SMARTER FASTER BETTER by Charles Duhigg

• There are some people who pretend at productivity, whose résumés appear impressive until you realize their greatest talent is self marketing.
• Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. It’s a process of learning how to succeed with less stress and struggle. It’s about getting things done without sacrificing everything we care about along the way.
• Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed.
• Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings.
• To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.
• When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more. They are, on average, more confident and overcome setbacks faster. People who believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers.
• One way to prove to ourselves that we are in control is by making decisions. “Each choice—no matter how small—reinforces the perception of control and self-efficacy,” the Columbia researchers wrote. Even if making a decision delivers no benefit, people still want the freedom to choose.
• The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination.
• As long as we feel a sense of control, we’re more willing to play along.
• Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control. The specific choice we make matters less than the assertion of control. It’s this feeling of self-determination that gets us going.
• Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence.
• People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction.
• In contrast, having an external locus of control—believing that your life is primarily influenced by events outside your control—“is correlated with higher levels of stress, [often] because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities,” the team of psychologists wrote.
• Studies show that someone’s locus of control can be influenced through training and feedback.
• Complimenting students for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings.
• Complimenting students on their intelligence activates an external locus of control.
• “Internal locus of control is a learned skill,”
• We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”
• When things are at their most miserable, their drill instructors had said, they should ask each other questions that begin with “why.”
• If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier,
• Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.
• If you give people an opportunity to feel a sense of control and let them practice making choices, they can learn to exert willpower.
• Once people know how to make self-directed choices into a habit, motivation becomes more automatic.
• Moreover, to teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals.
• An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.
• “Any group, over time, develops collective norms about appropriate behavior,
• Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards, and unwritten rules that govern how we function. When a team comes to an unspoken consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate, that’s a norm asserting itself.
• There is strong evidence that group norms play a critical role in shaping the emotional experience of participating in a team.
• On the best teams, for instance, leaders encouraged people to speak up; teammates felt like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another; people said they could suggest ideas without fear of retribution; the culture discouraged people from making harsh judgments.
• For psychological safety to emerge among a group, teammates don’t have to be friends. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard. “The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader,” as Amy Edmondson, who is now a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. “It seems like fairly minor stuff, but when the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel listened to, or starts a meeting by saying ‘I might miss something, so I need all of you to watch for my mistakes,’ or says ‘Jim, you haven’t spoken in a while, what do you think?,’ that makes a huge difference.”
• This is how psychological safety emerges: by giving everyone an equal voice and encouraging social sensitivity among teammates.
• “The biggest thing you should take away from this work is that how teams work matters, in a lot of ways, more than who is on them,” he said.
• Teams need to believe that their work is important. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful. Teams need clear goals and defined roles. Team members need to know they can depend on one another. But, most important, teams need psychological safety.
• Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don’t know. They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.
• Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.
• And the unwritten rules that make teams succeed or fail, it turns out, are the same from place to place.
• In general, the route to establishing psychological safety begins with the team’s leader. So if you are leading a team—be it a group of coworkers or a sports team, a church gathering, or your family dinner table—think about what message your choices send. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you modeling listening? Are you demonstrating a sensitivity to what people think and feel, or are you letting decisive leadership be an excuse for not paying as close attention as you should?
• There are always good reasons for choosing behaviors that undermine psychological safety. It is often more efficient to cut off debate, to make a quick decision, to listen to whoever knows the most and ask others to hold their tongues. But a team will become an amplification of its internal culture, for better or worse. Study after study shows that while psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, it’s more productive over time.
• When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. That’s ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that works only when people feel like they can trust one another. It only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.
• As a team leader, then, it’s important to give people control.
• Our attention span is guided by our intentions. We choose, in most situations, whether to focus the spotlight or let it be relaxed. But when we allow automated systems, such as computers or autopilots, to pay attention for us, our brains dim that spotlight and allow it to swing wherever it wants. This is, in part, an effort by our brains to conserve energy.
• Our brains automatically seek out opportunities to disconnect and unwind.
• Cognitive tunneling can cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks.
• Reactive thinking is at the core of how we allocate our attention, and in many settings, it’s a tremendous asset.
• Reactive thinking is how we build habits, and it’s why to-do lists and calendar alerts are so helpful: Rather than needing to decide what to do next, we can take advantage of our reactive instincts and automatically proceed. Reactive thinking, in a sense, outsources the choices and control that, in other settings, create motivation.
• But the downside of reactive thinking is that habits and reactions can become so automatic they overpower our judgment. Once our motivation is outsourced, we simply react.
• All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not.
• It’s always been difficult to learn how to focus. It’s even harder now.”
• People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades.
• By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes.
• If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head.
• If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.
• “Most of the time, when information overload occurs, we’re not aware it’s happening—and that’s why it’s so dangerous,”
• Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us. Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react.
• To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge.
• Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next.
• The need for cognitive closure, in many settings, can be a great strength. People who have a strong urge for closure are more likely to be self-disciplined and seen as leaders by their peers.
• When people rush toward decisions simply because it makes them feel like they are getting something done, missteps are more likely to occur.
• Decisive people have an instinct to “seize” on a choice when it meets a minimum threshold of acceptability. This is a useful impulse, because it helps us commit to projects rather than endlessly debating questions or second-guessing ourselves into a state of paralysis.
• However, if our urge for closure is too strong, we “freeze” on our goals and yearn to grab that feeling of productivity at the expense of common
• goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires—or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can’t match.
• “Making yourself break a goal into its SMART components is the difference between hoping something comes true and figuring out how to do it,”
• People respond to the conditions around them. If you’re being constantly told to focus on achievable results, you’re only going to think of achievable goals. You’re not going to dream big.”
• Stretch goals “serve as jolting events that disrupt complacency and promote new ways of thinking,” a group of researchers wrote in Academy of Management Review business journal in 2011.
• There is an important caveat to the power of stretch goals, however. Studies show that if a stretch goal is audacious, it can spark innovation. It can also cause panic and convince people that success is impossible because the goal is too big. There is a fine line between an ambition that helps people achieve something amazing and one that crushes morale. For a stretch goal to inspire, it often needs to be paired with something like the SMART system.
• The reason why we need both stretch goals and SMART goals is that audaciousness, on its own, can be terrifying. It’s often not clear how to start on a stretch goal. And so, for a stretch goal to become more than just an aspiration, we need a disciplined mindset to show us how to turn a far-off objective into a series of realistic short-term aims. People who know how to build SMART goals have often been habituated into cultures where big objectives can be broken into manageable parts, and so when they encounter seemingly outsized ambitions, they know what to do. Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.
• Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.
• What matters is having a large ambition and a system for figuring out how to make it into a concrete and realistic plan. Then, as you check the little things off your to-do list, you’ll move ever closer to what really matters.
• Toyota Production System—which in the United States would become known as “lean manufacturing”—relied on pushing decision making to the lowest possible level.
• Engineering-focused cultures are powerful because they allow firms to grow quickly.
• Hands down, a commitment culture outperformed every other type of management style in almost every meaningful way.
• The main problem with Sentinel, Fulgham believed, was that the bureau—like many big organizations—had tried to plan everything in advance. But creating great software requires flexibility. Problems pop up unexpectedly and breakthroughs are unpredictable. The truth was, no one knew exactly how FBI agents would use Sentinel once it was functional, or how it would need to change as crime-fighting techniques evolved. So instead of meticulously predesigning each interface and system—instead of trying to control from above—they needed to make Sentinel into a tool that could adapt to agents’ needs. And the only way to do that, Fulgham was convinced, was if developers were unfettered themselves.
• Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored, that their mistakes won’t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.
• Many of our most important decisions are, in fact, attempts to forecast the future.
• Good decision making is contingent on a basic ability to envision what happens next.
• Probabilities can help you forecast likelihoods, but they can’t guarantee the future.
• The paradox of learning how to make better decisions is that it requires developing a comfort with doubt.
• “If you have no basis for treating one variable as more important than another, use equal weighting.
• Contradictory futures can be combined into a single prediction.
• The future isn’t one thing. Rather, it is a multitude of possibilities that often contradict one another until one of them comes true. And those futures can be combined in order for someone to predict which one is more likely to occur.
• Learning to think probabilistically requires us to question our assumptions and live with uncertainty. To become better at predicting the future—at making good decisions—we need to know the difference between what we hope will happen and what is more and less likely to occur.
• Our assumptions are based on what we’ve encountered in life, but our experiences often draw on biased samples.
• Many successful people, in contrast, spend an enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures.
• “The best entrepreneurs are acutely conscious of the risks that come from only talking to people who have succeeded,”
• Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.
• You’ll never know with 100 percent certainty how things will turn out. But the more you force yourself to envision potential futures, the more you learn about which assumptions are certain or flimsy, the better your odds of making a great decision next time.
• All we can do is learn how to make the best decisions that are in front of us, and trust that, over time, the odds will be in our favor.”
• How do we learn to make better decisions? In part, by training ourselves to think probabilistically. To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures—to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously—and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true.
• The people who make the best choices are the ones who work hardest to envision various futures, to write them down and think them through, and then ask themselves, which ones do I think are most likely and why?
• “The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations.”
• “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”
• This method is worth studying because it suggests a way that anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clichéd, is paying more attention to how things make us feel.
• “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996.
• “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
• People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel.
• When strong ideas take root, they can sometimes crowd out competitors so thoroughly that alternatives can’t prosper. So sometimes the best way to spark creativity is by disturbing things just enough to let some light through.
• Creativity can’t be reduced to a formula. At its core, it needs novelty, surprise, and other elements that cannot be planned in advance to seem fresh and new. There is no checklist that, if followed, delivers innovation on demand. But the creative process is different. We can create the conditions that help creativity to flourish. We know, for example, that innovation becomes more likely when old ideas are mixed in new ways. We know the odds of success go up when brokers—people with fresh, different perspectives, who have seen ideas in a variety of settings—draw on the diversity within their heads. We know that, sometimes, a little disturbance can help jolt us out of the ruts that even the most creative thinkers fall into, as long as those shake-ups are the right size.
• If you want to become a broker and increase the productivity of your own creative process, there are three things that can help: First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you think and feel.
• Look to your own life as creative fodder, and broker your own experiences into the wider world.
• Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn’t a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, it’s the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new. Creative desperation can be critical; anxiety is what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways.
• Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to seeing alternatives. It is critical to maintain some distance from what we create. Without self-criticism, without tension, one idea can quickly crowd out competitors. But we can regain that critical distance by forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from a completely different perspective, by changing the power dynamics in the room or giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before.
• There’s an idea that runs through these three lessons: The creative process is, in fact, a process, something that can be broken down and explained. That’s important, because it means that anyone can become more creative; we can all become innovation brokers.
• “Creativity is just problem solving,” Ed Catmull told me. “Once people see it as problem solving, it stops seeming like magic, because it’s not.
• People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign. We just have to learn how to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.”
• Unfortunately, however, our ability to learn from information hasn’t necessarily kept pace with its proliferation.
• This inability to take advantage of data as it becomes more plentiful is called “information blindness.”
• Information blindness occurs because of the way our brain’s capacity for learning has evolved. Humans are exceptionally good at absorbing information—as long as we can break data into a series of smaller and smaller pieces.
• “Our brains crave reducing things to two or three options,” said Eric Johnson, a cognitive psychologist at Columbia University who studies decision making. “So when we’re faced with a lot of information, we start automatically arranging it into mental folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders.”
• This ability to digest large amounts of information by breaking it into smaller pieces is how our brains turn information into knowledge. We learn which facts or lessons to apply in a given situation by learning which folders to consult. Experts are distinguished from novices, in part, by how many folders they carry in their heads.
• One way to overcome information blindness is to force ourselves to grapple with the data in front of us, to manipulate information by transforming it into a sequence of questions to be answered or choices to be made. This is sometimes referred to as “creating disfluency” because it relies on doing a little bit of work: Instead of simply choosing the house wine, you have to ask yourself a series of questions (White or red? Expensive or cheap?).
• It might seem like a small effort at the time, but those tiny bits of labor are critical to avoiding information blindness.
• This is how learning occurs. Information gets absorbed almost without our noticing because we’re so engrossed with it.
• We’re often too close to our own experiences to see how to break that data into smaller bits.
• “Our brain wants to find a simple frame and stick with it, the same way it wants to make a binary decision,” Eric Johnson, the Columbia psychologist, told me.
• One of the best ways to help people cast experiences in a new light is to provide a formal decision-making system—such as a flowchart, a prescribed series of questions, or the engineering design process—that denies our brains the easy options we crave.
• The people who are most successful at learning—those who are able to digest the data surrounding them, who absorb insights embedded in their experiences and take advantage of information flowing past—are the ones who know how to use disfluency to their advantage. They transform what life throws at them, rather than just taking it as it comes. They know the best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information. They take data and transform it into experiments whenever they can.
• Writing is more disfluent than typing, because it requires more labor and captures fewer verbatim phrases.
• No matter what constraints were placed on the groups, the students who forced themselves to use a more cumbersome note-taking method—who forced disfluency into how they processed information—learned more.
• In our own lives, the same lesson applies: When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data.
• When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend—and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.
• Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames.
• Motivation becomes easier when we transform a chore into a choice. Doing so gives us a sense of control.
• General Krulak had told me something that stuck with me: “Most recruits don’t know how to force themselves to start something hard. But if we can train them to take the first step by doing something that makes them feel in charge, it’s easier to keep going.”
• Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals.
• Forcing ourselves to explain why we are doing something helps us remember that this chore is a step along a longer path, and that by choosing to take that journey, we are getting closer to more meaningful objectives.
• Something as simple as jotting down a couple of reasons why I am doing something makes it much simpler to start.
• Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate (to ourselves) that we are in control—and that we are moving toward goals that are meaningful. It’s that feeling of self-determination that gets us going.
• TO GENERATE MOTIVATION
• Make a choice that puts you in control. If you’re replying to emails, write an initial sentence that expresses an opinion or decision. If you need to have a hard conversation, decide where it will occur ahead of time. The specific choice itself matters less in sparking motivation than the assertion of control.
• Figure out how this task is connected to something you care about. Explain to yourself why this chore will help you get closer to a meaningful goal. Explain why this matters—and then, you’ll find it easier to start.
• TO SET GOALS:
• Choose a stretch goal: an ambition that reflects your biggest aspirations.
• Then, break that into subgoals and develop SMART objectives.
• We aid our focus by building mental models—telling ourselves stories—about what we expect to see.
• TO STAY FOCUSED:
• Envision what will happen. What will occur first? What are potential obstacles? How will you preempt them? Telling yourself a story about what you expect to occur makes it easier to decide where your focus should go when your plan encounters real life.
• Envision multiple futures, and then force myself to figure out which ones are most likely—and why.
• TO MAKE BETTER DECISIONS:
• Envision multiple futures. By pushing yourself to imagine various possibilities—some of which might be contradictory—you’re better equipped to make wise choices.
• We can hone our Bayesian instincts by seeking out different experiences, perspectives, and other people’s ideas. By finding information and then letting ourselves sit with it, options become clearer.
• TO MAKE TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE:
• Manage the how, not the who of teams. Psychological safety emerges when everyone feels like they can speak in roughly equal measure and when teammates show they are sensitive to how each other feel.
• If you are leading a team, think about the message your choices reveal. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you showing you are listening by repeating what people say and replying to questions and thoughts? Are you demonstrating sensitivity by reacting when someone seems upset or flustered? Are you showcasing that sensitivity, so other people will follow your lead?
• TO MANAGE OTHERS PRODUCTIVELY:
• Lean and agile management techniques tell us employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success.
• By pushing decision making to whoever is closest to a problem, managers take advantage of everyone’s expertise and unlock innovation.
• A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and solutions, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored and that their mistakes won’t be held against them.
• TO ENCOURAGE INNOVATION:
• Creativity often emerges by combining old ideas in new ways—and “innovation brokers” are key. To become a broker yourself and encourage brokerage within your organization:
• Be sensitive to your own experiences. Paying attention to how things make you think and feel is how we distinguish clichés from real insights. Study your own emotional reactions.
• Recognize that the stress that emerges amid the creative process isn’t a sign everything is falling apart. Rather, creative desperation is often critical: Anxiety can be what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways.
• Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to alternatives. By forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from different perspectives, by giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before, we retain clear eyes.
• TO ABSORB DATA BETTER:
• When we encounter new information, we should force ourselves to do something with it. Write yourself a note explaining what you just learned, or figure out a small way to test an idea, or graph a series of data points onto a piece of paper, or force yourself to explain an idea to a friend. Every choice we make in life is an experiment—the trick is getting ourselves to see the data embedded in those decisions, and then to use it somehow so we learn from it.
• Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It’s about making certain decisions in certain ways.
• Productive people and companies force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently.
• Productivity doesn’t mean that every action is efficient. It doesn’t mean that waste never occurs.
• Sometimes a misstep is the most important footfall along the path to success.