Smarter Faster Better

What’s In It For Me?

Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics, Smarter Faster Better explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently.  Instead, they view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.  Author Charles Duhigg explains how we can get better at the things we do by exploring the science of productivity.  Since we are all running short on time these days, the extensive research provided through thoughtful examples and stories in the book can be useful to anyone looking to more effectively use their time and accomplish more in life.

The Big Idea

At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key concepts-from goal setting to motivation-that explain why some people and companies get so much done.

To generate motivation: Make choices that put you in control and figure out how the task is connected to something you care about.

Goal setting: Choose a stretch goal that reflects your biggest aspiration and then break that into subgoals and develop SMART objectives.

Focus: To stay focused, envision what will happen and what the potential obstacles are, and how you will avoid them.  By telling yourself a story about what you expect to occur, you make it easier to determine where your focus should go when you encounter problems.

Decision Making: Push yourself to imagine various possibilities/multiple futures.  Assign a probability to each future by seeking out different experiences and perspectives.

Effective Teams:  Encourage everyone in the group to speak in roughly equal measure and be sensitive to how people feel.

Manage Others Productively: Lean management techniques tell us employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decision making authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. By pushing decision making to whoever is closest to a problem, managers can take advantage of everyone’s input.

Encourage Innovation: Creativity often emerges by combining old ideas in new ways.  It is important to remember that the stress that emerges amid the creative process is not a sign everything is falling apart.

Absorb Better Data:   When encountered with new information, force yourself to do something with it.  Write a note explaining what you just learned, or force yourself to explain the idea to a friend.

Key Concept #1

Motivation

“Motivation becomes easier when we transform a chore into a choice.  Doing so gives us a sense of control.” Smarter Faster Better p. 270

We all have our days where we feel less motivated than others, but have you ever wondered if there are techniques you can use to consistently create motivation?  Charles Duhigg, who at the time of writing this book was also a reporter at The New York Times, a father and a husband, would struggle with motivation after a long day at work.  He would have to start typing up notes for a chapter, help put the kids to bed, or clean up the dishes.  Then there is the never-ending flood of emails that seem impossible to keep up with.  As Duhigg struggled to find the drive to reply to the emails, he began thinking of the research he encountered on motivation and a key insight from his chapter on ideas that General Charles Krulak used to redesign Marine Corps boot camp by strengthening recruits’ internal locus of control:

General Krulak noted that most Marine Corps recruits don’t know how to force themselves to start something hard.  By training the recruits to take the first step by doing something that makes them feel in charge, it’s easier to keep moving.  Duhigg applied this approach to help clear-out his inbox.  He sat at his laptop and hit the reply button, creating a series of responses.  As fast as he could, he typed a sentence, any sentence, within each email to get going.  For instance, a co-worker sent a email asking him to attend a meeting.  Knowing that the meeting would be long and boring, Duhigg typed a reply stating he could attend, but would have to leave after 20 minutes.  This process made it much easier to reply to an email once at least one sentence was on the screen, and it was easier to get motivated when the first sentence was something that made him feel in control.  Essentially, he used the short sentences to amplify his internal locus of control.

But what about other types of procrastination, especially when you’re confronting a bigger, more involved task, such as having a hard conversation with a colleague or writing a long memo?

The other key lesson from the motivation chapter was:

“Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals.” Smarter Faster Better p. 272

The Marine Corps recruits ask each other “why” when working on a task.  Why are you doing push-ups, cleaning a mess hall, or running onto a battlefield when there are safer, easier ways to live life?  Forcing ourselves to explain why we are doing something helps us remember that the task is a step along a longer path and that by choosing to complete the task we are getting closer to more meaningful objectives.

When Duhigg was writing the book, he would begin writing at the top of each manuscript why it was important for him to get that task done.  This process made it easier to focus on why he was choosing to read a specific research paper, instead of bouncing between different studies and feeling like he was not accomplishing anything.

In summary, to generate motivation, make a choice that puts you in control.  If you are replying to emails, write an initial sentence that expresses an opinion or decision.  If you need to have a hard conversation, decide where it will occur ahead of time.  The specific choice itself matters less in sparking motivation than the assertion of control.  Figure out how a task is connected to something you care about and explain to yourself why this choice will help you get closer to a meaningful goal.

Key Concept #2

Goal Setting

Figuring out how to get motivated isn’t always enough.  Writing a book, for example, is a very big goal.  The big takeaway on the goal setting chapter from the book was:

• You need to have a stretch goal, which helps spark big ambitions.
• You need to have a SMART goal to help form a concrete plan.

One of the most effective ways to formulate both objectives is through a specific kind of to-do list.  It is important to write out your goals, but in a way that forces you to identify your stretch objectives and SMART aims.  It’s probably first helpful to define the acronym SMART, which stand for goals that are:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Realistic

Timeline (i.e. based on a timeline)

The SMART mindset spread throughout the culture at GE.  There were SMART charts to help mid level managers describe monthly goals and worksheets to turn personal objectives into action plans.  GE’s belief that SMART goals would work was rooted in science.  In the 1970s psychologists helped develop the SMART criteria through experiments scrutinizing the best way to set goals.

When the author wrote his to-do list, he would write on the top of each one his overarching ambition that he was working toward in the long-term.  This helped avoid the need for cognitive closure that can force us to become obsessed with short-term, easy to achieve goals.

One of Duhigg’s stretch goals related to completing the book was to find an aviation story that illustrated how mental models worked.  Below the stretch goal, he wrote SMART goals related to that big ambition:

Specific: Locate an aviation expert by researching academic papers.

Measurable: Call four experts each morning until the right person is found.

Achievable: Clear the morning schedule to focus on the task and turn off email from 9am-11am

Realistic: On Monday, spend an hour researching aviation experts and creating a call list rank those experts and by 10:15, begin four calls for the day.

Timeline: If four calls are done a day, then 16 calls should be completed by Thursday.

By creating a to-do list for every big task, you will know exactly what to do.  Instead of having to make decisions and running the risk of distraction, you will know how to proceed. The additional benefit is you are always reminded of your stretch goal, and you will not get easily sidetracked of captured by the need to simply check things off your list.

In summary, to set goals, choose a stretch goal (an ambition that reflects your biggest aspirations) and then break that into subgoals and develop SMART objectives.

Key Concept #3

Focus

You can have the motivation and goal setting in place, but distractions always come into play.  Finding focus is imperative.

“We aid our focus by building mental models-telling ourselves stories-about what we expect to see.” Smarter Faster Better p. 278

For the author to stay focused on his stretch and SMART goals, he had to envision what he expected to happen when he sat down at his desk each morning.  Every Sunday night, he got into the habit of taking a few moments with a pen and paper to imagine what the next day and week ought to look like.  He usually chose three or four things that he wanted to make sure would happen, and made himself answer a series of questions:

What will happen first?

What distractions are likely to occur?

How will you handle that distraction?

How will you know you have succeeded?

What is necessary for success?

What will you do next?

Although it takes a few minutes to envision what you hope will occur, by the end of the exercise you should have a story/mental model of how your morning should proceed.  As a result, when distractions inevitably arise, it will be easier to decide in the moment whether they deserve focus or can be ignored.  For instance, if you email inbox has 40 messages, you know you can ignore them until 10:30am because that is what the mental model you developed (i.e. the story inside your head) tells you to do.  On the other hand, if the phone rings from an important person you have been trying to contact, you will take the call because the interruption has a place in your mental model.

To help stay focused, envision what will happen.  What will occur first, and what are the potential obstacles?  How will you prevent them?  Telling yourself a story about what you expect to occur makes it easier to decide where your focus should go when your plan encounters a set-back, which is bound to happen in real life.

Key Concept #4

Decision Making

Human beings are faced with countless decisions on a daily basis, ranging from trivial decisions to important ones.  How should you make a decision when confronted with the unexpected?  Then book describes the importance of probabilistic thinking, which entails envisioning multiple futures and then forcing yourself to figure out which ones are most likely, and why.  For instance, for a simple decision like whether to meet your wife for lunch, the calculus is easy:  In one potential future, you take an hour for lunch and come back happy and relaxed.  In another, lunch goes long and you spend most of the time discussing family issues, so that when you get back to your desk you are fried and behind schedule.  By thinking through potential futures, you will be better prepared to influence which of those futures would actually occur.  When choosing a restaurant to meet your wife, for example, you could suggest one close to your office so it is easy to get back to work quickly.  If the topic of family issues comes up at lunch, you could suggest to wait to talk about that until later in the evening.  Anticipating the future allows us to be better prepared to make wiser decisions.

For bigger decisions, like deciding to take a new job, it may require a bit more analysis.  Do your research, talk to others in the industry, and assign each scenario a rough probability.  By writing this analysis down, you can feel better that you will have made the best decision you could given the information available.

In the late 1990s, a professor of cognitive science at MIT named Joshua Tenenbaum began a large scale experiment of the casual ways that people make everyday predictions.  For instance, when we estimate how long a meeting will last or envision two driving routes and guess at which one will have less traffic.  How do our brains make those decisions?  It turns out our brains are able to determine that different kinds of predictions require different kinds of reasoning.  Researchers call the ability to intuit patterns “Bayesian cognition” because for a computer to make predictions, it must use a variation of Baye’s rule, which is a mathematical formula that generally requires running thousands of models simultaneously and comparing millions of results.  At the core of Bayes rules is the principle that even if we have very little data, we can still forecast the future by making assumptions and then skewing them based on what we observe about the world.  Humans are surprisingly good Bayesian predictors, even if we’re unaware of it.

In summary, to make better decisions, envision multiple futures.  By pushing yourself to imagine various possibles, you will be better equipped to make wise choices.  You can hone your Bayesian instincts by seeking out different experiences, perspectives, and other people’s ideas.  By finding information and letting yourself sit with it for a day or two, options become clearer.

Key Concept #5

Make Teams More Effective

“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.” Smarter Faster Better p. 60

Regardless of where you work, chances are you have to deal with a team.  Even a solo freelancer likely relies on other people for a segment of their work.

The book mentions that Google’s Human Resources department has a specific group called People Analytics that is designed to help examine if employees were satisfied with their bosses and coworkers, whether they felt overworked, intellectually challenged, and a whole host of other variables.  The goal of People Analytics was to make life at Google a little bit better and a lot more productive.  People Analytics latest undertaking had been to help determine why some teams were more effective than others.  The conclusion from the study was that “psychological safety” was a key ingredient to good teams.  Psychological safety is a shared belief held by team members that the group is a safe place for taking risks and that team members will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.  Essentially, it describes a team environment that is characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.

Additional research supported Google’s conclusion.  Simply combining the 10 smartest people together and forming a team does not lead to outperformance.  Nor does having a team that has a decisive leader.  The single most important factor in team effectiveness is how members of the team treat each other.  Everyone on the team should feel like they have an equal opportunity to speak and their opinions are respected.

To make teams more effective, the book offers several key concepts.  First, manage the how, not the who of teams.  Psychological safety emerges when everyone feels like they can speak in roughly equal measure and when team members show they are sensitive to how each other feel.  Secondly, if you are leading a team, think about the message your choices are sending.  Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the most vocal person?  Make sure you show you are listening by repeating what people say and replying to questions and thoughts.  When someone is upset of flustered, show sensitivity and encourage others to follow your lead.

Apply It

*The next time you are feeling a lack of motivation, just get started with a simple task that allows you to feel like you have some sense of control.  Remind yourself that completing the task is important to a bigger goal that aligns with your values.

*Instead of coming up with a list of 5 items for a New Year’s resolution, simply write down one stretch goal and the supporting SMART goals to accomplish this.  Breaking your goal into subgoals that follow the SMART objectives will not only help keep you motivated, but will lead to a higher likelihood of accomplishing your goals.

*The next time you are faced with a difficult decision, write down 3-4 scenarios and assign a probability to each outcome.  This will help you better think through your decision and lead to better decision making.