How lateral thinking helps shorten the success path?

“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” ~ Helen Keller

Throughout our life, we keep getting this message that there are no shortcuts to success. You have to follow the linear path of working hard, paying your dues and climbing success ladder one step at a time.

What if I say that there are certainly ways to shorten your success? Ways which are completely legal and ethical but certainly clever enough which majority of people can't even think about. But how is that possible?

Before I answer this questions, let's first talk about Re-Captcha's. I hope all of you know what is a Re-Captcha? Almost every one of us who uses the internet throughout the day, have used Re-Captcha's while submitting forms on various websites. Re-Captcha's are used to prevent spammers and robots submit web forms or steal information from websites.

But hang on a minute. What does Re-Captcha's have to do with the shortcut to success? Well, there is an interesting story behind Re-Captcha's.

Re-Captcha was originally developed by Luis von Ahn, Ben Maurer, Colin McMillen, David Abraham and Manuel Blum at Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus.

In 2006, Dr. von Ahn’s group estimated that humans around the world decode at least 200 million Captchas per day, at 10 seconds per Captcha. This works out to about 500,000 hours per day — a lot of applied brainpower being spent on what Dr. von Ahn regards as a fundamentally mindless exercise.

While answering a Captcha, have you every thought that from where does it fetches all those words? Are these images or texts randomly generated by a computer algorithm?

Well, these words are actual images from the various books, newspapers, articles, magazines which are yet to be digitized (as part of another interesting project). Sounds interesting?

Re-Captcha has been used by companies like Google to digitize millions of articles and books effortlessly through crowdsourced human efforts (that too free of cost). It has helped digitize books that are too illegible to be scanned by computers as well as translate books to different languages.

Re-Captcha uses humans to translate images of scanned words that a computer couldn’t understand. The scanned words are placed alongside a normal captcha widget so users decode both words at the same time. The word can be run by multiple people to cut down on errors. Catchas also offer the opportunity to convert a lot of words.

So while you prove to Facebook, Google or any website that uses Re-captcha that you are a human, you are essentially donating your time (and brain power) to digitize a physical book. How innovative way to do things for a good cause.

This brings back us to our original question. Can we shorten our success path legally? Fundamentally yes. Re-Captcha project was able to digitize millions of pages effortlessly in just short few years which if done manually would have taken infinitely long time.

All that was required to solve this problem was some lateral thinking and bingo, the path to success was shorten drastically. It is not that team did not work hard or did not pay its dues (coming up with software, infrastructure, etc.) but they certainly did not climb the success ladder step by step or with conventional wisdom. They were able to bypass the norms of society and achieved substantially more than what they could get if they worked their way linearly.

Read more about Re-captcha here

So if you feel that you can't be successful quickly in your job, life, business or whatever you want to do then you must change your thinking. You need to think laterally and then the sky is the limit.

Think of ways to cut down unnecessary steps to success. You don't have to do what others are doing. Do not fall prey to the rat race. If dropping out of a college is a step to success then go for it. There are many billionaire dropouts to prove that college is not the only step to success. It can be bypassed.

Looking for ways to build your growth team fast? Well, wait for my next book on building high growth teams :)

Stay tuned!

About Author:

Lokesh Gupta is a startup and business growth expert with more than 12 years of experience in running and managing startups.

He is on a mission to help 5000 startups find 10X growth fast through product and technology.

His next book on building high growth teams is due in early 2018. Know more about the book here.

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