The Details | Little Bets — Chaos & Reason

Little Bets by Peter Sims

I really enjoyed this book, it opened my eyes and had me evaluating what my thought process is when I’m doing things.

I’ll be taking most of these points straight from the book with minimal changes, just because I think that language is already broken down enough for the points to be easily understood.

Fundamental to the little Bets approach is that we:

Experiment

Learn by doing. Fail quickly learn fast. Develop experiments and prototypes to gather insights, identify problems, and build up creative ideas, like Beethoven did in order to discover new musical styles and forms.

Play

A playful, improvisational, and humorous atmosphere quiets our inhibitions when ideas are incubating or newly hatched, and prevents creative ideas from being snuffed out or prematurely judged.

Immerse

Take time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up.

Define

Use insights gathered throughout the process to define specific problems and needs before solving them.

Reorient

Be flexible in pursuit of larger goals and aspirations, making good use of small wins to make necessary pivots and chart the course to completion.

Iterate

Repeat, refine, and test frequently armed with better insights, information and assumptions as time goes on.

These are some of the take aways for me:

Fixed mind set and Growth mind set. This is a concept developed by Dr. Carol Dweck, essential those with a fixed mind set are more results oriented, the focus is on how good you did or how smart you were. Those favouring a fixed mind-set believe that abilities and intelligence are set in stone, that we have an innate set of talents, which creates and urgency to repeated prove those abilities. They perceive failures or setbacks as threatening their sense of worth or their identity.

Whereas the Growth mind-set the focus is on the effort, the attempt rather than the results of the attempt. Those favouring a growth mind-set believe that intelligence and abilities can be grown through effort and tend to view failures or setbacks as opportunities for growth.

This right here is pivotal for me, I was mind blown.

I’ve realized that I’m a fixed mind thinker, If it’s not perfect or right the first go round I’m less likely to pursue that avenue. For example, I struggle with driving, I just feel that my skills are inadequate, and so I’m not motivated to keep trying because I think I suck, now most of this is me but some of it is my teachers, “You’re doing this wrong, you’re doing that wrong’. Theres only so much of that I want to hear.

However after reading this book, I plan to develop a strategy that will have me focus more on the attempt and effort rather than the execution.

This book as also helped me in regards to my formulations, let’s say I make a conditioner and I wanted it to be a good detangler, if it doesn’t work how I intended it to I usually scrap the idea, instead of focusing on what it may have done well, maybe it was awesome as a deep conditioner. So taking the time to venture down the bramble path and further flesh out ideas and concepts. ( I mean I knew this already but now there’s no lying to myself I have no excuses)

It’s really about changing your perceptions and your thought process. There will always be challenges, the question is how will you meet them?