Iterative Approach to Book Writing

Should you make little stories into larger chapters? How iterative is someone’s approach? I posed these questions to Peter Sims, author of the book, “Little Bets.” In the book, Peter discusses through stories the power of iterative cycles.

Peter Sims: Well, I wanted it to be a great book. I wanted it to be a book that was extremely well researched. So what you see is at the top of an iceberg. The starting point is… I think of it as an iceberg because the story that I share, or the story you read in the book is just at the top of a lot of research. Basically, both primary research in these 200 interviews where we’re looking for very — I worked with a research team at Stanford — we’re looking for patterns across how all these people work and think, so that we can boil that down into key insights and methods that each chapter is built around.

But then it’s also on top of all the innovation and creativity and psychology, neuroscience research that we could find that was relevant to this topic, as well. For example, there’s this belief that you can be more able to go through setbacks and failures if you change your mindset.

Well, we scoured the psychology research to understand, “Well, what does that mean exactly? How does somebody become more comfortable putting themselves out there night after night like Chris Rock does?” It turns out there’s this cutting edge research that has been developed by Dr. Carol Dweck who is a professor at Stanford. She talks about how people can develop what she calls a “growth mindset.” That is the sense that intelligence or ability can be grown through effort over time.

We found that to be a pattern that we saw in the innovators whether it was Frank Gehry or Chris Rock or Jeff Bezos; they all had a growth mindset. Then when we looked at Dweck’s research and all the research she was building on, the consensus was that this is extremely tight research.

Therefore, we said, “OK. Let’s put a chapter in the book on this idea of how one can develop a growth mindset.” So it applies to anyone. You just need to, as Dweck says, you need to be able to put yourself out there, though, in order to become more comfortable with setbacks and failure and basically it just gets easier and easier over time, as you see from your experience, as you’re able to grow through putting more effort into whatever you’re doing.

Whether it’s Lean or just developing ideas with rough prototypes, it’s just over time the research shows that you can develop a much stronger growth mindset. So that becomes a chapter in the book. That’s just one example.