Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries

Praising ability alone reduces persistence, while praising effort or the processes a person goes through to learn leads to growth mind-set behaviors. Dweck has found this to apply regardless of age.

Indeed, Dyer’s and Gregersen’s finding mirrors a preponderance of evidence that indicates that diversity, be it of perspectives, experiences, or backgrounds, fuels creativity.

This correlation between being open to experience and creativity is, in fact, one of the most prominent findings that threads throughout the creativity research.

Why are some people voracious questioners and others are not?

his distinctive style of architecture.

little bets, allowed him to explore new styles and forms with audiences. His surviving manuscripts are riddled with pockmarks, corrections, changes, and cross-outs, some so deep that he would even puncture the manuscript paper with his quill. Over time, Beethoven arrived at a highly distinct style, helping to usher in a new period of classical musi

approach problems in a nonlinear manner using little bets,

Among those changes, they altered the approach to storyboards and computer graphics standards. For example, they created what Bird called superelaborate storyboards that emulated camera movement to show which parts of the images of scenes needed to be perfect (e.g., have fine-grained detail) and which ones didn’t. This allowed the animators to focu

as failing forward. That is, entrepreneurs push ideas into the market as quickly as possible in order to learn from mistakes and failures that will point the way forward. This is an extremely well-known Silicon Valley operating principle. Howard

The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem.