Smarter Faster Better
A book I will own and revisit again soon.
Thoughts
This book was great, great audio, great anecdotes and great substance. I will apply these principles to my life. As I am in control
Outline
Productivity 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. Productivity 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.
Motivation
The prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control. The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination. Easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control. To teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals.
Teams
Group norms: any group, over time, develops collective norms about appropriate behavior. Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards, and unwritten rules that govern how we function. Some norms are correlated with high team effectiveness. Successful teams require behaviors that create a sense of togetherness while also encouraging people to take a chance. This is called psychological safety. It is a shared belief that the group is a safe place for taking risks. Good teams share two behaviors: (1) all members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as equality in distribution of conversational turntaking — This brings the collective intelligence up; (2) High average social sensitivity — a 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. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard. The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader. The members must have roughly equal voices and they must be sensitive to one another’s emotions and needs.
Focus
As automation becomes more common, the risks that our attention spans will fail have risen. The issue of cognitive tunneling — a mental glitch that sometimes occurs when our brains are forced to transition abruptly from relaxed automation to panicked attention. You can think about your brain’s attention span like a spotlight that can go wide and diffused, or tight and focused. Reactive thinking: This is at the core of how we allocate our attention, and in many settings, it’s a tremendous asset. . . . Reactive thinking is how we build habits, and it’s why to-do lists and calendar alerts are so helpful: Rather than needing to decide what to do next, we can take advantage of our reactive instincts and automatically proceed. Reactive thinking, in a sense, outsources the choices and control that, in other settings, create motivation. But the downside of reactive thinking is that habits and reactions can become so automatic they overpower our judgment. Once our motivation is outsourced, we simply react.
Creating Mental Models
When we envision the conversations we’re going to have with more specificity, and imagine what we are going to do later that day in greater detail, we’re creating mental models. As a result, we’re better at choosing where to focus and what to ignore. Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. If you need to improve your focus sand learn to avoid distractions, create mental models by taking a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what are you are about to do. To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. . . . Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next.
Goal Setting
Researchers describe the need for closure as having multiple components. There is the need to seize a goal, as well as a separate urge to freeze on an objective once it has been selected. Decisive people have an instict to seize on a choice when it meets a minimum threshold of acceptability. This is a useful impulse, because it helps us commit to projects rather than endlessly debating questions or second-guessing ourselves into a state of paralysis. However, if our urge for closure is too strong, we freeze on our goals and years to grab the feeling of productivity at the expense of common sense.
Goal Setting and SMART goals
Smart: Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timeline.
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 ‘do one’s best. Goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. This 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 turns 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. However, 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. As such, you need to balance the psychological influence of immediate goals with the freedom to think about bigger things — you can’t only focus on achievable results. 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. For a stretch goal to become more than just an aspiration, we need a disciplined mindset to show us how to turn a far-off objective into a series of realistic short-term aims. People who know how to build SMART goals have often been habituated into cultures where big objectives can be broken into manageable parts, and so when they encounter seemingly outsized ambitions, they know what to do. So combine the two: Set an ambitious goals and then choose one aim and start breaking it into short-term concrete steps. Within psychology, these 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.
Managing others
The most successful type of business culture to build is a Commitment Culture. The goal, as the name suggests, is to commit to the culture first and then move towards other tangible results like building a product. You focus on your retaining your employees and building a culture of trust before anything else. One of the reasons commitment cultures are more successful than star cultures is because a sense of trust emerges from workers, managers, and customers that entices everyone to work harder and stick together through the setbacks that are inevitable in any industry. There are higher levels of teamwork and psychological safety. 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. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored, that their mistakes wont be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.
Decision making
Probabilistic Thinking: The future isn’t one thing. Rather, it is a multitude of possibilities that often contradict one another until one of them comes true. And those futures can be combined in order for someone to predict which one is more likely to occur. Probabilistic thinking is the ability to hold multiple, conflicting outcomes in your mind and estimate their relative likelihoods. Bayes Principle: 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. Calibrating your base rate requires learning from both the accomplished and the humbled.
Innovation
A study looked at research papers to look for commonalities that could help determine what made the most successful papers creative. The study found that 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. It is a combination of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, that typically make a paper so creative and important. When strong ideas take root, they can sometimes crowd out competitors so thoroughly that alternatives can’t prosper. So sometimes the best way to spark creativity is to disturb things just enough to let some light through. If you want to become a creative-broker (someone who engineers creativity) and increase the productivity of your own creative process, there are three things that can help: First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you feel. That’s how we distinguish clichés from true insights. Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn’t a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, it’s that condition that makes us flexible enough to seize something new. Finally, remember that relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to seeing alternatives. It is critical to maintain some distance from what we create. Without self-criticism, without tension, one idea can quickly crowd out competitors. But we can regain that critical distance by forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from a completely different perspective, by changing the power dynamics in the room or giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before.
Absorbing Data
The problem in today’s technologically-rich society is the over-abundance of data we are constantly absorbed in. The inability to take advantage of this data as it becomes more plentiful is called “information blindness.” 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. This is sometimes referred to as creating disfluency. The important step in creating disfluency seems to be performing some kind of operation. Information gets absorbed almost without our noticing because we’re so engrossed with it. But the key to learning is to do something with all that information. In decision making, once a frame is established, that context is hard to dislodge. Frames can be uprooted, however, if we force ourselves to seek fresh vantage points. We can introduce disfluency to disrupt the frame. Typically, our brain wants to find a simple frame and stick with it, the same way it wants to make a binary decision. But 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, it helps them take more control of what’s going on inside their heads. 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. In the hand-writing vs. typing example: 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. Key Point: When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data.
Applying to my own life.
Generating Motivation
I must make a choice that puts me in control. For when I get homework assignments, I will decide where it will occur right when I receive it. I will ask Why? Why am I doing this homework assignment.
- So I can learn more
- So I can make my family and myself proud
- So I can establish a habit of doing assignments that will be useful all my life.
I am the one in control of my life.
Working with teams
Observe body language and possess strong social sensibility. Make sure everyone is comfortable and wants to share, as well as try to establish a commitment to each other.
Manage the how, Not the who
Setting Goals
I will choose a stretch goal, such as getting a 30 on the ACT. Then break that stretch goal into many different SMART goals. For example, I will make flashcards and review them everyday in the summer or take 10 practice tests.
Staying Focused
Envision what will happen during an action. What will occur first? What are the potential obstacles? How will you preempt them? Visualizing this will make it easier to perform once the action is actually in front of you. Imagine you are playing tennis and you are messing up often; keep your eye on the ball and follow thru. Or imagine an interaction with a person, what will be said, how will they react, how will you make them laugh.
Making better decisions
I will envision multiple futures and reactions. By envisioning many different possibilities I will be better suited to make a decision. Do this when college planning, think of multiple possibilities, options, so you can make a decision you are most comfortable with. I can hone our Bayesian instincts by seeking out different experiences, perspectives, and other people’s ideas. By finding information and then letting ourselves sit with it, and options become clearer.
Managing others
(1) Lean and agile 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. Make team members part of the decision making. (2) By pushing decision, making to whoever is closest to a problem, managers take advantage of everyone’s expertise and unlock innovation. Everyone is an expert at something, if they deal with it the most, they will know how to improve it. (3) A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and solutions, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored and that their mistakes won’t be held against them.
To innovate
Creativity often emerges by combining old ideas in new ways — and “innovation brokers” are key. To become a broker yourself and encourage brokerage within your organization: Be sensitive to your own experience. Notice successes and failure. Learn from others — mimic and fix. Paying attention to how things make you think and feel is how we distinguish clichés from real insights. Study your own emotional reactions. Recognize that the stress that emerges amid the creative process isn’t a sign everything is falling apart. Rather, creative desperation is often critical.
To absorb data
When I encounter information I will force myself to do something with it. I will test an idea, write it down, translate it into data or force myself to explain it to some one.
Every choice we make in life is an experiment — the trick is getting ourselves to see the data embedded in those decisions, and then to use it somehow so we learn from it.