Average Joe

"I love this stuff! Startup secrets, growth, genius, the magic touch, mystique—all of it. This is a self-help retreat in a book format for every startup founder and tech entrepreneur." Sean Ellis, originator of Growth Hacking "A must-have for all tech start-up founders and entrepreneurs that want to communicate their ideas and grow their products." Sean Ellis, originator of Growth Hacking BECOMING THE MYTH OF TECH GENIUS IN SILICON VALLEY How did some tech founders create breakthrough products and grow their start-ups to billions in value in just 1 to 2 years? How did the founder of one start-up convince an investor in a brief car ride to sign a term sheet for $4 billion? How do some in tech have a magic touch or mystique that opens doors, raises venture capital, and suspends reality? They are tech geniuses that enamor the media and amaze the public. They invoke their powers and make apps go viral, with their secrets, techniques, and charisma. But the tech genius is a myth. Their secret methods are formulaic, replicable, and sustainable. This book will dispel the myth of the tech genius, and yet—paradoxically—show you how to become one yourself. You'll learn how the creators of Gmail, Slack, Dropbox, Ring, Snap, Bitcoin, Groupon, and WeWork were able to work their magic on products and on people. You'll gain new skills in creativity, backed by neuroscience, like the Slow Create Framework, the Sustainable Mystique Triad, and the Mindless Work Ladder. These new tools, along with plenty of true stories and hard evidence, will help any average Joe in tech develop their ideas, narrow their focus, and refine their communication, until their friends, family, and co-workers start calling them a 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.