Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

by Peter Sims

What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, the story developers at Pixar films, and the Army Chief of Strategic Plans all have in common?

Peter Sims found that all of them have achieved breakthrough results by methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas. Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan a whole project out in advance, trying to foresee the final outcome, they make a series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning from lots of little failures and from small but highly significant wins that allow them to happen upon unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.

Based on deep and extensive research, including more than 200 interviews with leading innovators, the author discovered that productive, creative thinkers and doers from Ludwig van Beethoven to Thomas Edison and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, practice a key set of simple but ingenious experimental methods such as failing quickly to learn fast, tapping into the genius of play, and engaging in highly immersed observation that free their minds, opening them up to making unexpected connections and perceiving invaluable insights.

Entrepeneurs, creative and innovative people they all DO THINGS TO DISCOVER WHAT TO DO.

In this experimental approach, they use little bets, to discover, test and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable.

Little bets are their vehicle for discovery, whereby actions produce insights that can be analysed: build a prototype in order to identify, frame and reframe problems and ideas, so they can adapt and act using little bets again.

Ingenious ideas rare spring into people´s minds fulle formed: the emerge through a rigorous experimental discovery approach. As  new problems and experiments emerge, their plans evolve. It is not a linear process, but a constant learning process.

These methods also unshackle them from the constraints of overly analytical thinking and linear problem solving that our education places so much emphasis on, as well as from the fear of failure, all of which thwart so many of us in trying to be more innovative. 

Fast paced and as entertaining as it is illuminating, Little Bets offers a whole new way of thinking about how to break away from the narrow strictures of the methods of analyzing and problem solving we were all taught in school and unleash our untapped creative powers. 

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Life is a creative process.

It all begins with one little bet. What will yours be?