Decoding Greatness- How the best in world Reverse Engineer Success by Ron Friedman

This book has lots of meaty material which you can learn and apply in your daily creative life. Though none of the themes in the book are new, the presentation and various references from writing, business, innovators, etc to explain those themes are very good.

Some of the theme mentioned are-

1 Reverse outlining

First, detect a bigger picture & patterns & then put efforts into working out details i.e. bottom-up approach. Work backward and outline major points contained within a completed piece. It helps us to broaden our perspective.

• All the major innovators, giant businesses have mastered the practice of reverse engineering-taking things apart to explore their inner workings & extract important insights.
• To reverse — engineer look beyond the obvious. Find the hidden structure & find out how an object can be re-created.
• Successful entrepreneurs are masters at pattern-seeking -identifying profitable opportunities by linking success of the past with evolving change taking place in the market.
• For detecting patterns- By quantifying features & by turning important characteristics into numbers, we can compare how often they appear from one example to the next.

2 Creativity

• It begins with concerted efforts to observe & analyze the great work of others & distill their approach into a reproducible formula that compliment your unique abilities, interest, and situation which one could deconstruct, analyze and reproduce. Don’t mimic, evolve.
• Digging deeper into classical works that have stood the test of time & incorporating those influences into your approach can inspire a unique spin that is more likely to endure.

Optimal Newness

a-Leveraging the proven formula and add your unique twist.

• It involves blending the different influences to come up with something new.
• Application of ideas from one domain to another domain.
• Being selective about the information you consume & intentionally excluding influences.

3 Vision-ability gap

Skill can be taught but vision and taste come from within which is harder to develop.

Taste usually comes from-

• sensitivity to the elements that make particular objects pleasing, an awareness that helps in understanding things better
• Taste is also a reaction to one’s life experiences.

To address the unmet needs we must find out why it exists & what challenges we are going to solve.

How to think like a disruptive innovator

• Ask big picture questions.
• Maintain curiosity.
• Pose what-if scenarios. like what will happen if I do this or that?
• Do root cause analysis.
• Going deep & studying a single work through multiple mediums.

4 Keep score

• Measurement causes improvement. The moment a metric is introduced, we pay it more attention and pursue its optimization.
• Metrics motivate, it keeps progress tangible & sparks satisfaction & pride. It makes you think more strategically. It leads us to work harder in pursuit of a higher score.
• By signaling progress and illustrating achievement, metrics satisfy our instinctive drive for growth.
• The right measure can also expose wasted effort. Once you start collecting performance metrics, anything that doesn’t contribute to the desired outcome becomes impossible to ignore.
• Approach for designing your scoreboard

1. Break down the complex task and isolate specific aspects & focus on it one at a time.
2. Look beyond a particular task & Keep the focus on the totality of the job rather than concentrating on each component.
3. Measuring short-term outcomes makes progress easier to appreciate.
4. Immediate feedback is vital to the improvement. And the more rapid the feedback, the quicker we learn.

How not to measure score.

• Surrogation- People forget the ethics and larger picture & only concerned about meeting the target.
• Minimize- undesirable metric i.e. not aligned with larger goal be avoided.

The ideal scoreboard tracks both the measure we hope to boost as well as those we need to minimize.

5 Learning

• Desirable difficulty- We learn well when we stretch the limit of our current comfort zone, observe our outcome and make adjustments.
• Effective learning requires constant, detailed and immediate feedback.
• Reflective practice- It tells us to pause, reflect, analyze, strategize & consider our progress.We move away from daily routine & examine the value of our actions. Resist our beliefs and test our assumptions.
• Keeping a record- Making a journal is part of learning because it helps in collecting past mistakes and improves upon it.
• Visualize-Mental rehearsals and imagery exercise helps in reducing anxiety and it activates neural pathways involved in physically doing the behavior
• Practice novelty- avoid endless repetition & alternate among tasks & blending an assortment of tasks.

6 Talk to experts

While talking to experts we must focus on asking 3 categories of questions

a- Journey questions

• ask experts roadmap for success.
• What mistakes did they commit?
• What metrics do they value most?
• What events they had spent less time on?

b- Process questions

• Nitty-gritty of execution
• Idea generation & strategy, planning & daily routine.

c- Discovery Questions

*Asking their initial expectation & compare it with belief that exists today.

*Wish what they had known when they started.

*What was their defining moment & what surprised them most.

- Ask experts for examples- Learning with examples leads to faster comprehension & fewer errors.

-Look for analogies- where you can link complex & new ideas to something you already know.

-Demonstration- can you show what you mean?-It leads to generate our own explanation

.-Repeat back- Paraphrasing what you have heard to confirm your understanding.

It leads to process information more deeply & reveals a gap in your comprehension.

7 Feedback

Essential elements-

• It has to be specific, speaks of a particular element of some task.
• It must help in realizing opportunities for getting better.
• Must solve your weakness head-on.
• Must be taken from the select group who has the subject knowledge and can give a solution, not from any random people. Taking feedback from wrong people is worse than taking no freedom at all.
• It must be properly timed.

Convert feedback to the growth

- Translate negative feedback into corrective actions. Identify changes you can apply to address feedbacks. It makes failure feel temporary.

- Take a break, step back and reflect on big picture objectives.

- Viewing struggle as a natural and desirable part of growth provides greater openness to outside feedback.