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

by Charles Duhigg

“The need for control is a biological imperative,” a group of Columbia University psychologists wrote in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2010. 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. This instinct for control is so central to how our brains develop that infants, once they learn to feed themselves, will resist adults’ attempts at control even if submission is more likely to get food into their mouths.

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. “Animals and humans demonstrate a preference for choice over non-choice, even when that choice confers no additional reward,” Delgado noted in a paper published in the journal Psychological Science in 2011.

From these insights, a theory of motivation has emerged: The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination. In experiments, people are more motivated to complete difficult t...

This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control.

“Internal locus of control is a learned skill,” Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who helped conduct that study, told me. “Most of us learn it early in life. But some people’s sense of self-determination gets suppressed by how they grow up, or experiences they’ve had, and they forget how much influence they can have on their own lives.

The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning. Choosing to climb a mountain can become an articulation of love for a daughter. Deciding to stage a nursing home insurrection can become proof that you’re still alive. 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.

This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.

Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards, and unwritten rules that govern how we function.

There is strong evidence that group norms play a critical role in shaping the emotional experience of participating in a team. Research by psychologists from Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Oregon, and elsewhere indicate that norms determine whether we feel safe or threatened, enervated or excited, and motivated or discouraged by our teammates. Julia’s study group at Yale, for instance, felt draining because

There were, however, two behaviors that all the good teams shared. 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.” In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment—but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” said Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined. The conversations didn’t need to be equal every minute, but in aggregate, they had to balance out.” 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,” 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.”

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.

however, that Bonin was in the grip of what’s known as “cognitive tunneling”—a mental glitch that sometimes occurs when our brains are forced to transition abruptly from relaxed automation to panicked attention.

once in a cognitive tunnel, we lose our ability to direct our focus. Instead, we latch on to the easiest and most obvious stimulus, often at the cost of common sense.

People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. 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. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. They say when they daydream, they’re often imagining future conversations. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do.

By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes.

The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That’s who everyone tries to get.”

Today, Qantas Flight 32 is taught in flight schools and psychology classrooms as a case study of how to maintain focus during an emergency. It is cited as one of the prime examples of how mental models can put even the most dire situations within our control.

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.

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.

The Agile methodology, as it came to be known, emphasized collaboration, frequent testing, rapid iteration, and pushing decision making to whoever was closest to a problem. It quickly revolutionized software development and now is the standard methodology among many tech firms.

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.

For two years, the GJP conducted training sessions, watched people make predictions, and collected data. They tracked who got better, and how performance changed as people were exposed to different types of tutorials. Eventually, the GJP published their findings: Giving participants even brief training sessions in research and statistical techniques—teaching them various ways of thinking about the future—boosted the accuracy of their predictions. And most surprising, a particular kind of lesson—training in how to think probabilistically—significantly increased people’s abilities to forecast the future. The lessons on probabilistic thinking offered by the GJP had instructed participants to think of the future not as what’s going to happen, but rather as a series of possibilities that might occur. It taught them to envision tomorrow as an array of potential outcomes, all of which had different odds of coming true.

This is probabilistic thinking. It is the ability to hold multiple, conflicting outcomes in your mind and estimate their relative likelihoods.

This, ultimately, is one of the most important secrets to learning how to make better decisions. Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible. We need to sit in crowded and empty theaters to know how movies will perform; we need to spend time around both babies and old people to accurately gauge life spans; and we need to talk to thriving and failing colleagues to develop good business instincts.

“The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations.” It was this combination of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, that typically made a paper so creative and important.

It seemed as if nature’s creative capacities depended on some kind of periodic disturbance—like a tree fall or an occasional storm—that temporarily upset the natural environment. But the disturbance couldn’t be too small or too big. It had to be just the right size. “Intermediate disturbances are critical,” Connell told me. Within biology, this has become known as the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, which holds that “local species diversity is maximized when ecological disturbance is neither too rare nor too frequent.” There are other theories that explain diversification in different ways, but the intermediate disturbance hypothesis has become a staple of biology.

Human creativity, of course, is different from biological diversity. It’s an imprecise analogy to compare a falling tree in the Australian rain forest to a change in management at Disney. Let’s play with the comparison for a moment, though, because it offers a valuable lesson: 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.

Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It’s about making certain decisions in certain ways. The way we choose to see our own lives; the stories we tell ourselves, and the goals we push ourselves to spell out in detail; the culture we establish among teammates; the ways we frame our choices and manage the information in our lives. 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.