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How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World

Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Simon & Schuster, 2015
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Editorial Rating

9
getAbstract International Book Award Winner 2015

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Whether you’re producing T-shirts or mining asteroids for minerals, serial entrepreneur Peter H. Diamandis and research scientist Steven Kotler’s enthusiasm for what’s possible will win you over. Their “Six D’s of Exponentials” framework lays the groundwork for examining the profound opportunities available to today’s “exponential entrepreneurs”: the visionaries already changing the world using new technologies and platforms. Accounts of robotics, genomics and artificial intelligence bring home how much the world will change in the coming decades. The authors share the powerful, inexpensive tools available to everyone right now to fund, build and market your great idea. Chapters on crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and “incentive competitions” – including detailed guidance – are especially helpful. getAbstract recommends this valuable guide to investors, start-ups, entrepreneurs with big ideas and leaders of large organizations.

Summary

Think “Exponentially”

In millennia past, only “kings, pharaohs and emperors” had the resources to attack society’s largest problems. With the Industrial Revolution, power diffused to the new captains of industry who had the financial and intellectual capacity to expand society’s infrastructure and modernize production. Today, anyone with a great idea, passion and commitment “has access to the technology, minds and capital” needed to turn that idea into a reality.

In the past, commerce basically followed “linear growth”: the idea that progress occurs in small, steady steps. However, rapid advances in technology catapulted linear growth into the new “compound doubling” realm of “exponential growth.” The “Six D’s of Exponentials” model explains its power. As it adheres to the cumulative power of exponential development, the last three D’s are “far more potent” than the first three:

  1. “Digitalization” – The chain reaction resulting from advances in information technology starts here and makes collaboration easier.
  2. “Deception” – Growth is so tiny at this stage that it’s hard to see and appreciate.

About the Authors

Space entrepreneur and physician Peter H. Diamandis and scientist Steve Kotler co-wrote the bestseller Abundance. Kotler co-founded the Flow Genome Project. Diamandis founded the X Prize Foundation and co-founded Singularity University, Space Adventures, the International Space University and Planetary Resources, among other high-technology enterprises.

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