Smarter Faster Better Quotes

“Every choice we make in life is an experiment.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“A sense of control can fuel motivation, 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “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.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel. “Most people are too narrow in how they think about creativity,” Ed Catmull, the president of Disney Animation, told me. “So we spend a huge amount of time pushing people to go deeper, to look further inside themselves, to find something that’s real and can be magical when it’s put into the mouth of a character on a screen. We all carry the creative process inside us; we just need to be pushed to use it sometimes.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Determined and focused people tend to work harder and get tasks done more promptly. They stay married longer and have deeper networks of friends. They often have higher-paying jobs. But this questionnaire is not intended to test personal organization. Rather, it’s designed to measure a personality”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves "why.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don’t know. They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“No one can predict tomorrow with absolute confidence. 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. If”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“When filmmakers get stuck at Disney, it’s referred to as spinning. “Spinning occurs because you’re in a rut and can’t see your project from different perspectives anymore,” said Ed Catmull.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container. The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques. “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.” Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head. Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you’re applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. 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.” III.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shares information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals. That”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“The paradox of learning how to make better decisions is that it requires developing a comfort with doubt. There”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive. We now exist in a world where we can communicate with coworkers at any hour, access vital documents over smartphones, learn any fact within seconds, and have almost any product delivered to our doorstep within twenty-four hours. Companies can design gadgets in California, collect orders from customers in Barcelona, email blueprints to Shenzhen, and track deliveries from anywhere on earth. Parents can auto-sync the family’s schedules, pay bills online while lying in bed, and locate the kids’ phones one minute after curfew. We are living through an economic and social revolution that is as profound, in many ways, as the agrarian and industrial revolutions of previous eras. These advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, they often seem to fill our days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity—the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists—rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us. There are some people, however, who have figured out how to master this changing world. There are some companies that have discovered how to find advantages amid these rapid shifts. We now know how productivity really functions. We know which choices matter most and bring success within closer reach. We know how to set goals that make the audacious achievable; how to reframe situations so that instead of seeing problems, we notice hidden opportunities; how to open our minds to new, creative connections; and how to learn faster by slowing down the data that is speeding past us.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“That’s why they asked each other questions starting with “why.” Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“The best entrepreneurs are acutely conscious of the risks that come from only talking to people who have succeeded,” said Don Moore, the Berkeley professor who participated in the GJP and who also studies the psychology of entrepreneurship. “They are obsessed with spending time around people who complain about their failures, the kinds of people the rest of us usually try to avoid.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “creating mental models.”26 Understanding how people build mental models has become one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology.27 All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not. But”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“In an interview, the nurse manager explains that a ‘certain level of error will occur’ so a ‘nonpunitive environment’ is essential to deal with this error productively,” Edmondson wrote. “There is an unspoken rule here to help each other and check each other,” a nurse told Edmondson’s assistant. “People feel more willing to admit to errors here, because the nurse manager goes to bat for you.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a team of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business