13 Ideas You Should Know From: Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

The 13 Big Ideas:

• Why giving people control is so powerful

• Use compliments to reward truly exceptional work

• Everyone needs their voice heard, even if they don’t get a vote

• How to run a meeting

• Why it’s so hard to focus

• Use what if scenarios to manage future crises

• How to set up goals

• How goals can lead you to focus on the wrong priorities

• View losses and failures as experiments

• Creativity is often recombining existing ideas

• Why flowcharts, checklists, and other guides are useful for decision making

• When trying to learn something, making the process more manual leads to greater learning.

• Teams need to trust each other to really develop great ideas

My Highlights From the Book:

Why giving people control is so powerful

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… When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more. They are, on average, more confident and overcome setbacks faster. People who believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers.

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.

Krulak began reviewing studies on how to teach self-motivation, and became particularly intrigued by research, conducted by the Corps years earlier, showing that the most successful marines were those with a strong “internal locus of control”—a belief they could influence their destiny through the choices they made.

General Krulak had told me something that stuck with me: “Most recruits don’t know how to force themselves to start something hard. But if we can train them to take the first step by doing something that makes them feel in charge, it’s easier to keep going.”

“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…. 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.

Use compliments to reward truly exceptional work

“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.”

Everyone needs their voice heard, even if they don’t get a vote

“But now we can say those aren’t right. 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.” Onstage, Bock brought up a series of slides. “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. To create psychological safety, Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors.

How to run a meeting

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.

Why it’s so hard to focus

“This mess of a situation is one hundred percent our own fault,” said Stephen Casner, a research psychologist at NASA who has studied dozens of accidents like Air France Flight 447. “We started with a creative, flexible, problem-solving human and a mostly dumb computer that’s good at rote, repetitive tasks like monitoring. So we let the dumb computer fly and the novel-writing, scientific-theorizing, jet-flying humans sit in front of the computer like potted plants watching for blinking lights. It’s always been difficult to learn how to focus. It’s even harder now.”

Use what if scenarios to manage future crises

“Most of the time, when information overload occurs, we’re not aware it’s happening—and that’s why it’s so dangerous,” Burian said. “So really good pilots push themselves to do a lot of ‘what if’ exercises before an event, running through scenarios in their heads. That way, when an emergency happens, they have models they can use.”

How to set up goals

In particular, objectives like SMART goals often unlock a potential that people don’t even realize they possess. The reason, in part, is because goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires—or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can’t match.

How goals can lead you to focus on the wrong priorities

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.

So one solution is writing to-do lists that pair stretch goals and SMART goals. Come up with a menu of your biggest ambitions. Dream big and stretch. Describe the goals that, at first glance, seem impossible, such as starting a company or running a marathon. Then choose one aim and start breaking it into short-term, concrete steps. Ask yourself: What realistic progress can you make in the next day, week, month? How many miles can you realistically run tomorrow and over the next three weeks? What are the specific, short-term steps along the path to bigger success? What timeline makes sense? Will you open your store in six months or a year? How will you measure your progress? Within psychology, these smaller ambitions are known as “proximal goals,” and repeated studies have shown that breaking a big ambition into proximal goals makes the large objective more likely to occur.

View losses and failures as experiments

She [Annie Duke] understood poker—understood it better than many of the people she was playing against. She understood that a losing hand isn’t necessarily a loss. Rather, it’s an experiment. “The thing I had figured out by that point was the difference between intermediate and elite players,” Annie told me. “At the intermediate level, you want to know as many rules as possible. Intermediate players crave certainty. But elite players can use that craving against them, because it makes intermediate players more predictable.

Creativity is often recombining existing ideas

But almost all of the creative papers had at least one thing in common: They were usually combinations of previously known ideas mixed together in new ways. In fact, on average, 90 percent of what was in the most “creative” manuscripts had already been published elsewhere—and had already been picked over by thousands of other scientists. However, in the creative papers, those conventional concepts were applied to questions in manners no one had considered before. “Our analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal pattern,” Uzzi and Jones wrote. “The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations.” It was this combination of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, that typically made a paper so creative and important.

Why flowcharts, checklists, and other guides are useful for decision making

One of the best ways to help people cast experiences in a new light is to provide a formal decision-making system—such as a flowchart, a prescribed series of questions, or the engineering design process—that denies our brains the easy options we crave. “Systems teach us how to force ourselves to make questions look unfamiliar,” said Johnson. “It’s a way to see alternatives.”

When trying to learn something, making the process more manual leads to greater learning.

Once again, those who took notes by hand scored better on a test of the lecture’s content. No matter what constraints were placed on the groups, the students who forced themselves to use a more cumbersome note-taking method—who forced disfluency into how they processed information—learned more. In our own lives, the same lesson applies: When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data…. 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. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend—and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.

Teams need to trust each other to really develop great ideas

Psychological safety emerges when everyone feels like they can speak in roughly equal measure and when teammates show they are sensitive to how each other feel.