DECODING GREATNESS

Don’t quit your day job just yet, but do prepare to “harness the future and the past” to change the world and make yourself a superstar.

Friedman opens with a well-known moment in the history of technology: when Steve Jobs called out Bill Gates for supposedly stealing Apple’s software to build Windows. “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox,” Gates coolly replied, “and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found that you had already stolen it.” True enough, but even as Xerox snoozed, both Jobs and Gates had reverse-engineered their inventions from the Xerox original, “systematically taking things apart to explore their inner workings and extract new insights.” Though Friedman’s definition of reverse-engineering gets more metaphorical as the narrative proceeds, his fundamental lesson holds: If you want to be a novelist, you pick apart the work of eminent models to figure out their tricks; if you want to be a musician, you try to learn to think like Paul McCartney. Whatever the pursuit, writes the author, the race is on, since if you’re alive and working, you’re “facing significantly more competition than your colleagues did a decade back.” Greatness, Friedman holds, hinges on the mind, both creative and detail-oriented, that can see what someone else has done and do it better—or do something that the other thing does not. Drawing on examples from Jeff Bezos to Judd Apatow, Malcolm Gladwell, and Vincent Van Gogh (women, regrettably, don’t often figure in Friedman’s pages), the author examines how these creative minds think and counsels readers to ask interesting questions, solicit and interpret feedback (but not too much, since “feedback is valuable, but only to a point”), develop meaningful metrics, and set goals.

A meandering yet mostly engaging prescription for getting ahead in business and life.