Smarter Faster Better Quotes

“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

“Finally, the superstars also shared a particular behavior, almost an intellectual and conversational tic: They loved to generate theories—lots and lots of theories, about all kinds of topics, such as why certain accounts were succeeding or failing, or why some clients were happy or disgruntled, or how different management styles influenced various employees. They were somewhat obsessive, in fact, about trying to explain the world to themselves and their colleagues as they went about their days. The superstars were constantly telling stories about what they had seen and heard. They were, in other words, much more prone to generate mental models. They were more likely to throw out ideas during meetings, or ask colleagues to help them imagine how future conversations might unfold, or envision how a pitch should go. They came up with concepts for new products and practiced how they would sell them. They told anecdotes about past conversations and dreamed up far-fetched expansion plans. They were building mental models at a near constant rate.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“The first thing the researchers noticed, as they began crawling through all that data, was that the firm’s most productive workers, its superstars, shared a number of traits. The first was they tended to work on only five projects at once—a healthy load, but not extraordinary. There were other employees who handled ten or twelve projects at a time. But those employees had a lower profit rate than the superstars, who were more careful about how they invested their time. The economists figured the superstars were pickier because they were seeking out assignments that were similar to previous work they had done. Conventional wisdom holds that productivity rises when people do the same kind of tasks over and over. Repetition makes us faster and more efficient because we don’t have to learn fresh skills with each new assignment. But as the economists looked more closely, they found the opposite: The superstars weren’t choosing tasks that leveraged existing skills. Instead, they were signing up for projects that required them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities. That’s why the superstars worked on only five projects at a time: Meeting new people and learning new skills takes a lot of additional hours.”
― 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

“When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. It’s a process of learning how to succeed with less stress and struggle. It’s about getting things done without sacrificing everything we care about along the way.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“1 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

“They invited people to speak up. They talked about their own emotions. They didn’t interrupt other people. When someone was concerned or upset, they showed the group that it was okay to intervene. They tried to anticipate how people would react and then worked to accommodate those reactions. This is how teams encourage people to disagree while still being honest with one another and occasionally clashing. This is how psychological safety emerges: by giving everyone an equal voice and encouraging social sensitivity among teammates.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“That’s the reason recruits ask each other “why”—because it shows them how to link small tasks to larger aspirations.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business