Smarter Faster Better Quotes

“To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next. If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table. Then you’ll notice what goes unmentioned or if there’s a stray comment that you should see as a warning sign.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“What if, de Crespigny thought to himself, I imagine this plane as a Cessna? What would I do then? “That moment is really the turning point,” Barbara Burian, a research psychologist at NASA who has studied Qantas Flight 32, told me. “When de Crespigny decided to take control of the mental model he was applying to the situation, rather than react to the computer, it shifted his mindset. Now, he’s deciding where to direct his focus instead of relying on instructions. “Most of the time, when information overload occurs, we’re not aware it’s happening—and that’s why it’s so dangerous,” Burian said. “So really good pilots push themselves to do a lot of ‘what if’ exercises before an event, running through scenarios in their heads. That way, when an emergency happens, they have models they can use.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“We need to stop focusing on what’s wrong and start paying attention to what’s still working.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“The reality of a modern aircraft is that it’s a quarter million sensors and computers that sometimes can’t tell the difference between garbage and good sense,” de Crespigny later told me. He’s a brusque Australian, a cross between Crocodile Dundee and General Patton. “That’s why we have human pilots. It’s our job to think about what might happen, instead of what is.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Everyone has a responsibility to tell me if you disagree with my decisions or think I’m missing anything.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

“Researchers have found similar results in dozens of other studies. People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades. Moreover, experiments show that anyone can learn to habitually construct mental models.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

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

“There’s a myth we all carry inside our head,” Bock said. “We think we need superstars. But that’s not what our research found. 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Telling fifth graders they have worked hard has been shown to activate their internal locus of control, because hard work is something we decide to do. Complimenting students for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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. People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction. In contrast, having an external locus of control—believing that your life is primarily influenced by events outside your control—“is correlated with higher levels of stress, [often] because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities,” the team of psychologists wrote.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control. The specific choice we make matters less than the assertion of control. It’s this feeling of self-determination that gets us going.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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 tasks when those chores are presented as decisions rather than commands.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

“In 1980, more than 90 percent of the American workforce reported to a boss. Today more than a third of working Americans are freelancers, contractors, or in otherwise transitory positions. The workers who have succeeded in this new economy are those who know how to decide for themselves how to spend their time and allocate their energy. They understand how to set goals, prioritize tasks, and make choices about which projects to pursue.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Elementary School. “This is Principal Macon,” a voice said. “I am declaring a Hot Pencil Drill. Please prepare yourselves, prepare your worksheets, and we will begin in five, four, three, two…” Two minutes and thirty-three seconds later, eight-year-old Dante Williams slammed down his pencil, shot his hand into the air, and twitched impatiently as the teacher scribbled his finish time at the top of the multiplication quiz. Then Dante was out of his chair and flying through the door of his third-grade classroom, arms pumping as he speed-walked”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

“To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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. To create psychological safety, Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors. There were Google-designed checklists they could use: 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

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

“If you ask the original Saturday Night Live team why the show was such a success, they’ll talk about Lorne Michaels. There’s something about his leadership, they’ll say, that made everything come together. He had an ability to make everyone feel heard, to make even the most self-centered actors and writers pay attention to each other. His eye for talent is nearly unrivaled in entertainment over the last forty years.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

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

“Putting ten smart people in a room didn’t mean they solved problems more intelligently—in fact, those smart people were often outperformed by groups consisting of people who had scored lower on intellect tests, but who still seemed smarter as a group.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Why are you doing this?” Quintanilla’s pack buddy wheezed at him, lapsing into a call-and-response they had practiced on hikes. When things are at their most miserable, their drill instructors had said, they should ask each other questions that begin with “why.” “To become a Marine and build a better life for my family,” Quintanilla said.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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