Leveraging Little Bets

Kirk’s mission was to popularize archaeology, and he wanted to do so in a way that generated an exciting life. Hosting American Treasures made this mission a reality. The question at hand is how he made this leap from a general idea into specific action.

Here’s what I noticed: Kirk’s path to American Treasures was incremental. He didn’t decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a television show and then work backward to make that dream a reality. Instead, he worked forward from his original mission—to popularize archaeology—with a series of small, almost tentative steps. When he stumbled on the old film reels for Land and Water, for example, he decided to digitize them and produce a DVD. After this small step he took the slightly larger step of raising money to shoot exploratory footage for a new version of the documentary. When George Milner played him that fateful answering machine tape, Kirk took another modest step by launching The Armchair Archaeologist project with no real vision of how it would prove useful, other than perhaps as fodder for his intro archaeology courses. This final little step, however, turned out to be a winner, leading directly to his own television show.

As I was struggling to make sense of Kirk’s story, I stumbled across a new business book that had been making waves. It was titled Little Bets, and it was written by a former venture capitalist named Peter Sims.² When Sims studied a variety of successful innovators, from Steve Jobs to Chris Rock to Frank Gehry, as well as innovative companies, such as Amazon and Pixar, he found a strategy common to all. “Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins” [emphasis mine]. This rapid and frequent feedback, Sims argues, “allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.”

To illustrate this idea, Sims details the example of Chris Rock preparing a comedy set for one of his acclaimed HBO specials. Rock, it turns out, will make somewhere between forty to fifty unannounced visits to a small New Jersey–area comedy club to help him figure out which material works and which doesn’t. As Sims notes, he shows up on stage with a yellow legal pad, working through different jokes, taking notes on the crowd’s reaction. Most of the material falls flat. It’s not uncommon for Rock to look up and say, “This needs to be fleshed out more,” while the crowd laughs at the awkwardness of Rock’s flops. But these little failures, combined with the little victories of the jokes that connect, provide the key information required for Rock to put together an extraordinary set.

This style of little bets, I realized, is what Kirk deployed to feel out his mission of popularizing archaeology. He tried releasing a DVD, filming a documentary, and putting together a film series for his students. The latter ended up the most promising, but Kirk couldn’t have known this in advance. The important thing about little bets is that they’re bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This approach stands in contrast to the idea of choosing a bold plan and making one big bet on its success. If Kirk had done this—for example, deciding in advance to dedicate years to popularizing the Land and Water documentary—he would not have had nearly as much success with his mission.

When I looked back to Pardis Sabeti’s story, I noticed the little-bets strategy at play here as well. As you’ll recall, she decided early in her graduate student career to pursue the general mission of tackling infectious disease in Africa. But at this stage, she didn’t know how to make this mission successful, so she launched small experiments. She started in a research lab working on the genetic heritage of African-Americans. This didn’t seem quite right, so she moved to a group that worked on malaria—but again, she didn’t see a clear path to making her mission a success. Returning to Harvard, she began work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute. It was here that she began to gain traction for her computational approach to seeking out markers of natural selection in the human genome. It was this last bet—out of a long string of such bets—that proved to be a big winner, at which point she dedicated her career to its pursuit. It was tentativeness, not boldness, that transformed Pardis’s general mission into a specific success.