Smarter Faster Better Quotes

“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. In contrast, the norms of her case competition team—enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, withholding criticisms, encouraging people to take a leadership role or hang back as they wanted—allowed everyone to be friendly and unconstrained. Coordination was easy.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“In the years before Julia joined the group, People Analytics had determined that Google needed to interview a job applicant only four times to predict, with 86 percent confidence, if they would be a good hire. The division had successfully pushed to increase paid maternity leave from twelve to eighteen weeks because computer models indicated that would reduce the frequency of new mothers quitting by 50 percent.”
― 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. Choosing to climb a mountain can become an articulation of love for a daughter. Deciding to stage a nursing home insurrection can become proof that you’re still alive. An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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

“bottles. But the shy recruit beamed as he was praised. “I hand out a number of compliments, and all of them are designed to be unexpected,” said Sergeant Dennis Joy, a thoroughly intimidating drill instructor who showed me around the Recruit Depot one day. “You’ll never get rewarded for doing what’s easy for you. If you’re an athlete, I’ll never compliment you on a good run. Only the small guy gets congratulated for running fast. Only the shy guy gets recognized for stepping into a leadership role. We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

“Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation of meaningful projects, goals, and values. We start to recognize how small chores can have outsized emotional rewards, because they prove to ourselves that we are making meaningful choices, that we are genuinely in control of our own lives. That’s when self-motivation flourishes: when we realize that replying to an email or helping a coworker, on its own, might be relatively unimportant. But it is part of a bigger project that we believe in, that we want to achieve, that we have chosen to do. Self-motivation, in other words, is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“That’s how our mind learns and remembers how good it feels to be in control. And unless we practice self-determination and give ourselves emotional rewards for subversive assertiveness, our capacity for self-motivation can fade.”
― Charles Duhigg, 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. The way we choose to see our own lives; the stories we tell ourselves, and the goals we push ourselves to spell out in detail; the culture we establish among teammates; the ways we frame our choices and manage the information in our lives. Productive people and companies force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“I began thinking about the key insight from chapter one and the ideas that Gen. Charles Krulak used to redesign Marine Corps boot camp by strengthening recruits’ internal locus of control: • Motivation becomes easier when we transform a chore into a choice. Doing so gives us a sense of control.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“In addition to having audacious ambitions and plans that are thorough, we still need, occasionally, to step outside the day-to-day and consider if we’re moving toward goals that make sense. We still need to think.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

“If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you’ll be more likely to apply them in your life.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Creativity is just problem solving,” Ed Catmull told me. “Once people see it as problem solving, it stops seeming like magic, because it’s not. Brokers are just people who pay more attention to what problems look like and how they’ve been solved before. People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign. We just have to learn how to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“I needed to write out my goals—but in a way that forced me to identify my stretch objectives and my SMART aims. So I began writing to-do lists, and at the top of each one, I wrote my overarching ambition, what I was working toward in the long term.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Information blindness occurs because of the way our brain’s capacity for learning has evolved. Humans are exceptionally good at absorbing information—as long as we can break data into a series of smaller and smaller pieces. This process is known as “winnowing” or “scaffolding.” Mental scaffolds are like file cabinets filled with folders that help us store and access information when the need arises.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“This, ultimately, is one of the most important secrets to learning how to make better decisions. Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“In the previous two decades, as NUMMI’s success had become better known, executives in other industries had started adapting the Toyota Production System philosophy to other industries. In 2001, a group of computer programmers had gathered at a ski lodge in Utah to write a set of principles, called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” that adapted Toyota’s methods and lean manufacturing to how software was created.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Every person in an organization has the right to be the company’s top expert at something,” John Shook, who trained Madrid as one of Toyota’s first Western employees, told me. “If I’m attaching mufflers or I’m a receptionist or a janitor, I know more about exhaust systems or receiving people or cleaning offices than anyone else, and it’s incredibly wasteful if a company can’t take advantage of that knowledge. Toyota hates waste. The system was built to exploit everyone’s expertise.”
― 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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

“When people are allowed to stop the assembly line, redirect a huge software project, or follow an instinct, they take responsibility for making sure an enterprise will succeed.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“The Agile methodology, as it came to be known, emphasized collaboration, frequent testing, rapid iteration, and pushing decision making to whoever was closest to a problem.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Most commitment companies avoided layoffs unless there was no other alternative. They invested heavily in training. There were higher levels of teamwork and psychological safety. Commitment companies might not have had lavish cafeterias, but they offered generous maternity leaves, daycare programs, and work-from-home options.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“they found the only culture that was a consistent winner were the commitment firms. Hands down, a commitment culture outperformed every other type of management style in almost every meaningful way. “Not one of the commitment firms we studied failed,” said Baron. “None of them, which is amazing in its own right. But they were also the fastest companies to go public, had the highest profitability ratios, and tended to be leaner, with fewer middle managers, because when you choose employees slowly, you have time to find people who excel at self-direction.” Employees in commitment firms wasted less time on internal rivalries because everyone was committed to the company, rather than to personal agendas. Commitment companies tended to know their customers better than other kinds of firms,”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Toyota Production System—which in the United States would become known as “lean manufacturing”—relied on pushing decision making to the lowest possible level. Workers on the assembly line were the ones who saw problems first. They were closest to the glitches that were inevitable in any manufacturing process.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“The problem with many to-do lists is that when we write down a series of short-term objectives, we are, in effect, allowing our brains to seize on the sense of satisfaction that each task will deliver. We are encouraging our need for closure and our tendency to freeze on a goal without asking if it’s the right aim. The result is that we spend hours answering unimportant emails instead of writing a big, thoughtful memo—because it feels so satisfying to clean out our in-box.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“every executive and department, in addition to delivering specific and achievable and timely objectives, would also have to identify a stretch goal—an aim so ambitious that managers couldn’t describe, at least initially, how they would achieve it. Everyone, Welch said, had to partake in “bullet train thinking.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“The Work-Outs were successful because they balanced the psychological influence of immediate goals with the freedom to think about bigger things,” said Kerr. “That’s critical. People respond to the conditions around them. If you’re being constantly told to focus on achievable results, you’re only going to think of achievable goals. You’re not going to dream big.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business