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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the author of The Power of Habit comes a fascinating book that explores the science of productivity, and why managing how you think is more important than what you think--with an appendix of real-world lessons to apply to your life.
At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key productivity 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 painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don't merely act differently.
They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.
A young woman drops out of a PhD program and starts playing poker. By training herself to envision contradictory futures, she learns to anticipate her opponents' missteps--and becomes one of the most successful players in the world.
A group of data scientists at Google embark on a four-year study of how the best teams function, and find that how a group interacts is more important than who is in the group--a principle, it turns out, that also helps explain why Saturday Night Live became a hit.
A Marine Corps general, faced with low morale among recruits, reimagines boot camp--and discovers that instilling a "bias toward action" can turn even the most directionless teenagers into self-motivating achievers.
The filmmakers behind Disney's Frozen are nearly out of time and on the brink of catastrophe--until they shake up their team in just the right way, spurring a creative breakthrough that leads to one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
What do these people have in common?
They know that productivity relies on making certain choices. The way we frame our daily decisions; the big ambitions we embrace and the easy goals we ignore; the cultures we establish as leaders to drive innovation; the way we interact with data: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.
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, deep reporting, and rich storytelling to explain how we can improve at the things we do. It's a groundbreaking exploration of the science of productivity, one that can help anyone learn to succeed with less stress and struggle, and to get more done without sacrificing what we care about most--to become smarter, faster, and better at everything we do.
Author Notes
Charles Duhigg graduated from Harvard Business School and Yale College. He is an investigative reporter for The New York Times. He won the George Polk Award and the National Academies of Science Award. He is a contributor to NPR, This American Life, and Frontline. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business is his first book. His title Smarter Faster Better made the New York Times bestseller list in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Duhigg (The Power of Habit) shares his conversations with productive people in this manual for increasing productivity. From this fieldwork he draws eight commonalities, treated in individual chapters. He places particular emphasis on the importance of individual agency and engagement: according to him, success comes from proactive transformation, as opposed to passive acceptance. The book's major source consists of the interviewees' stories, so it makes sense that the discussion is more narrative than data-driven. Many examples are recent, relevant, and fresh-such as the story of creative triumph that was the development of the hit film Frozen. The narrative can feel like one under-analyzed anecdote after another, but Duhigg's accessible prose comes across as appropriate for the subject matter, since it ensures that his points about behaving proactively can be absorbed quickly and easily. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Investigative reporter Duhigg defines productivity as attempting to realize the most meaningful rewards with the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time by learning to succeed with less effort and stress and by efficiently accomplishing tasks without sacrificing other priorities. His eight concepts to expand productivity include innovation, motivation, mental models, and the correct way to set goals. A skillful storyteller, the author weaves his thought-provoking ideas into lessons learned from interviews of businesspeople, government leaders, psychologists, and others. One standout anecdote tells how, under enormous time pressure, with its creative team spinning, Disney promoted an underling to be, effectively, a film's codirector. This shake-up launched the all-time highest-grossing animated film, Frozen. We also learn about the world's most famous woman poker player, whose mastery of decision making stems from leaning to live with uncertainty and constantly updating her assumptions while thinking probabilistically having the ability to hold multiple conflicting outcomes in your mind and estimate their relative likelihoods. This is an excellent book, suitable for most public libraries.--Whaley, Mary Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BARACK OBAMA IS a life hacker. When interviewed by Michael Lewis a few years ago, Obama explained that he wears only gray or blue suits so as to cut down the choices he has to make each day, and then he cited research showing that "you need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself." The studies that Obama was referring to suggest that if you exhaust your decision-making capacity with unnecessary choices, you'll end up making mistakes when it really matters. Like many of us, Obama is influenced by the literature that draws upon psychology, neuroscience and behavioral economics to tell us how to be happier and more successful. The New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg has already contributed to this genre with his first book, "The Power of Habit," which was an engagingly deep dive into the psychology of how routines are formed and modified. His newest book is broader in scope. It has eight main chapters, each focusing on a single idea about how to increase productivity in business or in life, each telling a story of how the idea works in practice. Many of the stories are terrific; my favorites were about the early seasons of "Saturday Night Live," F.B.I. agents racing to rescue a kidnapping victim, and a poker player competing in a $2 million winner-take-all tournament. And Duhigg is a pleasure to read. Unlike a lot of contributors to this genre, he's a journalist, not a professor, and it shows in his prose, as when he casually describes someone as having "a passion for long skirts and Hooters chicken wings." But it's not clear that his book lives up to its subtitle, "The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business." Many of Duhigg's conclusions seem less like secrets and more like common sense. He reminds us that it's important to set goals, both specific and long-term. We learn that it's good for an organization to allow people to participate and express their views. I enjoyed reading about Annie Duke, cognitive scientist turned poker player, but the upshot of this chapter was: When you plan for the future, try to reason in terms of probability, not certainty. Are there really many people who need reminding that we live in an uncertain world? Other suggestions are less obvious, but they might not be that reliable as practical advice. Duhigg tells of a pilot who landed an Airbus during a huge system failure by thinking about the plane in a different way, as if it were a single-engine Cessna. "Get into the habit of telling yourself stories," Duhigg writes - these stories will tell us what to focus on and what to ignore. But one can easily find cases in which stories make us stupid - indeed, one of the main themes of Maria Konnikova's recent book, "The Confidence Game," is that our appetite for narrative can blind us to reality and make us easy prey to con men. OR CONSIDER CHOICES. Duhigg talks about how the act of making choices invigorates and motivates us, and suggests that we add opportunities for decision-making into our lives. This really is interesting and unintuitive research. But, as Obama realized, choices can also exhaust us, so it's not clear whether the advantages of additional choices exceed the costs. Certainly, Duhigg is sensitive to these sorts of nuances. He tells us about a kidnapping case that was solved in part because an F.B.I. agent acted on his own initiative, and he argues that organizations work better if employees have more autonomy. But he then concedes that "there are good reasons companies don't decentralize authority," and he notes that the agent might have wasted time by following the wrong hunch. As he puts it elsewhere, "an instinct for decisiveness is great - until it's not." He suggests that "forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsize jumps in innovation and productivity" - but then, on the next page, he worries that such goals might "cause panic and convince people that success is impossible because the goal is too big." Duhigg ends his book with "A Reader's Guide to Using These Ideas," and while some of his proposals are clever - there are some good tips about handling email overload - most have a fortunecookie flavor, such as "Envision multiple futures." Why can't a writer as astute as Duhigg come up with less ambiguous advice? One concern is his method. While his book contains an occasional failure story, the main focus of each chapter is on a person or organization that did well. This makes intuitive sense. If you want to be good at tennis, watch a champion tennis player; if you want to learn the secrets of a successful marriage, look at happy couples. Few of us approach people who do poorly and ask them the secrets of their failure. But we should. As Duhigg himself puts it, "many successful people ... spend an enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures." He should have done more of that in his book. He talks about the great seasons of "Saturday Night Live" and notes that while there was tension and infighting, the cast members still felt safe enough to criticize one another without fear of punishment. This is plainly a good thing, but if the same attitude was present for the lousy seasons of the show, then receptivity to criticism can't be the secret sauce. Annie Duke uses probabilistic reasoning to win at poker, but if the players she beats also calculate the odds, then that isn't what makes someone a poker champion. Also, stories can tell us only so much. I've never read a book from this genre that wasn't filled with stories - stories are memorable and appealing and persuasive - and Duhigg's skill as a storyteller makes his book so engaging to read. But individual cases, whether of success or failure, tell you little about general principles, because you can't distinguish factors that really made a difference from accidental features of the examples you've chosen. My favorite musician might take LSD, but I can't know that it's the acid that makes her so good - maybe she'd be better without it. One needs to do large-scale studies or, ideally, experiments. Take 200 musicians, randomly choose 100 of them to take acid, and force 100 to abstain; if the first group makes better music, well, now you've found a secret of productivity. If Duhigg used such methods, what would he find? Perhaps very little. Plainly, there are things worth knowing about how to live one's life and run an organization. You can learn to become a better poker player, a better pilot or a better manager, and M.B.A. programs aren't entirely a waste of time. But reading Duhigg's book makes one wonder whether there really are any secrets here - any surprising generalizations of broad applicability. Readers looking for quick and dirty life hacks are going to be disappointed. Better to ignore the how-to subtitle and just enjoy the excellent stories. Duhigg talks about how the act of making choices invigorates and motivates us. PAUL BLOOM is a professor of psychology at Yale. He is writing a book about the problems with empathy.
Kirkus Review
Why some people are more productive than others. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Duhigg follows up his bestselling The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (2012) with a revealing, brightly written exploration of the ways in which successful people make the right choices necessary to succeed with less effort. Drawing on research studies and innumerable interviews with neurologists, businesspeople, government leaders, and psychologists, the author identifies a series of key ideas that help expand productivity. In absorbing stories from every corner of life, he shows how these ideas explain why some people get so much done. Each chapter offers a remarkable blend of anecdotes and science illustrating concepts that clearly have much to offer individuals and companies striving for greater productivity. In Marine Corps training and nursing homes, he finds people are more motivated when they feel in control. Teams like the original group that created Saturday Night Live thrive in a place made safe for risk-taking. In accounts of the experiences of FBI agents, educators, airline pilots, and others, Duhigg explains the importance of creating mental models ("we must take control of our attention"), having large ambitions and realistic plans (rather than "achievable but inconsequential goals"), and managing people successfully in a culture of commitment and trust. In making decisionsin poker, for instancewe must see the future as having multiple possibilities. In innovating, we must be mindful that fast originality often lies in using proven ideas from elsewhere in new ways. Finally, in workplaces inundated with information, we can learn from data by actually doing something with it, as happened in the recent overhaul of the Cincinnati public school system. In each instance, Duhigg shows an uncanny ability to find just the right exciting example of productivity-boosting methods, leaving readers to nod in recognition that they might act in the same way to improve their lives and work. Highly informative and entertaining and certain to have wide appeal. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Everyone is busy, but not everyone is productive, says New York Times reporter Duhigg (The Power of Habit), who here explores the hows and whys of eight ideas that he feels are most important to expand effectiveness in the workplace. By using case studies, research reports, and experiences from a variety of industries, the author hopes to make everyone smarter, faster, and better at what needs to be accomplished, and to understand why some people and companies are more efficient than others. While the chapters deal with such topics as motivation, psychological safety in teams, focus, goal setting, and absorbing data, the examples are so enjoyable that Duhigg's point often tends to get lost. Other concepts include creative desperation, information blindness, reactive thinking, and cognitive tunneling. Even the notes section at the end makes for a compelling narrative. VERDICT Although a fascinating read in which the pages turn quickly, the author's goals may not have been realized. For readers who enjoy their business lessons disguised as entertaining stories, although in this case, absorbing the main arguments will require diligence.-Bonnie A. Tollefson, Rogue Valley Manor Lib., Medford, OR © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 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." Excerpted from Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
