In order to encourage our employees like Kari and their managers like Jack to shift their mind-set in the direction of experimentation, we use the image of placing bets. This motivates employees to think of themselves as entrepreneurs—who typically don’t succeed without some failures. The examples of Kari and (from a few pages back) Paolo reflect everyday life at Netflix. We want all employees taking bets they believe in and trying new things, even when the boss or others think the ideas are dumb. When some of those bets don’t pay off, we just fix the problems that arise as quickly as possible and discuss what we’ve learned. In our creative business, rapid recovery is the best model.

To generate lots of behavior options, you can use the following categories during your own Magic Wanding sessions.

• What behaviors would you do one time? 

• What new habits would you create? 

• What habit would you stop?

After you come up with each behavior wish, think to yourself, Great. What else? and keep going. Eventually, you will have a Swarm of Behaviors that will range from wacky to logical to surprising. And that’s a good thing.

Notice that Krieger and Systrom nailed the motivation component by choosing a behavior that people already wanted to do. According to the Behavior Model, they were already in good shape. That alone might have brought them some success. But what they did next catapulted them into the pantheon of Silicon Valley demigods—they made their Golden Behaviors easy to do.

In the previous chapters, you’ve already been working on Behavior Crafting even though I didn’t use that term. You have already learned how to:

• Identify a lot of behavior options (chapter 2) 

• Match yourself with behaviors that will lead to your aspiration (chapter 2) 

• Make the behavior easier to do (chapter 3)

We were creative in how we saved money, and we got creative in how to make money, too. (This, incidentally, was a whole lot more fun.) No matter how you try to sugarcoat it, managing expenses is playing defense, and we had decided to play offense to get through the crisis.