Skip the Line

Aug 11

Written By Socrates - Head of School Team

Think you might want to read this book?

James Altucher gives us page after page of reframing how we should operate in Skip the Line. Think you need 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” to master something? What about a steady string of experiments to see what's possible? Think you need to network in person with business cards? What about sending four targeted texts every single day? Well there’s no need to wait your turn. This book will show you how to create opportunity and then invite others to join you!

What Would Socrates Ask?

What if you explicitly taught students to merge traditionally disparate ideas?
What if schools intentionally sought to reach the entrepreneurial spirit of each student?
What if your school offered in person and on demand classes to move through the curriculum?
What if artificial intelligence were used to connect teachers and administrators with right fit jobs?
What if artificial intelligence were used to connect learners in a specific subject with peer learners and experts in that field?
In what ways should school evolve from human centered to data driven?

Concepts

Shaping- Praising another for a quality you want them to possess.
Pareto Principle- 20 percent of the time you spend on a project creates 80 percent of the value.

Quotes from the author

“In this book, we will do away with the 10,000-Hour Rule - the rule that says if you work at something for 10,000 hours you will be among the best in the world at that thing. That rule no longer works, if it ever did. I found that in my own life, being able to construct experiments to quickly try out ideas, learn from them, and move on from them beats the 10,000-Hour Rule. I call it the 10,000 Experiments Rule.”
“The best way to get smarter is to find people of differing opinions and listen to them.”
“Be the credit card: give everyone the credit they deserve. Then they keep coming back to the source.”
“You have to find the room nobody else is in and then invite everybody to join you. This is skipping the line.”
“Don’t waste one of your precious years devoting yourself to just one idea. Walt Disney made some of the greatest animated films of all time. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella are my favorite animated films. But Walt Disney made his first fortune on Mickey Mouse watches in the middle of the Great Depression.”
“Only talk when you have something unique to say. Otherwise, listen.”
“... almost every aspect of life that we can think of evolves over time. And success in an industry follows the people who evolve with that industry.”
“We are just at the beginning (the first thirty years of what could be a thousand-year evolution) in the rise of dataism as a business model.”

Quotes from others

“If you can’t explain something simply, then you don’t understand it.” - Albert Einstein
“Nobody wants to create a business serving the bottom third of an industry. Everyone competes for the top third. If you can find a business model that serves the bottom third, you could be the only player in the space, and that’s worth billions.” - Jim McKelvey, the co-founder of Square
“Don’t be the best, be the only.” - Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine

Implement tomorrow?

Great Networking Idea

Scroll through your texts as far down as you can go. Find four people you haven’t texted in a while.
Text them. Texts have a 90 percent open rate and emails only have about an 8 percent open rate.
Don’t ask for anything. Just say, “ I just saw XYZ and it reminded me of that project ABC you were working on. It gave me an idea you should do JKL. In any case, hope all is well. Talk to you soon.”
Every day.