Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success

Inside the bowels of the SpaceX factory, a kid named Kosta Grammatis, one of the youngest avionics systems engineers in the company, sat tinkering with a tiny satellite for the year leading up to the third Falcon 1 launch. It was called K-SAT. It was basically a modem. With it, Grammatis’s team hoped to use preexisting satellite networks to control SpaceX spacecraft. Essentially, hooking in to an existing platform that could save the company time and money.

After nearly failing out of high school and college, Grammatis had hacked the ladder to his position at SpaceX on the back of what he called “an epically large project,” wherein he sent balloons and sensors up into the atmosphere to sniff for pesticide residue. He did it by shunning his classes (there was no physics program at the college he managed to get into) and reading a lot of articles on the Internet. He was a smart kid, a practitioner of David Heinemeier Hansson’s selective slacking, and, it turns out, good at engineering.

bionic eye that

Musk isn’t the first in history to use over-the-top demonstration to create buzz, and therefore harnessable momentum. Pop star Lady Gaga gained unprecedented support for her music and mission to “foster a more accepting society” through the stir generated by her outrageous costumes and music videos. Being hoisted into the 2011 Grammy Awards inside a giant egg, then hatching on stage wasn’t eccentricism, it was brilliant marketing. Twenty-four million albums later, it’s clear such artistic brinkmanship worked. Energy-drink maker Red Bull spurred enormous word-of-mouth when it sent daredevil Felix Baumgartner to the edge of space in a balloon, then recorded his supersonic freefall. His skydive broke the record for first human body to break the speed of sound, and the highest freefall distance (127,852 feet). Creating your own wave and then catching it is as old as ancient Greece: Alexander III rallied the Macedonians with his hyperbolic quest to reach the “ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea,” conquering the entire Persian Empire along the way.

Momentum, it turns out, can cover a multitude of sins.

360I HAD BEEN CLEVER to direct the award judges’ attention away from the Oreo tweet’s absolute economics and toward the momentum the tweet had in the press. And rather than cross their fingers like many of us would, 360i’s publicists had taken the tweet’s initial momentum and pushed it along like sweepers in a curling match.

If 360i hadn’t kept swinging, it certainly would not have won all those Clios.

The Oreo tweet case study proves that the perception of momentum is often as good as momentum. I didn’t personally believe it deserved all the attention it got. And yet, here I am, perpetuating the Oreo tweet even further. That’s the power of momentum.

’re Better Off Being a Fast Follower Than an Originator

20% Time” is not Google indigenous. It was borrowed from a company formerly known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, aka 3M, which allowed its employees to spend 15 percent of their work hours experimenting with new ideas, no questions asked.

Ryan Tate called The 20% Doctrine

You can make incremental progress by playing by the rules. To create breakthrough change, you have to break the rules.

People are generally willing to support other people’s small dreams with kind words. But we’re willing to invest lives and money into huge dreams

, on the other hand, you make something ten times better for a large number of people—you really produce huge amounts of new value—the money’s gonna come find you. Because it would be hard not to make money if you’re really adding that much value.”