Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg

We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”

Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation of meaningful projects, goals, and values. We start to recognize how small chores can have outsized emotional rewards, because they prove to ourselves that we are making meaningful choices, that we are genuinely in control of our own lives. That’s when self-motivation flourishes: when we realize that replying to an email or helping a coworker, on its own, might be relatively unimportant. But it is part of a bigger project that we believe in, that we want to achieve, that we have chosen to do. Self-motivation, in other words, is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.

Michaels himself says the job of modeling norms is his most important duty. “Everyone who comes through this show is different, and I have to show each of them that I’m treating them different, and show everyone else I’m treating them different, if we want to draw the unique brilliance out of everyone,” Michaels told me.

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.

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?

Cognitive tunneling can cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks. It’s what keeps someone glued to their smartphone as the kids wail or pedestrians swerve around them on the sidewalk.

Reactive thinking, in a sense, outsources the choices and control that, in other settings, create motivation.

Darlene explained that she carried around a picture in her mind of what a healthy baby ought to look like—and the infant in the crib, when she glanced at her, hadn’t matched that image. So the spotlight inside Darlene’s head went to the child’s skin, the blot of blood on her heel, and the distended belly. It focused on those unexpected details and triggered Darlene’s sense of alarm. The other nurse, in contrast, didn’t have a strong picture in her head of what she expected to see, and so her spotlight focused on the most obvious details: The baby was eating. Her heartbeat was strong. She wasn’t crying. The other nurse was distracted by the information that was easiest to grasp.

One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs.

It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.

The French pilots never reached for a new mental model to explain what was going on. But when the mental model of the Airbus inside de Crespigny’s head started coming apart under the weight of all the new emergencies, he decided to replace it with something new.

To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day.

“You can’t delegate thinking,” de Crespigny told me. “Computers fail, checklists fail, everything can fail. But people can’t. We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. As long as you’re thinking, you’re halfway home.”

But there are risks associated with a high need for closure. When people begin craving the emotional satisfaction that comes from making a decision—when they require a sensation of being productive in order to stay calm—they are more likely to make hasty decisions and less likely to reconsider an unwise choice.

Put differently, an instinct for decisiveness is great—until it’s not. When people rush toward decisions simply because it makes them feel like they are getting something done, missteps are more likely to occur.

“You get into this mindset where crossing things off your to-do list becomes more important than asking yourself if you’re doing the right things,” said Latham.

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.

“If I’m attaching mufflers or I’m a receptionist or a janitor, I know more about exhaust systems or receiving people or cleaning offices than anyone else, and it’s incredibly wasteful if a company can’t take advantage of that knowledge. Toyota hates waste. The system was built to exploit everyone’s expertise.”

“Our basic philosophy was that no one goes to work wanting to suck. If you put people in a position to succeed, they will.

“Once you’re entrusted with that kind of authority, you can’t help feel a sense of responsibility,” said Smith.

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.

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.

“But it only works if you start with the right assumptions.” So how do we get the right assumptions? By making sure we are exposed to a full spectrum of experiences.

This is hard, because success is easier to stare at. People

But the mistake some people make is trying to avoid making any predictions because their thirst for certainty is so strong and their fear of doubt too overwhelming.

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.

We’re more likely to recognize discoveries hidden in our own experiences when necessity pushes us, when panic or frustrations cause us to throw old ideas into new settings.

Effective brokers aren’t cool and collected. They’re often worried and afraid.

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. The path out of that turmoil is to look at what you know, to reinspect conventions you’ve seen work and try to apply them to fresh problems. The creative pain should be embraced.

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. Disturbances are essential, and we retain clear eyes by embracing destruction and upheaval, as long as we’re sensitive to making the disturbance the right size.

“With Google and the Internet and all the information we have now, you can find answers to almost anything in seconds,” said Macon. “But South Avondale shows there’s a difference between finding an answer and understanding what it means.”

When information is made disfluent, we learn more.

It subverts our brain’s craving for binary choices—Should I help my sister or let my family down?—by learning to reframe decisions in new ways.

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.