Summary of Bold by Peter Diamandis

Takeaway

• Big goals lead to big outcomes.
• The bigger you go, the less competition you have.
• Clear goal setting is the best way to improve performance and motivation.
• Focus on the long term.

What Bold Talks About

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World is a book that aims to explain how to go big and have an impact. It features some tips, an autobiographical part, and short interviews with billionaires. I learned that the bigger you go, the less competition you have. You go big by setting up a clear goal and dividing it into smaller goals.

Overall, the book is too long.

Skip parts one and three and go directly to the billionaire mindset part.

Or better, read this summary.

6/10.

Buy the book here.

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Summary of Bold Written by Peter Diamandis

New technologies all follow a specific pattern of adoption called the Gartner hype cycle.

Bitcoin is a good example of technology obeying this law.

1. Technology trigger: the 2008 financial crisis made Satoshi want to give people back control of their money.
2. Peak of inflated expectations: the BTC reaches 20 000 USD in 2018.
3. Trough of disillusionment: it goes back to 3000 USD three months later.
4. Slope of enlightenment: it raises in value and will never go back below 30 000 USD
5. Plateau of productivity: it skyrockets to 100 000 USD.

Skunk success: taking a bunch of smart people, locking them into a room, and getting them to come up with genius in a record time.

Goal setting is the easiest way to increase motivation and enhance performance.

Big goals lead to big outcomes. It comes down to attention and persistence.

To realize them, you need leverage: believe in yourself and align your values with the end goal.

The road to bold is paved with failure. You need a strategy to handle risks and make sure you learn along the way.

Good entrepreneurs don’t like risks. They try to reduce it as starting a company is already risky.

Cultivate autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Go 10X -> you’ll make a 2X.

If you go 2X, you will make 0,05 X.

Google’s eight innovation principles.
1. Focus on the user
2. Share everything
3. Look for ideas everywhere
4. Think big but start small
5. Never fail to fail
6. Spark with imagination, fuel with data
7. Be a platform
8. Have a mission that matters

Create direct feedback loops.

Focus on the now. Don’t focus on what will happen in one hour or so.

Uncertainty is our rocket ride into the now.

The seventeen triggers of flow state (I only found eleven in the book lmao).
1. Clear goal: think challenging yet manageable.
Group flow:
2. Serious concentration
3. Shared, clear goals
4. Good communication
5. Equal participation.
6. Element of risk
7. Familiarity with each other.
8. Blending egos
9. Sense of control (combination of autonomy and mastery)
10. Close listening
11. Always say “yes, and…” instead of saying “no” or “but”.

How to achieve the extraordinary.

1. Get a big goal.
2. Get traction: slow down and talk about it, see who is interested to build what you want to build, or benefiting from what you want to create.
3. Divide your big goal into sub-goals.

Fear is hell on decision-making. Fear prompts retreat.

The moment one gets into the expert state of mind, a great number of things become impossible -> be and stay a student to keep your curiosity up.

Laws of the author.

1. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.
2. When faced without a challenge – make one!
3. “No” means “begin one level higher”.
4. If anything can go wrong, fix it.
5. When proposed with choices – take both.
6. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite.
7. An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how something can’t be done.
8. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.
9. Start at the top, then work your way up.
10. Do it by the book, but be the author.
11. When forced to compromise, ask for more.
12. If you can’t win, change the rules.
13. If you can’t change the rules, ignore them.
14. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing.
15. The squeaky wheel gets replaced.
16. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.
17. You get what you incentivize.
18. If you think it is impossible, then it is for you.
19. The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.
20. If it was easy, it would have been done already.
21. Without a target, you’ll miss every time.
22. Fail early, often, forward.
23. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Billionaire mindset.

1. Take risk, but mitigate them.
2. Rapid iteration and ceaseless experimentation.
3. Passion and purpose.
4. Long-term thinking.
5. Customer-centric thinking.
6. Probability thinking.
7. Rationally optimistic thinking.
8. Reliance on first principles (fundamental truth).

To make better decisions, take a broader view.

Outcomes are not deterministic (certain), they are probabilistic (likely).

Make bold moves but always protect the downside, always make sure you have a way out if things go bust.

It’s easier to make progress when you are really ambitious because you have less competition and you get the best people to work for you.

Being negative is NOT how we make progress.

The secret to Virgin, Google, Amazon, and Musk’s companies is that these guys focus on the long-term and are customer-centric.

Google: they focus on products and services people use more than 2x per day.

At Google, they increase the volume of what they do, and yet their rate of failure doesn’t go up. It’s because if you fail at doing something ambitious, you usually succeed in doing something important.

For more summaries, head to auresnotes.com.

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