How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World
Rating
4/5
Date Started
5/31/2023
Date Completed
6/6/2023
Five Powerful Quotes from the Book
Quote 1
“This book was written as both a manifesto and a manual for today’s exponential entrepreneur, anyone interested in going big, creating wealth, and impacting the world. It is a go-to resource on accelerating technologies, thinking at scale, and utilizing crowd-powered tools… It’s about seriously leveling up your abilities and your ambition. It is about moonshot thinking and global impact…
“I have developed a framework called the Six Ds of Exponentials: digitalization, deception,
disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization. These Six Ds are a chain reaction of technological progression, a road map of rapid development that always leads to enormous upheaval and opportunity…
“Digitalization. This idea starts with the fact that culture makes progress cumulative. Innovation occurs as humans share and exchange ideas. I build on your idea; you build on mine. This type of exchange was slow in the early days of our species (when all we had as a means of transmission was storytelling around the campfire), picked up with the printing press, then exploded with the digital representation, storage, and exchange of ideas made possible by computers…
“Deception. What follows digitalization is deception, a period during which exponential growth goes mostly unnoticed. This happens because the doubling of small numbers often produces results so minuscule they are often mistaken for the plodder’s progress of linear growth…
“Disruption. In simple terms, a disruptive technology is any innovation that creates a new market and disrupts an existing one. Unfortunately, as disruption always follows deception, the original technological threat often seems laughably insignificant…
“Digitalization, deception, and disruption have radically reshaped our world, but the chain reaction we’re tracking is cumulative. Thus the three Ds that follow—demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization—are far more potent than their predecessors.
“Demonetization. This means the removal of money from the equation. Consider Kodak. Their legacy business evaporated when people stopped buying film. Who needs film when there are megapixels? Suddenly one of Kodak’s once unassailable revenue streams came free of charge with any digital camera….
“Dematerialization. While demonetization describes the vanishing of the money once paid for goods and services, dematerialization is about the vanishing of the goods and services themselves. In Kodak’s case, their woes didn’t end with the vanishing of film. Following the invention of the digital camera came the invention of the smartphone—which soon came standard with a high-quality, multi-megapixel camera. Poof! Now you see it; now you don’t. Once those smartphones hit the market, the digital camera itself dematerialized. Not only did it come free with most phones, consumers expected it to come free with most phones. In 1976, Kodak controlled 85 percent of the camera business. By 2008—one year after the introduction of the first iPhone (the first smart phone with a high-quality digital camera)—that market no longer existed…
“Democratization. Obviously, this chain of vanishing returns has to end somewhere. Sure, film and cameras now come free with smartphones, but there are still the hard costs of the phone with which to contend. Democratization is what happens when those hard costs drop so low they become available and affordable to just about everyone…
“The bigger the issue, the more valuable and important the solution.
“And the number of players in the world who are able to mine this gold and take on such challenges has exploded. A few hundred years ago, such activities were solely the domain of royalty. A few decades ago, they belonged to national leaders and the heads of multinational corporations. But today, almost anyone with a passion has the power to bring real change into this world.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 2
“Medical devices are even further along. Because 3-D printing allows products to be perfectly matched to an individual’s body shape, 3-D printers are being used today to make individually customized surgical tools, bone implants, prosthetic limbs, and orthodontic devices—all of which significantly enhance patient outcomes. It’s also worth pointing out how fast this is happening…
“Another example of large-scale medically related 3-D printing can be found in the fully automated factories of Align Technology, the makers of Invisalign—the clear plastic teeth-straightening alternative to metal braces. This factory 3-D prints 65,000 distinct aligners every day. ‘Last year alone,’ says (Avi) Reichental, ‘they printed seventeen million pairs of fully customized one-offs in a factory of the future not much bigger than a large college lecture hall.’
“I spend a lot of time giving presentations to corporations. When I speak to executives, there are six key points I stress.
- “The only constant is change.
- “The rate of change is increasing.
- “If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will.
- “Competition and disruption are no longer coming from some multinational company overseas. They now originate from the guy or gal in a start-up garage harnessing exponential technologies.
- “Given Bill Joy’s famous comment ‘No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,’ how do you tap into these individuals?
- “If you’re dependent upon innovation only from within your company, you are dead. You must harness the crowd to remain competitive.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 3
“Google has eight innovation principles that govern their strategy, famously summarized in a 2011 article by Google senior vice president of advertising Susan Wojcicki. Throughout this book, we’ll see them highlighted in different ways and exhibited by different people. Without doubt, these rules are core to your success as an exponential entrepreneur. My suggestion is that you write them on your wall, use them as a filter for your next start-up idea, but above all, don’t ignore them. Let’s take a quick look:
- “Focus on the User. We’ll see this again in chapter 6, when Larry Page and Richard Branson speak about the importance of building customer-centric businesses.
- “Share Everything. In a hyperconnected world with massive amounts of cognitive surplus, it’s critical to be open, allow the crowd to help you innovate, and build on each other’s ideas.
- “Look for Ideas Everywhere. The entire third part of this book is dedicated to the principle that crowdsourcing can provide you with incredible ideas, insights, products, and services.
- “Think Big but Start Small. This is the basis for Singularity University’s 10^9 thinking. You can start a company on day one that affects a small group, but aim to positively impact a billion people within a decade.
- “Never Fail to Fail. The importance of rapid iteration: Fail frequently, fail fast, and fail forward.
- “Spark with Imagination, Fuel with Data. Agility—that is, nimbleness—is a key discriminator against the large and linear. And agility requires lots of access to new and often wild ideas and lots of good data to separate the worthwhile from the wooly. For certain, the most successful start-ups today are data driven. They measure everything and use machine learning and algorithms to help them analyze that data to make decisions.
- “Be a Platform. Look at the most successful companies getting billion-dollar valuations … AirBnb, Uber, Instagram … they are all platform plays. Is yours?
- “Have a Mission That Matters. Perhaps most important, is the company you’re starting built upon a massively transformative purpose? When the going gets hard, will you push on or give up? Passion is fundamental to forward progress.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 4
“A long time ago, in a tiny medieval village, a farmer spots three soldiers on the edge of town. Knowing what would likely happen next, he runs into the marketplace shouting a warning: ‘Quick, close the doors, lock the windows! There are soldiers coming and they’ll take away all our food.’
“The soldiers are in fact hungry. When they enter the village, they start knocking on doors, asking for food. The first villager tells them the cupboard is bare. At the next, the second villager tells them the same. The next door isn’t even opened.
“Finally one of the starving soldiers says, ‘I have an idea—let’s make stone soup.’
“With that, he strides over and knocks on yet another door. ‘Excuse me,’ he says to the villager, ‘do you have a cauldron and some firewood? We would like to make some stone soup.’
“The villager, thinking there’s no risk to her, says, ‘Soup from stones? This I’ve got to see. Sure, I’ll help.’ So she gives them a cauldron and some firewood while another soldier gets some water. They bring the water to a boil and place three large stones in the pot. News spreads around the town and the villagers begin to gather. ‘Soup from stones,’ they say. ‘this we have to see.’
“So the soldiers are standing around the fire and the villagers are standing around the soldiers.
“’I had no idea you can make soup from stones,’ says one villager.
“’Sure can,’ replies the soldier.
“Eventually, tired of standing around, another villager asks, ‘Can I help?’
“’Perhaps,’ says a soldier, ‘if you had a few potatoes, that would make the stone soup even better.’
“So the villager quickly fetches some potatoes and adds them to the pot of simmering stones.
“Another asks, ‘How can I help?’
“’Well, a couple of carrots would sure make the soup even better.’
“So the villager contributes some carrots. Soon others are adding poultry, barley, garlic, and leeks. After a while one of the soldiers calls out, ‘It’s done,’ and shares the soup with everyone. The villagers are heard saying, ‘Soup from stones! It tastes fantastic. I had no idea.’
“That story of stone soup comes from an old folktale that eventually became a children’s book. I heard it in college and it’s never left me. In fact, I’ve come to think of making stone soup as the only way an entrepreneur can succeed. The stones are, of course, your big bold ideas; the contributions of the villagers, the capital, resource, and intellectual support offered by investors and strategic partners. Everyone who adds a small amount to your stone soup is in fact helping to make your dreams come true.
“What makes stone soup work is passion. People love passion. People love to contribute to passion. And you can’t fake it.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 5
“At TED 2014, when I asked (Jeff) Bezos what advice he would give to exponential entrepreneurs, he, like Musk, counsels a focusing on passion, not fads.
“‘It’s so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is hot,’ says Bezos. ‘Instead, position yourself and wait for the wave to come to you. So then you ask, Position myself where? Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you’re missionary about. I tell people that when we acquire companies, I’m always trying to figure out: Is this person who leads this company a missionary or a mercenary? The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money. One of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries end up making more money than the mercenaries anyway. And so pick something that you are passionate about, that’s my number one piece of advice.'”
Pithy Summary
About the Book
Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World – Audiobook | Ebook | Hardcover – “Bold is a radical, how-to guide for using exponential technologies, moonshot thinking, and crowd-powered tools to create extraordinary wealth while also positively impacting the lives of billions.
“Exploring the exponential technologies that are disrupting today’s Fortune 500 companies and enabling upstart entrepreneurs to go from “I’ve got an idea” to “I run a billion-dollar company” far faster than ever before, the authors provide exceptional insight into the power of 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, robotics, networks and sensors, and synthetic biology.”
About the Author
Peter H. Diamandis – “Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world’s leaders on exponentially growing technologies.”
Steven Kotler – “Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of 11 bestsellers (out of fourteen books), including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and the Harvard Business Review.”
Additional Resources
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Business | Nonfiction | Science | Sociology