#290 Shawn Livermore - Author of The Amazon Bestselling Book - Average Joe

Today we are talking to Shawn Livermore, the Author of the Amazon Bestselling book Average Joe. And we discuss the 6 claims of a tech genius. The highly valuable slow create process that allows the average technologist to create at the same level of tech giants, and the coveted but unreliable flow state.

All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!

About Shawn:

Shawn is a software architect and startup founder with 20 years experience in tech, serving billion-dollar / Fortune-500 level customers. Shawn has architected and released large-scale enterprise software implementations and corporate acquisitions in the 100mm range.

Shawn has authored several books on software and business, and launched multiple tech startups with venture funding & incubators.

About Average Joe:

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.