The 11 Big Ideas:

• Importance of big goals

• Alignment of your values and your goals is critical

• What is groundbreaking is often viewed as crazy until acceptance

• Iterate often, experiment, fail quickly

• Extrinsic motivation has its limits

• Autonomy, mastery, purpose

• Think in terms of 10x

• The importance of clarity

• Break big goals into small, clear goals that give immediate feedback

• Always take action

• Are you working on something that will change the world?

My Highlights From the Book:

Importance of Big Goals:

In the late 1960s, University of Toronto psychologist Gary Latham and University of Maryland psychologist Edwin Locke discovered that goal setting is one of the easiest ways to increase motivation and enhance performance.4 Back then this was something of a shocking finding. General thinking was that happy workers were productive workers and putting too much stress on employees—by, say, imposing goals—was considered bad for business. But in dozens and dozens of studies, Latham and Locke found that setting goals increased performance and productivity 11 to 25 percent. That’s quite a boost. If an eight-hour day is our baseline, that’s like getting two extra hours of work simply by building a mental frame (aka a goal) around the activity.

But not every goal is the same. “We found that if you want the largest increase in motivation and productivity,” says Latham, “then big goals lead to the best outcomes. Big goals significantly outperform small goals, medium-sized goals, and vague goals. It comes down to attention and persistence—which are two of the most important factors in determining performance. Big goals help focus attention, and they make us more persistent. The result is we’re much more effective when we work, and much more willing to get up and try again when we fail.” This is a critical piece of information for the exponential entrepreneur. Starting any business is hard. Starting a business with the intention of disrupting an industry—now, that’s downright terrifying. But Locke and Latham’s work shows that there’s hidden leverage available. Because the practice focuses attention and increases motivation, by setting big goals, we’re actually helping ourselves achieve those big goals.

Alignment of your values and your goals is critical:

Yet for these high, hard goals to really work their magic, Locke and Latham found that certain moderators—the word psychologists use to describe “if-then” conditions—need to be in place. One of the most important is commitment. “You have to believe in what you’re doing,” continues Latham. “Big goals work best when there’s an alignment between an individual’s values and the desired outcome of the goal. When everything lines up, we’re totally committed—meaning we’re paying even more attention, are even more resilient, and are way more productive as a result.”

What is groundbreaking is often viewed as crazy until acceptance:

As Burt Rutan, winner of the Ansari XPRIZE, once taught me: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure, and this means having a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from mistakes is critical.

Iterate often, experiment, fail quickly:

Enter agile design, an ideology that emphasizes fast feedback loops.9 Instead of launching a finely polished gem, companies now release a “minimum viable product,” then get immediate feedback from customers, incorporate that feedback into the next iteration, release a slightly upgraded version, and repeat. Instead of design cycles that last years, the agile process takes weeks and produces results directly in line with consumer expectations. This is rapid iteration.

That’s why LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman famously said, ‘If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

Bezos also understands that the only way to really succeed with his long-term customer-centrism is via experimentation. He also knows that this approach will occasionally produce spectacular failure. As he recently said to a group at the Utah Technology Council Hall of Fame30 dinner: “The way I think about it, if you want to invent, if you want to do any innovation, anything new, you’re going to have failures because you need to experiment. I think the amount of useful invention you do is directly proportional to the number of experiments you can run per week per month per year. So if you’re going to increase the number of experiments, you’re also going to increase the number of failures.

Extrinsic motivation has its limits:

To understand this boost requires dipping back into the science of motivation. For most of the last century, that science focused on extrinsic rewards—that is, external motivators, “if-then” conditions of the “do this to get that” variety. With extrinsic rewards, we incentivize the behavior we want more of and punish the behavior we dislike. In business, for example, when we want to drive performance, we offer classic extrinsic rewards: bonuses (money) and promotions (money and prestige).

Unfortunately, an ever-growing pile of research shows that extrinsic rewards do not work like most suppose. Take money. When it comes to increasing motivation, cash is king only under very specific conditions. For very basic tasks that don’t require any cognitive skill, money can effectively influence behavior. If I’m nailing together boards for five dollars an hour, offering me ten will increase the rate at which I nail. But once tasks become slightly more complex—such as shaping those nailed boards into a house—once they require even the slightest bit of conceptual ability, money actually has the exact opposite effect: It lowers motivation, hinders creativity, and decreases performance.

Autonomy, mastery, purpose:

Once we pay people enough so that meeting basic needs is no longer a constant cause for concern, extrinsic rewards lose their effectiveness, while intrinsic rewards—meaning internal, emotional satisfactions—become far more critical. Three in particular stand out: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is the desire to steer our own ship. Mastery is the desire to steer it well. And purpose is the need for the journey to mean something. These three intrinsic rewards are the very motivators that motivate us most. In his book Drive,13 author Daniel Pink explains it like this: The science shows that . . . typical twentieth-century carrot-and-stick motivators—things we consider somehow a “natural” part of human enterprise—can sometimes work. But they’re effective in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. The science shows that “if-then” rewards . . . are not only ineffective in many situations, but can also crush the high-level, creative, conceptual abilities that are central to current and future economic and social progress. The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive (our survival needs) or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to fill our life with purpose.

Think in terms of 10x:

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.”

The importance of clarity:

If creating more flow is the aim, then the emphasis falls on clear, not goals. Clarity gives us certainty. We know what to do and where to focus our attention while we are doing it. When goals are clear, metacognition is replaced by in-the-moment cognition, and the self stays out of the picture.

Break big goals into small, clear goals that give immediate feedback:

Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly. A writer, for example, is better off trying to pen three great paragraphs at a time, rather than attempting one great chapter. Think challenging yet manageable—just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again. Immediate feedback, our next psychological trigger, is another shortcut into the now. The term refers to a direct, in-the-moment coupling between cause and effect. As a focusing mechanism, immediate feedback is something of an extension of clear goals. Clear goals tell us what we’re doing; immediate feedback tells us how to do it better. If we know how to improve performance in real time, the mind doesn’t go off in search of clues for betterment; we can keep ourselves fully present and fully focused and thus much more likely to be in flow.

Always take action:

#18: THE RATIO OF SOMETHING TO NOTHING IS INFINITE The best predictor of future success is past action. It doesn’t matter how small those actions. When I’m interviewing potential employees, I’m always more interested in what they’ve done than in what they will do. Doing something, doing anything, is always so much more important than just talking about doing it. The ratio of something to nothing is literally infinite. So make a plan. Set subgoals. Get busy. Even if the path is unclear, you’ll use what you’ve learned taking that first step to build toward the next, and the next after that. Results always follow. Charles Lindbergh was correct: “The important thing is to start; to lay a plan, and then follow it step by step no matter how small or large one by itself may seem.”

Are you working on something that will change the world?

In an impromptu speech given at the Singularity University founding conference, Larry stood up in front of an audience of some 150 attendees and said: “I have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999 percent of people is no. I think we need to be training people on how to change the world.”