Average Joe Be the Silicon Valley Tech Genius

The book covers numerous tech entrepreneurial founders and software developers, and the exciting brands or products that they created. It goes deep on a handful of them, narrowly divulging exactly how a few software developers and startup founders created breakthrough tech products like Gmail, Dropbox, Ring, Snapchat, Bitcoin, Groupon, and more. It highlights and unpacks the general hero-worship that the media and our own minds practice about tech founders and tech entrepreneurs. This idealization of tech success can create a paradox, preventing average tech professionals from their own successful journeys. This book provides hard evidence that anyone in tech can create, and anyone on the peripheral of tech can break through to the center where innovation, creativity, and opportunity meet.

The anecdotes, stories, evidence, facts, arguments, logic, principles, and techniques provided in this book have helped individuals and businesses engage in slow creation cycles, improve the morale of their development teams, and increased their delivery potential of their technology solutions overall.

Average Joe covers:

• Genius - The systematic deconstruction and debunking of the commonly held assumptions in the tech industry around supreme intelligence, and how that intelligence has been worshipped and sought after, despite the facts.
• Slow Creation - How to force-manufacture creative ideation. How conscious and subconscious cycles of patterns, details, and secrets can lead to breakthrough innovations, and how those P.D.S. cycles, and systematic mental grappling, can be conjured and repeated on a regular basis.
• Little-C Creativity - The conscious and miniature moments of epiphany that leak into our active P.D.S. cycles of Slow Creation.
• Flow - Why it's great, but also - why it's completely unreliable and unnecessary. How to perpetually innovate without relying on a flow state.
• Team Installation - How teams and companies can engage their employees in Slow Creation to unlock dormant ideas, stir up creative endeavors, and jumpstart fragile ideas into working products.
• User Manipulation - How tech products are super-charged with tricks, secret techniques, and neural transmitters like Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Cortisol; how those products leverage cognitive mechanisms and psychological techniques to force user adoption and user behaviors.
• Contrarianism - How oppositional and backward-thinking leaders create brand-new categories and the products which dominate those categories.
• Showmanship - How tech players have presented their ideas to the world, conjured up magic, manufactured mystique, and presented compelling stories that have captured their audiences.
• Sustainable Mystique Triad ? A simple model for capturing audiences consistently without relying on hype and hustle. 

Introduction xxi

1 Unpacking the Tech Genius Archetype 1

Solving Email 3

Paul Buchheit 7

The Great Man Theory 10

Odin 11

Quackery 13

Great Man Data 16

The Great Person Has Something More 17

Consumers 17

The Hero-Worshipping Media 18

Tech Professionals 20

The Venture Capital Community 21

Shoulders of Giants 23

The Tech Genius Myth 25

Claim #1: Genius is Required 25

Claim #2: Creation is Sudden and Inspired 26

Claim #3: Secrets Are Elusive 26

Claim #4: Growth is Magic 27

Claim #5: Their Thinking is Mysteriously Inverted 27

Claim #6: Their Mystique is Real 28

Dispelling the Myth: Why It Matters 28

2 The Myth of Genius 33

The Mozart Letter 33

Genius 34

Finding Genius 37

Wonder Kids 39

The Termites 39

Bill Gates 42

Michael Kearney 45

Psychometrics 47

Big-C and Little-c Creativity 48

Intelligence Worship 49

Purists, Linux, and Losers 51

Bram Cohen and BitTorrent 54

Narcissism of Minor Differences 55

Imposter Syndrome 56

Iteration 58

Winston Churchill’s Iterative Process 58

Abraham Lincoln’s Iterative Process 61

Something from Nothing 64

Mozart’s Iterative Process 65

3 Creativity: Person vs. Process 69

Wright’s Magic Dust 70

Creative Processes in Tech 71

Creative Processes for Software Developers 72

Creative Processes for UX/Product Designers 73

The Science of Creativity 78

Cognitive Science 79

The Origins of Creativity—Wallas’s Four Steps 79

Thought Fluidity 82

The Nagging Pull 84

Subconscious Creative Work 85

The Default Mode Network 89

Resting-State Functional Connectivity 92

Mindless Work 94

The Slow Create Framework 98

Benefits of the SCF 100

Artifacts of SCF 103

Using the SCF 116

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Slow Creation 119

Paul Buchheit’s Slow Creation 120

Leonard Cohen’s Slow Creation 121

4 The Dropbox Miracle 125

Growth Hacking 125

Drew Houston 127

Y-Combinator 130

Sean Ellis 133

Jamie Siminoff 135

The Siminoff Secret 137

Seamless Product Execution 139

5 The Coveted, Unreliable Flow State 143

Achieving Flow 144

Flow in the Wild 147

Flow for Musicians 148

Flow for Athletes 150

Flow for Comedians 151

Flow for Software Developers 153

Flow for Everyone 156

Flow is Not a Goal 157

Flow is Not Required 158

Flow Not Required for Success 158

Flow Not Required for Ideation and Creativity 159

6 Patterns, Details, and Secrets 163

PDS Cycles 163

Patterns 166

Details 169

The First 10,000 Pots 171

Secrets 174

The Siminoff Secret 176

The Village Mindset 178

Finding Truffles 183

7 Make Me Click 187

Conversion 188

The Marketing Playbook 188

Sticky 189

Flappy Bird 191

Behavioral Addiction 198

User Manipulation 203

The Slot Machine Newsfeed 205

Operant Conditioning 207

Conditioned for Distraction 212

Friction 214

Snapchat Streaks 215

Responsibility Invocation 220

Reciprocity 222

Cognitive Mechanisms 223

Manipulate Me, Please 229

8 Becoming Contrarian 231

Bitcoin 231

The Year of Bitcoin 235

Science > Trust 237

A Slow Crypto-Creation 239

Contrarians with a Cause 241

Appetite for Uncertainty 243

Bulldozer Mindset 244

Amazon’s Bulldozer 245

The Contrarian Lens 248

The Curse of Knowledge 248

The Beginner’s Mind 251

Contrarian Belief Mode 258

Indifference 263

Becoming Contrarian 267

9 The Science of Showmanship 269

Demosthenes’s Delivery 269

Substance and Delivery 275

Elon Musk and Jack Ma 277

Emotional Intelligence 282

The Dark Side of EQ 287

A Scene from the Multiverse 292

Story Science 294

Vampire Economics 295

Conflict & Narrative Transport 297

Neural Entrainment 299

Nerds Telling Stories 300

Recruiting Left-Brainers 301

The Great Crossover 303

Business Storytelling 304

The Founding Myth 306

10 Mystique 315

Blackbeard’s Smoke 315

The Holmes Hustle 318

The Muddy Waters Hustle 326

The Muddy Waters of Snapchat 326

The Muddy Waters of Uber 328

The Hungry Hustle 329

The Healthy Hustle: Authentic Uncertainty 332

Mystique’s Special Quality 337

The Average Tech Entrepreneur 338

When Dreamer Meets Banker 339

The Sustainable Mystique Triad 346

Interesting Problems 347

Narrow Focus 350

Articulate Speech 353

Inflections 355

Fascination 358

11 Revisiting the Myth of the Tech Genius 361

Claim #1: Genius is Required 361

Claim #2: Creativity is Sudden and Inspired 364

Claim #3: Secrets Are Elusive 369

Claim #4: Growth is Magic 371

Claim #5: Their Thinking is Mysteriously Inverted 372

Claim #6: Their Mystique is Real 373

The Great Person with Something More 375

Why We Knock 377

References 379

Index 439