Smarter Faster Better Quotes

“GE had recently started a series of meetings among top executives called “Work-Outs” that were designed to encourage people to think about bigger ambitions and more long-term plans.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Experiments have shown that people with SMART goals are more likely to seize on the easiest tasks, to become obsessed with finishing projects, and to freeze on priorities once a goal has been set. “You get into this mindset where crossing things off your to-do list becomes more important than asking yourself if you’re doing the right things,” said Latham.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“Zeira had set out with a goal of alleviating public anxiety, and the government had followed his lead. But in their eagerness to provide confident answers, to make decisive judgments and avoid ambiguity, those leaders had almost cost Israel its life.”
― 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“once in a cognitive tunnel, we lose our ability to direct our focus. Instead, we latch on to the easiest and most obvious stimulus, often at the cost of common sense.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“risks that our attention spans will fail have risen. Studies from Yale, UCLA, Harvard, Berkeley, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and elsewhere show errors are particularly likely when people are forced to toggle between automaticity and focus, and are unusually dangerous as automatic systems infiltrate airplanes, cars, and other environments where a misstep can be tragic. In the age of automation, knowing how to manage your focus is more critical than ever before.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“two general principles: Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“What matters are five key norms,” he told the audience. 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

“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

“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

“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

“Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence. A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts.”
― 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”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“If you can become more motivated, more focused, better at setting goals and making good decisions, then you’re a long way down the path to becoming more productive.”
― 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 storytelling moments can be as small as trying to envision a coming meeting while driving to work—forcing yourself to imagine how the meeting will start, what points you will raise if the boss asks for comments, what objections your coworkers are likely to bring up—or they can be as big as a nurse telling herself stories about what infants ought to look like as she walks through a NICU. 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

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

“Those inventors looked to their own lives as the raw materials for innovation. What’s notable is that, in each case, they were often in an emotional state. We’re more likely to recognize discoveries hidden in our own experiences when necessity pushes us, when panic or frustrations cause us to throw old ideas into new settings. Psychologists call this “creative desperation.” Not all creativity relies on panic, of course.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“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.”36”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

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

“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. If”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“How do we learn to make better decisions? In part, by training ourselves to think probabilistically. To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures—to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously—and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true. We”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“A lot of poker comes down to luck,” Annie told me. “Just like life.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“The researchers eventually concluded that the good teams had succeeded not because of innate qualities of team members, but because of how they treated one another. Put differently, the most successful teams had norms that caused everyone to mesh particularly well.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“There is significant evidence, however, that Bonin was in the grip of what’s known as “cognitive tunneling”—a mental glitch that sometimes occurs when our brains are forced to transition abruptly from relaxed automation to panicked attention.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

“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. That”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“Fulgham’s team started by coming up with more than one thousand scenarios in which Sentinel could be useful, everything from inputting victims’ statements to tracking evidence to interfacing with FBI databases that looked for patterns among clues. Then they started working backward to figure out what kind of software should accommodate each need. Every morning, the team conducted a “stand-up”—meetings where everyone stood to encourage brevity—and recounted the previous day’s work and what they hoped to accomplish over the next twenty-four hours.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“Fulgham told the bureau’s director that if they gave him the authority to distribute control, he would cut the number of people needed from more than four hundred to just thirty employees and deliver Sentinel for $20 million in a bit over a year.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“And as workers were empowered to make more choices, their motivation skyrocketed. Just as Mauricio Delgado and the U.S. Marine Corps had found in other settings, when workers felt a greater sense of control, their drive expanded. Word”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“By forcing a substantial elevation in collective aspirations, stretch goals can shift attention to possible new futures and perhaps spark increased energy in the organization. They thus can prompt exploratory learning through experimentation, innovation, broad search, or playfulness.”38 There”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

“Welch had given his aircraft manufacturing division a stretch goal of reducing errors by 70 percent, an objective so audacious the only way to go about it was to change nearly everything about (a) how workers were trained, (b) which workers were hired, and (c) how the factory ran.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive