I wish I wrote the book and that's how much I love it. I've always been drawn to secrets to success stories hoping to learn tips and tricks about how to excel in life. I strongly believe hard work alone is not enough to succeed. In this book, you learn through stories of different smartcuts people take. One of the chapters examined how having a mentor had mixed results on mentee's careers. The key is that the some people are able to learn more quickly than others (ability to spot important details among noise a "first class noticer"). The key to benefit mentor and mentee relationship is to tell them negative feedback for mentee to improve and to make mentee examine success-crucial details more closely than they might have on their own. Smartcuts is very smart, very intelligent, and somewhat redundant. Snow is very good at weaving stories together that seem to lead up to a great point, but might be better as a collection of stories about innovative people. He writes like Gladwell, but is much more interesting. I give this book four stars because of the excellent storytelling and several good ideas, like the image of surfers finding a wave to explain how Skrillex's timing in the music industry was so perfect.
Really insightful book with immediate applications for personal and professional development.
—spartan752937
It turns out you shouldn't bother reading books that overuse the phrase, "It turns out."
—ANNA123
Great principles, and really good stories. Very inspirational.
—Jaytee
Entertaining. Liked the anecdotes and overall theme.
—Preethi
Available at library (paperback)
—jazzy413
