New results demand new ways of seeing and acting – this is reframing, one of humanity’s most powerful tools. Recent decades have unlocked behavioural economics breakthroughs, now gathered in one place as “smart-cuts.” Steve Jobs once said technology is a “bicycle for the mind” – and the world is full of them. Adopt these principles and you can think sharper, build stronger teams, and even outpace industry giants. Wicked Smart distils proven, real-world insights into a guide for achieving more, faster. Whether for personal growth, leadership, persuasion, or simply navigating life, this book offers dozens of ingenious accelerators.
WHAT IF THERE’S A SMARTER WAY?
Every challenge seems unsolvable …
until you find the right bicycle.
Let me explain …
BICYCLES FOR THE MIND
Gorillas are stronger than people. Lions are faster. A herd of wildebeest keeps running long after exhaustion overtakes us and we drop to the ground. Yet none of that matters.
Steve Jobs once pointed out that although animals in the wild are way more energy-efficient than humans, if you put a guy on a bike, he suddenly blows past all of them.
Our technology, he said, is like a bicycle for the mind.1
Technology accelerates outcomes. But what if there are other bicycles for the mind?
Start searching, and the history of our species is littered with them. Humans excel at discovering and inventing smart ways to be more effective.
Everything we do starts off slowly. Then we learn principles that speed things up. A clever insight allows us to rethink our problems, approach them in novel ways and reach our desired outcomes faster. Labour that was complex becomes simple. Challenges that were difficult become easy. We discover the 80/20 rule everywhere: 20 per cent of the effort for 80 per cent more effect.
There is a term for such breakthroughs. It was coined by the author Shane Snow. The term is ‘smart-cuts’. A smart-cut is a bicycle for the mind.
We’ve been generating smart-cuts for centuries, but there is a problem. They are scattered over different fields.
By spending years studying architecture, you might learn clever ways to build something. Or you might master the most useful leadership principles after taking several courses. Or you might speed up a slow process by hiring consultants who understand the best ways to achieve it. Spend enough time around athletes, and you will likely learn their strategies and tactics.
Smart-cuts abound in every domain. Each is valuable. And no single one of these principles is a state secret.
But it takes time to acquire them. Gathering bicycles is tedious, the work of a lifetime.
So, what if all the best ones were collected in a single place? What if there were one source for the highest-performing conceptual breakthroughs?
Here it is.
This is your guide to the most useful ones. They will help you to go from slow to fast. From struggle to accomplishment. From needlessly complex to ingeniously efficient.
How many of your goals might you achieve armed with a better approach? How different might your life look following several breakthroughs?
Think of your keenest dream. Think of your most obstinate challenge. Someone, somewhere, has solved these problems before. What if you could carve years off your learning curve by applying their
insights?
There are smart-cuts galore in the pages ahead. Each one is a bicycle for your mind. Each one will make you faster, reduce your input and maximise your results. Each one is tailor-made to help you blow right past the average gorilla.
‘Give me an example’
‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.’ That’s an example. Networks make people more effective. It is unusual to be successful without support. You are more likely to prosper given the help of others. A network is a bicycle. It helps you get where you want to go quicker while expending less energy.
This principle is common knowledge, yet it isn’t always common practice.
Here is a less obvious example. How many people comprise the ideal team? The answer is seven, with a margin of two in either direction. And what one, specific skill helps you get promoted more than any other? The answer is presentation skills.
And how can you be more accurate when guessing? The answer is to pretend that you are someone else.
There are hundreds more such principles, some simple, some advanced, some well-known, others criminally overlooked. All can contribute to how effectively you negotiate the world. We will explore them momentarily.
First, I will make you three promises.
You will not wade through waffle.
Authors love indulgent stories. It’s fun recounting the details of how the CIA foiled a plot, or failed to do so, or the long and turbulent history of an Elon Musk experiment, with its twists and turns. Books like that abound.
This will not be one of them.
Instead, I will tell you that in order to speed up processes, Elon Musk got rid of walls, then made everyone work on the same problem from day one. This has made their progress ten times faster. That’s the part you need to know, so that you can emulate it.
I will use stories where useful, but stripped to their skeletons. You’re not here for a long read or a slow journey to the point. You’re here for the abstracted principle, distilled to its clearest form. So, the nuggets will be at the forefront.
The language will be simple.
Edward de Bono has long been regarded as a leading writer on clever ways to think. His ideas are complex, but his language style is simple. I will follow his lead. Each idea will be expressed succinctly, using headlines like ‘How to compete and win’ or ‘How to improve a system’.
We will cover only the most useful principles.
Authors love obscure ideas. We adore the odd little misfits that no one notices. They allow us to seem esoteric and wise.
But this book is for you, not me, so that is another indulgence we will forgo.
Every principle here is a ‘best practice’. It has proven its chops in the real world. It is the most useful of its kind.
For instance, you could spend hundreds of hours studying ‘different ways to brainstorm’. But only two or three methods are commonly used by actual problem-solvers to achieve breakthroughs in the real world.
So, we won’t bother with the obscure ones. We will go straight to those that yield the greatest results.
You have distance to cover, so only the best bicycles will do.
“It’s called ‘reframing’, and it’s one of the most effective things humans ever do.”
DOG AND BONE
In many ways, this is a book about seeing things differently. When you see your world in different ways, you see different ways to approach it.
By contrast, if you look at your world in the same old ways, you behave in the same old patterns. This renders the same results.
New results require new ways of acting. New ways of acting require new ways of looking at things. Therefore, a great many smart-cuts focus on helping you to do that – to see your world differently.
It’s called ‘reframing’, and it’s one of the most effective things humans ever do.
Even Einstein said that his greatest breakthroughs were not because he had more knowledge than others. Instead, they occurred because he looked at the world in creative ways, which rendered new insights. You can look at the world in many new ways. ‘Creative’ is just one of them. You can also look at it optimistically. Or pessimistically. Or while pretending to be another person. Or while pretending to be your own enemy. The options abound, and each can yield new insights.
Reframing lets you see more options.
Imagine you are a dog. Your goal is to reach a bone, but you have a problem. The bone is on the other side of a fence.
In this famous thought exercise by Douglas Hofstadter, the dog pushes against the fence because it sees the bone ‘right there’. The dog is thinking of its problem as one of ‘proximity’. It is close to the bone and thinks it needs to get closer. This will never work, so long as the fence holds.
The dog should reframe its understanding of the situation. This is not a problem of proximity. It is actually a problem of access.
Sure, the dog may be close to the bone. But close isn’t useful. It is actually misleading. Instead, access is useful. And solving the problem of access requires different behaviour.
And so, the dog stops, looks around and sees that the fence doesn’t go on forever. A few feet away there is a gate, and the gate is open. It will be easy to walk to that gate, go through, then get the bone.
But it will never happen if the dog continues to think, ‘I’m so close, I must keep pushing forward.’ With that approach, the project is doomed. Reframing, and seeing the problem in new ways, is the difference between success and failure.
What’s your bone? Have you been struggling to reach it for years? Is it possible that your approach is wrong and that simply pushing harder against the fence will never work?
Could it be that changing how you see the problem would get you there quickly and easily? Would such a breakthrough surprise you after all these years of struggle?
Breakthroughs are inherently surprising. When a better way is discovered, people are astonished by it. Suddenly, the impossible becomes possible. The bone that was out of reach is easily retrieved and enjoyed.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could simply achieve the goals you’ve been pursuing?
People have solved your problem before.
It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter how complicated it is. Someone, somewhere, has done it, and now there is a better way.
There are billions of us on this planet. We have been around for a long time, applying our considerable collective mental powers to solving many different kinds of problems, and then passing on the results.
To make use of these results, and have your own breakthrough, you must start with two honest admissions:
1. I might have been doing it less than optimally this whole time.
2. I need to stop and rethink my approach.
We tend to think that ‘how hard we have worked’ is important. That is actually the wrong metric. We didn’t undertake that work in order to work hard. We undertook that work to achieve specific outcomes. It is entirely possible that we have worked very hard but have done it wrong, and therefore we haven’t achieved our outcomes. Is there a chance that might have happened to you?
If so, it is important to stop and think. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. You don’t want to be in a hole. There is no reason to honour all the work you have done digging the hole if ‘down into a hole’ is not where you want to go.
Instead, take time to think. The dog can keep scratching at the fence forever, believing that the work he has done up to this point is worth something. Or he can pause, look around and see if there is a gate in the fence. If he keeps pushing at the fence, he may never discover it. If he discovers it, and uses it, he will have that bone in the next five seconds.
That’s how important it is to reframe.
Einstein was asked, ‘If you had one hour to solve a problem and save the world, what would you do?’ He answered that he would spend the first fifty-five minutes defining the problem. Framing is everything.
In a study published in the Creativity Research Journal, which analysed over seventy programmes on thinking skills and creativity courses, authors Ginamarie Scott, Lyle Leritz and Michael Mumford Scott-Lawrence determined what made the greatest contribution to participants’ effectiveness. They initially thought it might be ‘idea generation’. But no. The greatest contribution came from ‘problem identification’.2 How you see it. The way you frame a problem is the most significant element in solving it.
Extracted from Wicked Smart by Douglas Kruger, out now.
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