More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ron Friedman
Started reading
March 7, 2021
Research conducted by the Great Place to Work Institute—the organization that compiles an annual list of leading workplaces in conjunction with Fortune magazine—reveals an eye-opening statistic: The stocks of companies on the Best Companies to Work For list outperform the market as a whole by a stunning factor of 2 to
Businesses today need psychologists. In a world where productivity hinges on the quality of an employee’s thinking, psychological factors are no longer secondary. They’re at the very core of what determines success.
When your attempt rate is high, each individual failure becomes a lot less significant.
failure doesn’t just make risk-taking easier. In a surprising number of instances, it’s the only reliable path to success.
fields. So what’s different about geniuses? For one thing, Simonton argues, creative geniuses tend to hold a broader array of interests than their average contemporary. While working to find a solution in one domain, they’ll dabble in unrelated fields, exploring the worlds of art, music, and literature. It might look as if they are slacking off, but it’s often these extraneous experiences that fuel their ability to find unexpected connections.
Creative geniuses simply do not generate masterpieces on a regular basis. Yet the quality that distinguishes them would be impossible without the quantity of attempts.
The more solutions you generate, the more likely you are to stumble upon a winning combination that lives on, because it is considered both novel and useful.
When practice is effortless, Coyle argues, learning stops. It’s by walking the precipice between your current abilities and the skills just beyond your reach that growth happens.
Failure, per se, is not enough. The important thing is to mine the failure for insight that can improve your next attempt.
The moment evading a negative outcome becomes the focus, our attention narrows and our thinking becomes more rigid. We have a hard time seeing the big picture and resist the mental exploration necessary for finding a solution. All of a sudden, insights become a lot more elusive. In
There are times when brief bursts of avoidance motivation can be useful, but research suggests they are best left to tasks that require persistence.
When avoiding failure is a primary focus, the work isn’t just more stressful; it’s a lot harder to do. And over the long run, that mental strain takes a toll, resulting in less innovation and the experience of burnout.
When the consequences of reporting failure are too severe, employees avoid acknowledging mistakes altogether. But when a work environment feels psychologically safe and mistakes are viewed as a natural part of the learning process, employees are less prone to covering them up. The fascinating implication is that fearful teams avoid examining the causes of their blunders, making it all the more likely that their mistakes will be repeated again in the future.
In contrast, teams that freely admit their errors are better able to learn from one another’s mistakes. They can also take steps to prevent repeating those mistakes by tweaking their process. Over the long term, encouraging employees to acknowledge mistakes is therefore a vital first step to seeing improvement.
The challenge for many organizations is that the pressure to avoid failure is so strong that hardly anyone bothers examining the root cause. It’s when intelligent failures are treated exactly the same as preventable ones that learning and creativity grind to a halt.
The human mind does not operate in a vacuum. It is constantly scanning its surroundings, scouring it for clues and using the data to select an ideal mental approach. Where we are affects the way we think.
Creativity and innovation thrive on serendipitous encounters. And those interactions can only occur when people are collaborating together in the same place.
Numerous studies have found that in many cases, employees who have the option of telecommuting are more productive than their office-bound counterparts.
A University of California–Irvine study found that when we’re distracted from an activity in which we are fully immersed, it takes us an average of more than twenty minutes just to regain our previous momentum.
In one experiment, researchers measured a 32 percent increase in performance among people who were allowed to customize their offices, compared to those whose offices were kept bare.
Gary Jacobs, an architectural illustrator and design consultant, uses these terms to describe our evolutionary penchant for both quiet, restorative spaces and interactive, group settings. He argues that some of us have personalities that make caves more appealing, while others have personalities that draw us to campfires.
The reason? When we try to solve a problem consciously, we tend to think in a rigid and linear fashion. But when we absorb a problem and then set it aside, the ideas that pop into our heads are far less obvious. The unconscious mind is less constrained in its approach, stumbling upon associations that are often inaccessible when we’re focusing too hard.
The shared elevation in heart rate that comes from walking together can also provide an added benefit: better workplace relationships.
A diet of diverse mental stimulation is a vital component of creative thinking.
Creativity is just connecting things. 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. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. The more ideas we’re exposed to, the more likely we are to find novel solutions. Provide enough inputs and new outputs will emerge.
What casinos are doing is leveraging a series of psychological techniques that increase people’s tolerance for risk, enhancing their willingness to gamble.
Which leads us to our first happiness insight: Small, frequent pleasures can keep us happy longer than large, infrequent ones.
The more we do the same enjoyable things, the less attention we pay them. Which teaches us an important lesson about happiness: Sometimes, in order to continue enjoying something we love, we need for it to temporarily disappear.
When we build appreciation for our current circumstances, we feel happier about the present and more optimistic about the future, which improves the quality of our work.
Studies show that the mere exposure effect doesn’t just affect our impressions of people. It also applies to paintings, songs, and consumer products. Ever wonder why Coca-Cola still bothers advertising when nearly everyone on the planet has already sampled their beverage? The mere exposure effect offers one perspective: The more often we see a logo, the more we tend to like (and therefore buy) the product.
It also pays to think carefully about a new hire’s first assignment. You can use it to do more than simply get a new employee up to speed; you can use it as a tool for deepening relationships. Start new hires with a series of modest, collaborative projects that discourage isolation and allow them to collect early wins. The shared accomplishment will bolster connections while fostering a sense of team pride.
Instead of using shared enjoyment to promote friendship, what he really needed was a shared struggle. Sherif discovered that the key was in presenting a challenge so big that it could only be resolved through collaboration.
As Sherif’s work demonstrates, superordinate goals can serve as a powerful tool for defusing tension in times of conflict. Just as important, they can also be used to inoculate coworkers before disagreements erupt. When colleagues feel like they’re working toward a common objective, a sense of shared purpose naturally softens the conditions for friendships.
