life, not just the formal challenge at hand. And she gets involved in her mentors’ lives too.”

For those who favor boundaries when it comes to their colleagues, such a strategy will be alarming.

In “Smartcuts” Snow says failure is overrated.  

The modern mantra that we must embrace failure to succeed is debunked. In fact, he writes, we do not necessarily learn from our missteps, because all too often we prefer to attribute our mistakes to others instead of making a real effort to learn from them.

Like a junior Malcolm Gladwell, the author fuses academic research with personal stories, citing a broad range of people who have achieved career success — including the Cuban revolutionaries; Skrillex, the electronic dance music producer; and cardiac surgeons.

Snow’s advice is sensible, if not groundbreaking: Be savvy, flexible, make an effort to learn from your mistakes and others’ successes and collaborate with well-connected people.

This is a manifesto for success for those who do not want to toil away unnoticed.

The book is shot through with an itchy impatience. Yet in his rush to take “smartcuts,” there is something that bothers me. If you achieve your desired goal — be it billions of dollars or millions of YouTube followers — what do precocious overachievers do then? What is all this success for?

Emma Jacobs is a columnist for the Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.