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Title: Smarter Faster Better Authors: Charles Duhigg Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 59 Date: 2025-11-25 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
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.
On the best teams, for instance, leaders encouraged people to speak up; teammates felt like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another; people said they could suggest ideas without fear of retribution; the culture discouraged people from making harsh judgments.
Tags:leadership,teamwork
Second, the good teams tested as having âhigh average social sensitivityââa fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.
Tags:perception,teamwork
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.
Tags:psychological_safety,psychology,teamwork
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.
Tags:choice,motivation
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.
Tags:motivation
One way to prove to ourselves that we are in control is by making decisions. âEach choiceâno matter how smallâreinforces the perception of control and self-efficacy,â
Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.
âSystems teach us how to force ourselves to make questions look unfamiliar,â said Johnson. âItâs a way to see alternatives.â
Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control.
Tags:control,favorite,habits,health,motivation
Making good decisions relies on forecasting the future, but forecasting is an imprecise, often terrifying, science because it forces us to confront how much we donât know. The paradox of learning how to make better decisions is that it requires developing a comfort with doubt.
If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier, Quintanillaâs drill instructors had told him. Thatâs why they asked each other questions starting with âwhy.â Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.
Tags:habits,motivation
Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. 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.
Tags:habits,motivation
The superstars were constantly telling stories about what they had seen and heard. They were, in other words, much more prone to generate mental models.
The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us weâre in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.
Tags:motivation,work
First, all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as âequality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.â In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignmentâbut by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.
Tags:teamwork
The norms that Googleâs surveys said were most effectiveâallowing others to fail without repercussions, respecting divergent opinions, feeling free to question othersâ choices but also trusting that people arenât trying to undermine youâwere all aspects of feeling psychologically safe at work.
The first thing the researchers noticed, as they began crawling through all that data, was that the firmâs most productive workers, its superstars, shared a number of traits. The first was they tended to work on only five projects at onceâa healthy load, but not extraordinary.
Tags:work
The Agile methodology, as it came to be known, emphasized collaboration, frequent testing, rapid iteration, and pushing decision making to whoever was closest to a problem. It quickly revolutionized software development and now is the standard methodology among many tech firms.
Tags:teamwork,technology,work
The method Robbins suggested for jump-starting the creative processâtaking proven, conventional ideas from other settings and combining them in new waysâis remarkably effective, it turns out. Itâs a tactic all kinds of people have used to spark creative successes.
Tags:cognition,creativity,teamwork
In contrast, students who had been praised for their hard workâwho were encouraged to frame the experience in terms of self-determinationâwent to the hard puzzles. They worked longer and scored better. They later said they had a great time.
Note: This is the Locusof Control
Tags:cognition,motivation,psychology
When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. Thatâs ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that works only when people feel like they can trust one another. It only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.
Tags:teamwork
The superstars werenât choosing tasks that leveraged existing skills. Instead, they were signing up for projects that required them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities. Thatâs why the superstars worked on only five projects at a time: Meeting new people and learning new skills takes a lot of additional hours.
Tags:communication,learning,skills,work
Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation of meaningful projects, goals, and values. We start to recognize how small chores can have outsized emotional rewards, because they prove to ourselves that we are making meaningful choices, that we are genuinely in control of our own lives.
Tags:work
Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinatesâ success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shares information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.
Tags:management
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 âcreativeâ manuscripts had already been published elsewhereâand had already been picked over by thousands of other scientists.
Tags:creativity,knowledge
Bonin made a second mistake, a mental misstep that is a cousin to cognitive tunneling: He sought to aim the spotlight in his head onto something familiar. Bonin fell back on a reaction he had practiced repeatedly, a sequence of moves he had learned to associate with emergencies. He fell into what psychologists call âreactive thinking.â
Tags:bias,cognition,problem_solving
Itâs 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.â
Tags:teamwork
âThe quality of peopleâs decisions generally gets better as they receive more relevant information. But then their brain reaches a breaking point when the data becomes too much. They start ignoring options or making bad choices or stop interacting with the information completely.â Information blindness occurs because of the way our brainâs capacity for learning has evolved.
Tags:choice,cognition,knowledge
Numerous academic studies have examined the impact of stretch goals, and have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity.
Tags:goals,productivity
People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see.
Tags:vision
âYouâll never get rewarded for doing whatâs easy for you. If youâre an athlete, Iâll 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. Thatâs how they learn to believe they can do them.â
One way to overcome information blindness is to force ourselves to grapple with the data in front of us, to manipulate information by transforming it into a sequence of questions to be answered or choices to be made.
Reactive thinking is at the core of how we allocate our attention, and in many settings, itâs a tremendous asset. Athletes, for example, practice certain moves again and again so that, during a game, they can think reactively and execute plays faster than their opponents can respond.
Tags:habits,preparation
Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.
Tags:decisions,leadership,productivity,work
âItâs the difference between making decisions that prove to yourself that youâre still in charge of your life, versus falling into a mindset where youâre just waiting to die,â
Tags:decisions
TO STAY FOCUSED: âą Envision what will happen. What will occur first? What are potential obstacles? How will you preempt 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 real life.
But systems such as the engineering design processâwhich forces us to search for information and brainstorm potential solutions, to look for different kinds of insights and test various ideasâhelp us achieve disfluency by putting the past in a new frame of reference. It subverts our brainâs craving for binary choicesâShould I help my sister or let my family down?âby learning to reframe decisions in new ways.
Tags:perspective
âBut when we teach people a process for reframing choices, when we give them a series of steps that causes a decision to seem a little bit different than before,â said Johnson, âit helps them take more control of whatâs going on inside their heads.â
Tags:perspective,problem_solving
Many of the SMART goals the consultants found inside the factories were just as detailedâand just as trivial. Workers spent hours making sure their objectives satisfied every SMART criterion, but spent much less time making sure the goals were worth pursuing in the first place.
Laszlo Bock, the head of the People Operations department at Google, walked onto the stage and thanked everyone for coming. âThe biggest thing you should take away from this work is that how teams work matters, in a lot of ways, more than who is on them,â he said.
A high need for closure has been shown to trigger close-mindedness, authoritarian impulses, and a preference for conflict over cooperation.
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. This instinct for control is so central to how our brains develop that infants, once they learn to feed themselves, will resist adultsâ attempts at control even if submission is more likely to get food into their mouths.
TO MAKE BETTER DECISIONS: âą Envision multiple futures. By pushing yourself to imagine various possibilitiesâsome of which might be contradictoryâyouâre better equipped to make wise choices. âą We can hone our Bayesian instincts by seeking out different experiences, perspectives, and other peopleâs ideas. By finding information and then letting ourselves sit with it, options become clearer.
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.
As long as we feel a sense of control, weâre more willing to play along.
Tags:control,negotiation
However, some peopleâabout 20 percent of test takers, and many of the most accomplished people who have completed the examâshow a higher-than-average preference for personal organization, decisiveness, and predictability. They tend to disdain flighty friends and ambiguous situations. These people have a high emotional need for cognitive closure. The need for cognitive closure, in many settings, can be a great strength. People who have a strong urge for closure are more likely to be self-disciplined and seen as leaders by their peers.
Tags:cognition,leadership,organization
So how do we get the right assumptions? By making sure we are exposed to a full spectrum of experiences. Our assumptions are based on what weâve encountered in life, but our experiences often draw on biased samples.
Tags:assumption,experience
Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us. Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react.
Tags:attention,decisions,models
This, ultimately, is one of the most important secrets to learning how to make better decisions. Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.
Finally, the superstars also shared a particular behavior, almost an intellectual and conversational tic: They loved to generate theoriesâlots and lots of theories, about all kinds of topics, such as why certain accounts were succeeding or failing, or why some clients were happy or disgruntled, or how different management styles influenced various employees.
Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isnât a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, itâs the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new.
Then someone would propose a new theory or experiment and the process would start all over again. âWhen you track every call and keep notes and talk about what just happened with the person in the next cubicle, you start paying attention differently,â Fludd told me. âYou learn to pick up on things.â
This is how learning occurs. Information gets absorbed almost without our noticing because weâre so engrossed with it. Fludd took the torrent of data arriving each day and gave her team a method for placing it into folders that made it easier to understand. She helped her employees do something with all those memos they received and the conversations they were havingâand, as a result, it was easier for them to learn.
âA lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,â said Uzzi. âTheyâve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. Theyâve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.â
âSome 400 laboratory and field studies [show] that specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to âdo oneâs best,â
There was a second body of academic research that focused on what are known as âgroup norms.â âAny group, over time, develops collective norms about appropriate behavior,â a team of psychologists had written in the Sociology of Sport Journal. Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards, and unwritten rules that govern how we function.
Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control.
âIt was odd,â Delgado told me later. âThereâs no reason he should have wanted to continue playing once he knew it was rigged. I mean, whereâs the fun in a rigged game? Your choices have no impact. But it took me five minutes to convince him he didnât want to take the game home.â