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February 2 - February 11, 2017
People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and say they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.
Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed.
The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings.
When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more.
The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination.
Among Habib’s patients, the injuries in their striata prevented them from feeling the sense of reward that comes from taking control.
What’s more, we need to prove to ourselves that our choices are meaningful. When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves “why.”
Group norms, the researchers on Project Aristotle concluded, were the answer to improving Google’s teams. “The data finally started making sense,” said Dubey. “We had to manage the how of teams, not the who.”
As Edmondson’s list of good norms grew, she began to notice that everything shared a common attribute: They were all behaviors that created a sense of togetherness while also encouraging people to take a chance.
First, all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.
Second, the good teams tested as having “high average social sensitivity”—a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.
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,”
What matters is having a voice and social sensitivity.”
Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.
As a team leader, then, it’s important to give people control.
Cognitive tunneling can cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks.
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.
Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us.
To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge.
“The Work-Outs were successful because they balanced the psychological influence of immediate goals with the freedom to think about bigger things,”
stretch goal—an aim so ambitious that managers couldn’t describe, at least initially, how they would achieve it.
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.
For a stretch goal to inspire, it often needs to be paired with something like the SMART system.
Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.
‘I sometimes write down easy items I can cross off right away, because it makes me feel good,’ that’s exactly the wrong way to create a to-do list.
So one solution is writing to-do lists that pair stretch goals and SMART goals.
In short, we need stretch and SMART goals. It doesn’t matter if you call them by those names. It’s not important if your proximal goals fulfill every SMART criterion. What matters is having a large ambition and a system for figuring out how to make it into a concrete and realistic plan.
One of the reasons commitment cultures were successful, it seemed, was because a sense of trust emerged among workers, managers, and customers that enticed everyone to work harder and stick together through the setbacks that are inevitable in any industry.
Most commitment companies avoided layoffs unless there was no other alternative. They invested heavily in training. There were higher levels of teamwork and psychological safety.
Commitment firms dodged one of the business world’s biggest hidden costs: the profits that are lost when an employee takes clients or insights to a competitor.
They all encouraged collaboration by allowing teams to self-manage and self-organize. They emphatically insisted on a culture of commitment and trust.
Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success.
The bigger misstep is when there is never an opportunity for an employee to make a mistake.
This is probabilistic thinking. It is the ability to hold multiple, conflicting outcomes in your mind and estimate their relative likelihoods.
If we pay attention only to good news, we’re handicapping ourselves.
Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.
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 building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge.”
anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder.
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.
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.
First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you think and feel.
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.
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.
This ability to digest large amounts of information by breaking it into smaller pieces is how our brains turn information into knowledge.
Frames can be uprooted, however, if we force ourselves to seek fresh vantage points.
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.
by making information more disfluent, we paradoxically make it easier to understand.
the students who forced themselves to use a more cumbersome note-taking method—who forced disfluency into how they processed information—learned more.
we should force ourselves to do something with the data.
