Smarter Faster Better Quotes

“A culture of commitment and trust isn’t a magic bullet. It doesn’t guarantee that a product will sell or an idea will bear fruit. But it’s the best bet for making sure the right conditions are in place when a great idea comes along.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“..з високою потребою завершеності пов*язані ризики. коли люди жадають емоційного задоволення від прийняття рішення, коли їм, щоб заспокоїтись, потрібне відчуття своєї ефективності, вони швидше приймають поквапні рішення і не схильні міняти нерозумний вибір.”
― Чарлз Дахигг, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It’s about making certain decisions in certain ways.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“I feel like a failure,” I wrote my editor during one particularly dispiriting moment. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” When he wrote back, he pointed out the obvious: Maybe I needed to take what I was learning from the experts and apply it to my own life. I had to live by the principles described in this book.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames.”
― 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Fortune-telling isn’t real. 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“you have to be comfortable not knowing exactly where life is going. That’s how I’ve learned to keep the anxiety away.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

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

“All of us, together, are the best, because we’re devoted to each other.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“they argued that within most companies—no matter how great the product or loyal the customers—things would eventually fall apart unless employees trusted one another.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“It’s the culture that makes Toyota successful, not hanging cords or prototyping tools. If we couldn’t export a culture of trust, we had no other ideas. So we sent everyone to America and prayed it would work.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. That’s ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that works only when people feel like they can trust one another. It only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“In general, the route to establishing psychological safety begins with the team’s leader. So if you are leading a team—be it a group of coworkers or a sports team, a church gathering, or your family dinner table—think about what message your choices send. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you modeling listening?”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“To create psychological safety, Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors.”
― 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Within those teams, a norm of loyalty held sway—and it undermined people’s willingness to make suggestions or take chances.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Julia’s study group at Yale, for instance, felt draining because the norms—the tussles over leadership, the pressure to constantly demonstrate expertise, the tendency to critique—had put her on guard.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Dubey and his colleagues wanted to figure out how to build the perfect team.”
― 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

“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. “This is not creativity born of genius,” Burt wrote. “It is creativity as an import-export business.” What’s particularly interesting, however, is that there isn’t a specific personality associated with being an innovation broker. Studies indicate that almost anyone can become a broker—as long as they’re pushed the right way.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“demanded. Starting in the 1950s, however, as computers became more powerful, scientists found they could use Bayesian approaches to forecast events that were previously thought unpredictable, such as the likelihood of a war, or the odds that a drug will be broadly effective even if it has only been tested on a handful of people. Even today, though, calculating a Bayesian probability curve can, in some cases, tie up a computer for hours.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Bayes’ rule, which was first postulated by the Reverend Bayes in a posthumously published 1763 manuscript, can be so computationally complex that for centuries most statisticians essentially ignored the work because they lacked tools to perform the calculations it demanded”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“which choice gets you the best odds? Fortune-telling isn’t real. 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 Annie had stayed in academics, would any of this have mattered? “Absolutely,” she said. “If you’re trying to decide what job to take, or whether you can afford a vacation, or how much you need to save for retirement, those are all predictions.” The same basic rules apply. The people who make the best choices are the ones who work hardest to envision various futures, to write them down and think them through, and then ask themselves, which ones do I think are most likely and why? Anyone can learn to make better decisions. We can all train ourselves to see the small predictions we make every day. No one is right every time. But with practice, we can learn how to influence the probability that our fortune-telling comes true.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“We can develop this intuition by studying statistics, playing games like poker, thinking through life’s potential pitfalls and successes, or helping our kids work through their anxieties by writing them down and patiently calculating the odds. There are numerous ways to build a Bayesian instinct. Some of them are as simple as looking at our past choices and asking ourselves: Why was I so certain things would turn out one way? Why was I wrong? Regardless of our methods, the goals are the same: to see the future as multiple possibilities rather than one predetermined outcome; to identify what you do and don’t know; to ask yourself,”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“So the next time a friend misses out on a promotion, ask him why. The next time a deal falls through, call up the other side to find out what you did wrong. The next time you have a bad day or you snap at your spouse, don’t simply tell yourself that things will go better next time. Instead, force yourself to really figure out what happened.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“We hardly notice the empty restaurants we pass on the way to our favorite, crowded pizza place. We become trained, in other words, to notice success and then, as a result, we predict successful outcomes too often because we’re relying on experiences and assumptions that are biased toward all the successes we’ve seen—rather than the failures we’ve overlooked. Many successful people, in contrast, spend an enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures. They read inside the newspaper’s business pages for articles on companies that have gone broke.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“We call it ‘psychological safety,’ ” she 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business