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Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity Kindle Edition
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“Duhigg melds cutting-edge science, deep reporting, and wide-ranging stories to give us a fuller, more human way of thinking about how productivity actually happens.”—Susan Cain, author of Quiet
In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Duhigg explained why we do what we do. In Smarter Faster Better, he applies the same relentless curiosity and rich storytelling to how we can improve at the things we do.
At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key concepts—from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making—that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics—as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters—this book reveals that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently. They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.
Smarter Faster Better is a story-filled exploration of the science of productivity, one that can help us learn to succeed with less stress and struggle—and become smarter, faster, and better at everything we do.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateMarch 8, 2016
- File size12883 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Not only will Smarter Faster Better make you more efficient if you heed its tips, it will also save you the effort of reading many productivity books dedicated to the ideas inside.”—Bloomberg Businessweek
“Duhigg pairs relatable anecdotes with the research behind why some people and businesses are not as efficient as others. . . . He takes readers from inside the cockpit of a crashing plane to the writing room of Disney’s Frozen.”—Chicago Tribune
“The book covers a lot of ground through meticulous reporting and deft analysis, presenting a wide range of case studies . . . with insights that apply to the rest of us.”—The Wall Street Journal
“[Duhigg] looks at the numerous ways that people can become more effective, whether in improving motivation, setting goals, making decisions or thinking creatively . . . [He’s] an effective storyteller with a knack for combining social science, fastidious reporting and entertaining anecdotes.”—The Economist
“Engagingly written, solidly reported, thought-provoking and worth a read.”—Associated Press
“Charles Duhigg is the master of the life hack.”—GQ
“A gifted storyteller, Duhigg . . . combines his reporting skills with cutting-edge research in psychology and behavioural economics to explain why some companies and people get so much done, while some fail. Almost all books written in this genre are full of case studies and stories, but Duhigg’s storytelling skills make this book memorable and persuasive. Duhigg succeeds in challenging our mindsets and existing thought processes. It is not just another productivity book. It is about making sense of overwhelming data we live with.”—The Financial Express
“There are valuable lessons in Smarter, Faster, Better. . . . Duhigg is a terrific storyteller, and a master of the cliffhanger.”—Financial Times
“As he did in The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg melds cutting-edge science, deep reporting, and wide-ranging stories to give us a fuller, more human way of thinking about how productivity actually happens. He manages to reframe an entire cultural conversation: Being productive isn’t only about the day-to-day and to-do lists. It’s about seeing our lives as a series of choices, and learning that we have power over how we think about the world.”—Susan Cain, author of Quiet
“A brilliant distillation of the personal and organizational behaviors that produce extraordinary results. Duhigg uses engaging storytelling to highlight fascinating research and core principles that we can all learn and use in our daily lives. A masterful must-read for anyone who wants to get more (and more creative) stuff done.”—David Allen, author of Getting Things Done
“Charles Duhigg has a gift for asking just the right question, and then igniting the same curiosity in the rest of us. In Smarter Faster Better he finds provocative answers to a riddle of our age: how to become more productive (by two times, or even ten times) and less busy, how to be more effective in the world and more in control of our lives. Duhigg has rendered, yet again, a great service with his sharp, lucid prose.”—Jim Collins, author of Good to Great
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Motivation
Reimagining Boot Camp, Nursing Home Rebellions, and the Locus of Control
The trip was intended as a celebration, a twenty-nine-day tour of South America that would take Robert, who had just turned sixty, and his wife, Viola, first to Brazil, then over the Andes into Bolivia and Peru. Their itinerary included tours of Incan ruins, a boat trip on Lake Titicaca, the occasional craft market, and a bit of birding.
That much relaxation, Robert had joked with friends before leaving, seemed unsafe. He was already anticipating the fortune he would spend on calls to his secretary. Over the previous half century Robert Philippe had built a small gas station into an auto parts empire in rural Louisiana and had made himself into a Bayou mogul through hard work, charisma, and hustle. In addition to the auto-parts business, he also owned a chemical company, a paper supplier, various swaths of land, and a real estate firm. And now here he was, entering his seventh decade, and his wife had convinced him to spend a month in a bunch of countries where, he suspected, it would be awfully difficult to find a TV showing the LSU-Ole Miss game.
Robert liked to say there wasn't a dirt road or back alley along the Gulf Coast he hadn't driven at least once to drum up business. As Philippe Incorporated had grown, Robert had become famous for dragging big-city businessmen from New Orleans and Atlanta out to ramshackle bars and forbidding them from leaving until the ribs were picked clean and bottles sucked dry. Then, while everyone nursed painful hangovers the next morning, Robert would convince them to sign deals worth millions. Bartenders always knew to fill his glass with club soda while serving the bigwigs cocktails. Robert hadn't touched booze in years.
He was a member of the Knights of Columbus and the chamber of commerce, past president of the Louisiana Association of Wholesalers and the Greater Baton Rouge Port Commission, the chairman of his local bank, and a loyal donor to whichever political party was more inclined to endorse his business permits that day. "You never met a man who loved working so much," his daughter, Roxann, told me.
Robert and Viola had been looking forward to this South American trip. But when they stepped off the plane in La Paz, midway through the monthlong tour, Robert started acting oddly. He staggered through the airport and had to sit down to catch his breath at the baggage claim. When a group of children approached him to ask for coins, Robert threw change at their feet and laughed. In the bus to the hotel, Robert started a loud, rambling monologue about various countries he had visited and the relative attractiveness of the women who lived there. Maybe it was the altitude. At twelve thousand feet, La Paz is one of the highest cities in the world.
Once they were unpacked, Viola urged Robert to nap. He wasn't interested, he said. He wanted to go out. For the next hour, he marched through town buying trinkets and exploding in a rage whenever locals didn't understand English. He eventually agreed to return to the hotel and fell asleep, but woke repeatedly during the night to vomit. The next morning, he said he felt faint but became angry when Viola suggested he rest. He spent the third day in bed. On day four, Viola decided enough was enough and cut the vacation short.
Back home in Louisiana, Robert seemed to improve. His disorientation faded and he stopped saying strange things. His wife and children, however, were still worried. Robert was lethargic and refused to leave the house unless prodded. Viola had expected him to rush into the office upon their return, but after four days he hadn't so much as checked in with his secretary. When Viola reminded him that deer hunting season was approaching and he'd need to get a license, Robert said he thought he'd skip it this year. She phoned a doctor. Soon, they were driving to the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans.
The chief of neurology, Dr. Richard Strub, put Robert through a battery of tests. Vital signs were normal. Blood work showed nothing unusual. No indication of infection, diabetes, heart attack, or stroke. Robert demonstrated understanding of that day's newspaper and could clearly recall his childhood. He could interpret a short story. The Revised Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale showed a normal IQ.
"Can you describe your business to me?" Dr. Strub asked.
Robert explained how his company was organized and the details of a few contracts they had recently won.
"Your wife says you're behaving differently," Dr. Strub said.
"Yeah," Robert replied. "I don't seem to have as much get-up-and-go as I used to."
"It didn't seem to bother him," Dr. Strub later told me. "He told me about the personality changes very matter of fact, like he was describing the weather."
Except for the sudden apathy, Dr. Strub couldn't find evidence of illness or injury. He suggested to Viola they wait a few weeks to see if Robert's disposition improved. When they returned a month later, however, there had been no change. Robert wasn't interested in seeing old friends, his wife said. He didn't read anymore. Previously, it had been infuriating to watch television with him because he would flip from channel to channel, looking for a more exciting show. Now, he just stared at the screen, indifferent to what was on. She had finally convinced him to go into the office, but his secretary said he spent hours at his desk gazing into space.
"Are you unhappy or depressed?" Dr. Strub asked.
"No," Robert said. "I feel good."
"Can you tell me how you spent yesterday?"
Robert described a day of watching television.
"You know, your wife tells me your employees are concerned because they don't see you around the office much," said Dr. Strub.
"I guess I'm more interested in other things now," Robert replied.
"Like what?"
"Oh, I don't know," Robert said, and then went silent and stared at the wall.
Dr. Strub prescribed various medications--drugs to combat hormonal imbalances and attention disorders--but none seemed to make a difference. People suffering from depression will say they are unhappy and describe hopeless thoughts. Robert, however, said he was satisfied with life. He admitted his personality change was odd, but it didn't upset him.
Dr. Strub administered an MRI, which allowed him to collect images from inside Robert's cranium. Deep inside his skull, near the center of Robert's head, he saw a small shadow, evidence that burst vessels had caused a tiny amount of blood to pool temporarily inside a part of Robert's brain known as the striatum. Such injuries, in rare cases, can cause brain damage or mood swings. But except for the listlessness, there was little in Robert's behavior to suggest that he was suffering any neurological disability.
A year later, Dr. Strub submitted an article to the Archives of Neurology. Robert's "behavior change was characterized by apathy and lack of motivation," he wrote. "He has given up his hobbies and fails to make timely decisions in his work. He knows what actions are required in his business, yet he procrastinates and leaves details unattended. Depression is not present." The cause of this passivity, Dr. Strub suggested, was the slight damage in his brain, which had possibly been triggered by Bolivia's altitude. Even that, however, was uncertain. "It is possible that the hemorrhages are coincidental and that the high altitude played no physiologic role."
It was an interesting but ultimately inconclusive case, Dr. Strub wrote.
Over the next two decades, a handful of other studies appeared in medical journals. There was the sixty-year-old professor who experienced a rapid "decrease in interest." He had been an expert in his field with a fierce work ethic. Then, one day, he simply stopped. "I just lack spirit, energy," he told his physician. "I have no go. I must force myself to get up in the morning."
There was a nineteen-year-old woman who had fallen briefly unconscious after a carbon monoxide leak and then seemed to lose motivation for the most basic tasks. She would sit in one position all day unless forced to move. Her father learned he couldn't leave her alone, as a neurologist wrote, when she "was found by her parents with heavy sunburns on the beach at the very same place where she laid down several hours before, under an umbrella: intense inertia had prevented her from changing her position with that of the shadow while the sun had turned around."
There was a retired police officer who began waking up "late in the morning, would not wash unless urged to do so, but meekly complied as soon as his wife asked him to. Then he would sit in his armchair, from which he would not move." There was a middle-aged man who was stung by a wasp and, not long after, lost the desire to interact with his wife, children, and business associates.
In the late 1980s, a French neurologist in Marseille named Michel Habib heard about a few of these cases, became intrigued, and started searching archives and journals for similar stories. The studies he found were rare but consistent: A relative would bring a patient in for an examination, complaining of a sudden change in behavior and passivity. Doctors would find nothing medically wrong. The patients scored normally when tested for mental illness. They had moderate to high IQs and appeared physically healthy. None of them said they felt depressed or complained about their apathy.
Habib began contacting the physicians treating these patients and asked them to collect MRIs. He then discovered another commonality: All the apathetic individuals had tiny pinpricks of burst vessels in their striatum, the same place where Robert had a small shadow inside his skull.
The striatum serves as a kind of central dispatch for the brain, relaying commands from areas like the prefrontal cortex, where decisions are made, to an older part of our neurology, the basal ganglia, where movement and emotions emerge. Neurologists believe the striatum helps translate decisions into action and plays an important role in regulating our moods. The damage from the burst vessels inside the apathetic patients' striata was small--too small, some of Habib's colleagues said, to explain their behavior changes. Beyond those pinpricks, however, Habib could find nothing else to explain why their motivation had disappeared.
Neurologists have long been interested in striatal injuries because the striatum is involved in Parkinson's disease. But whereas Parkinson's often causes tremors, a loss of physical control, and depression, the patients Habib studied only seemed to lose their drive. "Parkinsonians have trouble initiating movement," Habib told me. "But the apathetic patients had no problems with motion. It's just that they had no desire to move." The nineteen-year-old woman who couldn't be left alone at the beach, for example, was able to clean her room, wash the dishes, fold the laundry, and follow recipes when instructed to do so by her mother. However, if she wasn't asked to help, she wouldn't move all day. When her mother inquired what she wanted for dinner, the woman said she had no preferences.
When examined by doctors, Habib wrote, the apathetic sixty-year-old professor would "stay motionless and speechless during endless periods, sitting in front of the examiner, waiting for the first question." When asked to describe his work, he could discuss complicated ideas and quote papers from memory. Then he would lapse back into silence until another question was posed.
None of the patients Habib studied responded to medications, and none seemed to improve with counseling. "Patients demonstrate a more or less total indifference to life events that would normally provoke an emotional response, positive or negative," Habib wrote.
"It was as if the part of their brain where motivation lives, where élan vital is stored, had completely disappeared," he told me. "There were no negative thoughts, there were no positive thoughts. There were no thoughts at all. They hadn't become less intelligent or less aware of the world. Their old personalities were still inside, but there was a total absence of drive or momentum. Their motivation was completely gone."
II.
The room where the experiment was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh was painted a cheery yellow and contained an fMRI machine, a computer monitor, and a smiling researcher who looked too young to have a PhD. All participants in the study were welcomed into the room, asked to remove their jewelry and any metal from their pockets, and then told to lie on a plastic table that slid into the fMRI.
Once lying down, they could see a computer screen. The researcher explained that a number between one and nine was going to appear on the monitor. Before that number appeared, participants had to guess if it was going to be higher or lower than five by pressing various buttons. There would be multiple rounds of guessing, the researcher said. There was no skill involved in this game, he explained. No abilities were being tested. And though he didn't mention this to the participants, the researcher thought this was one of the most boring games in existence. In fact, he had explicitly designed it that way.
The truth was, the researcher, Mauricio Delgado, didn't care if participants guessed right or wrong. Rather, he was interested in understanding which parts of their brains became active as they played an intensely dull game. As they made their guesses, the fMRI was recording the activity inside their skulls. Delgado wanted to identify where the neurological sensations of excitement and anticipation--where motivation--originated. Delgado told participants they could quit whenever they wanted. Yet he knew, from prior experience, that people would make guess after guess, sometimes for hours, as they waited to see if they had guessed wrong or right.
Each participant lay inside the machine and watched the screen intently. They hit buttons and made predictions. Some cheered when they won or moaned when they lost. Delgado, monitoring the activity inside of their heads, saw that people's striata--that central dispatch--lit up with activity whenever participants played, regardless of the outcome. This kind of striatal activity, Delgado knew, was associated with emotional reactions--in particular, with feelings of expectation and excitement.
As Delgado was finishing one session, a participant asked if he could continue playing on his own, at home.
"I don't think that's possible," Delgado told him, explaining that the game only existed on his computer. Besides, he said, letting the man in on a secret, the experiment was rigged. To make sure the game was consistent from person to person, Delgado had programmed the computer so that everyone won the first round, lost the second, won the third, lost the fourth, and so on, in a predetermined pattern. The outcome had been determined ahead of time. It was like betting on a two-headed quarter.
"That's okay," the man replied. "I don't mind. I just like to play."
"It was odd," Delgado told me later. "There's no reason he should have wanted to continue playing once he knew it was rigged. I mean, where's the fun in a rigged game? Your choices have no impact. But it took me five minutes to convince him he didn't want to take the game home."
Product details
- ASIN : B00Z3FRYB0
- Publisher : Random House; Reprint edition (March 8, 2016)
- Publication date : March 8, 2016
- Language : English
- File size : 12883 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 368 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0434023469
- Best Sellers Rank: #137,421 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
My name is Charles Duhigg, and I'm a reporter for The New Yorker Magazine and the author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better, and Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection (coming out on February 20, 2024!)
While I worked at the New York Times, I won a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Apple named "The iEconomy". Before that, I wrote about the 2008 financial crisis, how companies take advantage of the elderly, and reported from Iraq. (For those and other articles, I won the National Journalism Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors' Medal, the National Academies' reporting award and other recognitions.)
But let’s be honest, you aren’t visiting this page so I can brag about series and awards. (Unless you’re my mom. Hi mom!)
I’m also a native of New Mexico. I studied history at Yale and received an MBA from Harvard Business School. I now live in Santa Cruz, CA with my wife and two children and, before becoming a journalist, was a bike messenger in San Francisco for one terrifying day.
I would love to hear from you.
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He explores the rebelliousness of a retirement home resident, a successful businessman who suffered a rare form of brain damage that changed his brain’s ability to be motivated teaching us how motivation works in the brain. He looks at what motivation lessons come from the military.
What kinds of people make up the ideal team? Should they be alike or diverse? How does diversity in personality types strengthen a team? What have hospitals and airlines learned about team work that can save lives?
How does focus, too much or too little, affect performance? What have we learned from aircraft crashes about how focus and cognitive tunneling can cripple decision making in a crisis? What are mental models and how can they be used by anyone to improve focus and analysis of a difficult situation?
How did a young woman win the National Poker Championship and what did she know about Bayesian psychology that anyone can take advantage of?
What has the business world learned about effective goal setting? How are SMART goals effective and in what ways are they ineffective? What do you have to add to SMART goals to make them more effective?
Duhigg provides insight into all these questions and many more. This book will provide you with a unique and provocative analysis into how we can perform smarter, faster and better.
What I found useful about this book:
Careful analysis of how people perform both on an individual level and as teams has provided us with considerable insight into what works best. While the traditional principles of success remain valid there is more to the story than that.
Readability/Writing Quality:
The book is very well written and engrossing. It is written as a series of stories that hold attention and teach at the same time.
Notes on Author:
Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist with the New York Times. He is an author who digs deeply into his subjects. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College.
Other Books by This Author:
The Power of Habit
Related Website:
Charlesduhigg.com
Three Great Ideas You Can Use:
1. Teams function most effectively when made up of diverse people with different approaches, attitudes and personalities.
2. Goal setting must be a combination of measurable and achievable goals with stretch goals to prevent limited performance.
3. By developing a mental model of what we want to achieve we can avoid cognitive tunneling and achieve more.
Get the book here: Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business
The introduction includes this quote, which will tell you everything you need to know about the purpose of the book:
“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.”
I think the basic definition of productivity is good, but I also like the fact that Duhigg calls it “a process of learning.” That’s how it’s been in my life. Here’s what I liked and didn’t like about the book.
What’s in the book
After the introduction that sets out the basic purpose, Duhigg moves to eight chapters on key subjects. Let’s look at them one at a time.
Chapter one is titled “Motivation.” That’s probably not the most accurate title. I suggest you think of this chapter as about control. For the last couple of decades, we’ve been learning about how important it is for people to feel like they control their surroundings. This chapter will give you some ideas about how to feel more like you’re in control.
Chapter two is all about teams. There are two key examples here. One is the example of Saturday Night Live. The other, and the one that’s probably more meaningful for business people, is the results of Google’s research into what makes a successful team. The most important thing here for me is the discussion of psychological safety. Another thing which seems obvious once it’s stated, but which has not been at the forefront for most of my working life.
Duhigg titles chapter three “Focus.” He talks about cognitive tunneling and airline disasters. For me, the most interesting part was the discussion of mental models. Mental models have been a feature of a lot of thinking about productivity. You’ll find an excellent discussion of them in Anders Ericsson’s book Peak.
Chapter four is all about goal setting. I thought this was the weakest chapter of the book. There’s a lot about GE’s experience with goals and a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of SMART goals. The chapter missed the mark for me, I didn’t identify a takeaway that I could use. Duhigg’s appendix about how he learned to set goals helped, but not enough.
“Managing Others” is the title for chapter five. There’s a lot here about some changes in FBI culture that made it more possible for a team to solve a particular kidnapping. It was interesting and helpful. I’d use this chapter as a starting point to apply lean and agile thinking to managing a team. But I suggest that you go to Jeff Sutherland’s book, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time for more details that you can use in your own life and work.
Chapter six is about decision-making, specifically about forecasting the future. The primary story is about learning to play poker at a professional level. It’s a good story, but the big learning point here is about what Duhigg calls Bayesian psychology. I learned it back in my college days as Bayesian inference. It’s a way to improve your forecast as you go. There are some great insights here about why so many of us are so bad at forecasting.
Duhigg says that chapter seven is about innovation. I guess it is, but for me it was more about how the entire creative process plays out and interacts with the way that individuals get a job done. The core story here is about creating Disney’s “Frozen. This chapter is mostly about the way we structure our human activities to create something new. If that’s innovation, so be it.
Now we come to chapter eight. Duhigg titled it “Absorbing Data: Turning Information into Knowledge in Cincinnati’s Public Schools.” That’s true as far as it goes.
There’s a belief that if we give people more data and information they can make their lives or their work better. That’s true, but as this chapter points out, that’s only true if people know how to use what they get. That becomes a matter of perception and process. There are two important bits of information in this chapter. The first is about how to structure data so that it’s most likely that people will be able to understand it and use it to make a difference. The second important idea is that process is important.
The chapter describes what Duhigg calls the engineering design process, but which I learned in college as simply the engineering process. It describes a structure for analyzing data and prototyping so that you come up with a good result. It’s as effective for analyzing new products as it is for figuring out how to fix a problem with the brakes on a car. It’s also the essence of what is now popularly called “design thinking.”
Bottom Line
There’s a lot of good stuff in this book. Your best strategy might be to read the introduction then pick a chapter or two that you want to dig into. Later, you can come back and cover the stuff that you missed.
Most of the content is five-star-worthy, but there are pockets that are only OK, so I'm giving the book four stars. Even so, it's one of the best I've read this year.
Top reviews from other countries
The author is one of the best.