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

by Charles Duhigg

The striatum serves as a kind of central dispatch for the brain, relaying commands from areas like the prefrontal cortex, where decisions are made, to an older part of our neurology, the basal ganglia, where movement and emotions emerge. Neurologists believe the striatum helps translate decisions into action and plays an important role in regulating our moods. The damage from the burst vessels inside the apathetic patients’ striata was small—too small, some of Habib’s colleagues said, to explain their behavior changes. Beyond those pinpricks, however, Habib could find nothing else to explain why their motivation had disappeared.

As people began playing, Delgado watched the activity in their striata. This time, when people were allowed to make their own choices, their brains lit up just like in the previous experiment. They showed the neurological equivalents of anticipation and excitement. But during those rounds when participants didn’t have any control over their guesses, when the computer made a choice for them, people’s striata went essentially silent. It was as if their brains became uninterested in the exercise. There was “robust activity in the caudate nucleus only when subjects” were permitted to guess, Delgado and his colleagues later wrote. “The anticipation of choice itself was associated with increased activity in corticostriatal regions, particularly the ventral striatum, involved in affective and motivational processes.”

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.

True only if you don’t have difficulties with executive function.

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.

Locus of control has been a major topic of study within psychology since the 1950s. 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. A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts. A salesman with an internal locus of control will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune.

This assumes an individualistic mindset. In such a setting for locus of blame for failure and success falls to the individual to process. Whereas, collectivist setting the onus responsibility falls to the group, often providing better outcomes and less detrimental effects of failure. So, one must ask themselves whether This largely individualistic concept is, indeed, helpful especially in times of failure.

Complimenting students for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings. The other half of the students were also informed they had scored well, and then told, “You must be really smart at these problems.” Complimenting students on their intelligence activates an external locus of control. Most fifth graders don’t believe they can choose how smart they are. In general, young kids think that intelligence is an innate capacity, so telling young people they are smart reinforces their belief that success or failure is based on factors outside of their control.

When we can contextualize the source of our success, deserved or not, the location from which that is sourced alters our perception of what the driving force behind it. Either way, this is invoking a teleological understanding of the source of gratification in light of success. As we get older, the desire to derive success, failure, change, etc., from a natural source that is also intrinsic to our being poor ego, however this is not always the case. Autistics are far more likely to invoke natural causes for events and phenomena even in childhood.

In contrast, students who had been praised for their hard work—who were encouraged to frame the experience in terms of self-determination—went to the hard puzzles. They worked longer and scored better. They later said they had a great time.

This begs the question: how much of this particular response is in eight to the psyche of the child and how much is it derived from being raised in an environment in which productivity is seen as one of the highest virtues? Would this apply in a culture where productivity–based mind sets do not exist or at least have a smaller role in childhood development and greater social environment? Also, why do we not take into account possible negative side effects from drawing self value from what we are able to produce, rather than who we are as people? It would seem to me that tying these two together, for they do not necessarily require connection, would result in some possibly bad to catastrophic results.

“That’s when training is helpful, because if you put people in situations where they can practice feeling in control, where that internal locus of control is reawakened, then people can start building habits that make them feel like they’re in charge of their own lives—and the more they feel that way, the more they really are in control of themselves.”

This seems to ignore the limitations stemming from any number of sociological and political limitations that are inherent in certain areas of society, specifically those in marginalized communities. In a system that is built on hierarchy not derived directly from anything tied to human agency, like a meritocracy, it would seem that at some point this inner locus would be defeated.

“We never tell anyone they’re a natural-born leader. ‘Natural born’ means it’s outside your control,” Krulak said. “Instead, we teach them that leadership is learned, it’s the product of effort. We push recruits to experience that thrill of taking control, of feeling the rush of being in charge. Once we get them addicted to that, they’re hooked.”

What happens when this person finds out they are, in fact, not granted full control or agency over their own existence? Much like the concept of illusion of safety, this strikes me as something that would create the illusion, rather than the reality of, the extent to which the person has control over themselves within a given system, especially one as regimented and dependent on hierarchy like the military.

When they were done, however, their drill instructor approached the smallest, shyest member of the platoon and said he had noticed how the recruit had asserted himself when a decision was needed on where to put the ketchup. In truth, it was pretty obvious where the ketchup should have gone. There was a huge set of shelves containing nothing but ketchup bottles. But the shy recruit beamed as he was praised.

I think this speaks more paucity of actual agency given to the soldier, than the effectiveness of the method of by which he was trained.

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

This is how we learn to fetishize success, not enjoy it. Perverts the natural desire to want to succeed, if such an instinct actually exists, and turns it into the proverbial carrot on a stick.

The only way to get across the pit is to figure out some workaround. We’re trying to teach them that you can’t just obey orders. You have to take control and figure things out for yourself.”

This would only work in a situation or an environment in which there was permission granted, although maybe only in very extreme circumstances, to violate orders in order to complete a given task. Even then, for the Neuro divergent community specifically autistics, this actually creates a barrier.

If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier, Quintanilla’s drill instructors had told him. That’s why they asked each other questions starting with “why.” Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.

This is an over op overly optimistic view on the power of Xrinsic motivators on an individual. The greater the motivator there is a possibility of a greater chance of success, however, I would be interested in knowing how often this worked practically and what the outcome was when that person failed. Is it the prospect of success which drives the person or is it the fear of failure? Is there a measured increase in anxiety towards completing the task and does it in any way alter the outcome in such a way that the success outweighs the deleterious effects of emotional strain?

Since Krulak’s reforms, the Corps’ retention of new recruits and the performance scores of new marines have both increased by more than 20 percent. Surveys indicate that the average recruit’s internal locus of control increases significantly during basic training. Delgado’s experiments were a start to understanding motivation. The Marines complement those insights by helping us understand how to teach drive to people who aren’t practiced in self-determination: If you give people an opportunity to feel a sense of control and let them practice making choices, they can learn to exert willpower.

This paints a very benign picture of self determination in a vocation where one of the main aspects of the training is to learn how to kill other people. Taken two extremes, one wonders what effects this would have going forward. What are the effects in a regular social setting or a regular home life after being discharged? I find it very difficult to celebrate the end goal of military training that has the possibility of training people to be controlling when a personality disorder intersects with it. And because of the high number of ex-military that later become police officers, I would be interested to know what further for reaching effects this kind of training hard.

Researchers were studying why some seniors thrived inside such facilities, while others experienced rapid physical and mental declines. A critical difference, the researchers determined, was that the seniors who flourished made choices that rebelled against the rigid schedules, set menus, and strict rules that the nursing homes tried to force upon them.

The author is establishing a strange dichotomy by contrasting military service to long-term care facilities or nursing homes. In a military structure, those who are subversive to the status quo or not treated kindly. However, the treatment of subversives in the nursing home example the subversives are treated with a sort of whimsy, as if in that context it is OK. That is not to say that I do not endorse such behavior, because senior citizens are adults and should be given as much agency and control over their lives as possible. However in the grander scheme of what the author is discussing, these two examples seem to be at odds with each other if not completely contradictory.

So in 2015, he reenlisted. “I missed that constant reminder that I can do anything,” he told me. “I missed people pushing me to choose a better me.”

I read this as, “I miss being told what to do in the guise of what I perceive to be self determination.”

Viola Philippe, the wife of the onetime auto parts tycoon of Louisiana, was something of an expert on motivation herself before she and Robert flew to South America. She had been born with albinism—her body did not produce the enzyme tyrosinase, critical in the production of melanin—and as a result, her skin, hair, and eyes contained no pigment, and her eyesight was poor. She was legally blind, and could read only by putting her face very close to a page and using a magnifying glass. “You have never met a more determined person, though,” her daughter, Roxann, told me. “She could do anything.”

Well some of this may be up to personal preference, I would contend that this person should not have had to go to such extremes to have agency in the world as a disabled person. When we valorize or fetishize success in light of an immutable characteristic, the person being valorized is reduced to an object, and their personhood is ignored. For the abled, this is a perverse sort of inspiration because they cannot fully connect with the approaches and effort required by a disabled person to complete tasks in able to person does with no tangible difficulty. Colloquially, we refer to this as inspiration porn in the disability community.

After graduation, Julia went to work at Google and joined its People Analytics group, which was tasked with studying nearly every aspect of how employees spent their time. What she was supposed to do with her life, it turned out, was use data to figure out why people behave in certain ways.

Imagine having a job where your information is used to find better and more efficient ways to extract excess labor value from employees. I don’t know any personal gratification that could stem from such a job unless one is completely divorced from the labor pool and they were analyzing.

It wasn’t that wards with strong teams were making more mistakes. Rather, it was that nurses who belonged to strong teams felt more comfortable reporting their mistakes. The data indicated that one particular norm—whether people were punished for missteps—influenced if they were honest after they screwed up.

As her research continued, Edmondson found a handful of good norms that seemed to be consistently associated with higher productivity. 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. 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.

said. Psychological safety is a “shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.” It is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up,” Edmondson wrote in a 1999 paper. “It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

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.

You can take a team of average performers, and if you teach them to interact the right way, they’ll do things no superstar could ever accomplish. And there’s other myths, like sales teams should be run differently than engineering teams, or the best teams need to achieve consensus around everything, or high-performing teams need a high volume of work to stay engaged, or teams need to be physically located together. “But now we can say those aren’t right. The data shows there’s a universality to how good teams succeed. It’s important that everyone on a team feels like they have a voice, but whether they actually get to vote on things or make decisions turns out not to matter much. Neither does the volume of work or physical co-location. What matters is having a voice and social sensitivity.”

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.

biggest teams. “So seeing this data has been a game changer for me. Engineers love debugging software because we know we can get 10 percent more efficiency by just making a few tweaks. But we never focus on debugging human interactions. We put great people together and hope it will work, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, and most of the time we don’t know why.

And they’re proving my point. This motivation only works or is at least the most closely tied to the belief that productivity is of the upmost importance.