Everything I learned from reading Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

I have recently finished reading Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg. As someone who is constantly seeking to accomplish more with my time and be as productive as I can, I found this book very important and helpful in learning how to achieve my goals in the most efficient ways.

I recommend you to read the book fully, as it holds a lot of insights on how organizations, big and small, and successful individuals as well operate in order to achieve the best results.

I will present all the important lessons I learned through reading this book.

Sense of Control Generates Self-Motivation

We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself.

The author in the book presents different scientific experiments and real cases that prove that people by nature love being in control. Once people feel in control of a situation, and they are able to see the bigger picture behind doing smaller tasks, they are able to generate the motivation they need to finish these tasks.

Psychological Safety Makes a Successful Team

When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. That’s ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.

Be it a study group, a team at Google, or hospital employees, the only common thing between successful groups and teams in different organizations was psychological safety. In other words, these teams made everyone feel heard and like their opinion matters. Everyone had roughly equal voices. It’s not about whether the people in the team are the best or just average people, it’s about whether everyone felt psychologically safe which lead them to trust one another.

Creating Mental Models Keeps You Focused and Ready

…a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads.

By practicing making Mental Models — imagining different situations and telling yourself stories — you will be better at shifting your focus to what really matters. Psychological studies of different cases — flights gone wrong, nurses noticing a problem with a newborn child that no one noticed — showed that people who tend to envision how their day would go like, or what would they do in extreme scenarios, were more productive and successful.

People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades.

To Achieve Goals You Need Ambition, but also a Realistic Approach

What matters is having a large ambition and a system of figuring out how to make it into a concrete and realistic plan

Over history, it has been proven that without ambition, our goals and to-do lists will be full of easy, small goals that will not lead us to bigger accomplishments. On the other hand, having a big ambition without knowing how to realistically achieve it will keep that goal big and impossible to achieve.

You need to have big goals, but you need to dissect them into smaller tasks that makes those goals achievable.

However, that’s not always enough. In a lot of cases, you need one more factor: taking the time to think. A lot of times we get pulled in to the problem at hand to the point we can’t see or think clearly. That’s why we also need to take a step back and reflect on what we are doing every now and then.

A Culture of Commitment and Trust Should be at the Core of Every Successful Enterprise

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

After the success of NUMMI — the result of a partnership between General Motors and Toyota that adapted Toyota’s Production System for the first time in the United States — so many organizations in different fields started following that same system.

The “Agile Methodology” for tech firms, “Pixar Method” for filmmakers, and “Lean Healthcare” for hospitals are just some examples of systems that were built on the Toyota Production System. Each of these systems encouraged collaboration and gave decision-making authority to the person closest to the problem.

Your Experiences and Moments of Uneasiness and Tensions Can Flourish Your Creative Process

We all have experiences and tools, disturbances and tensions that can make us into brokers — if, that is, we’re willing to embrace that desperation and upheaval and try to see our old ideas in new ways.

From the creators of Disney’s Frozen, to the discovery of the immediate disturbance hypothesis, we get to learn that the creative process is not “magic,” but merely the ability to use your past experiences, your fears and moments of panic, and to allow just the right amount of disturbance to enter.

All of Your Experiences Have Important Data That You Need to Take Advantage of

The people who are most successful at learning — those who are able to digest the data surrounding them, who absorb insights embeded in their experiences and take advantage of information flowing past — are the ones who know how to use disfluency to their advantage.

In order to learn from your past experiences and apply your knowledge to your present daily life, you need to absorb all the information coming your way. This means that you need to analyze it, divide it into small pieces, and make the data “disfluent — harder to process at first, but stickier once it was really understood.” This will help you make better decisions by replacing the need to have binary decisions with asking endless questions until everything makes sense.