Charles Duhigg: Smarter Faster Better
Take responsibility and have a strong internal locus of control.
Think of the future as multiple outcomes floating loosely in the air. They have different weights—their probabilities. Think of the future in terms of probability, many things can happen, how can you make the one you want more likely to happen?
Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control.
A strong internal locus of control is when you praise or blame yourself for successes/failures, instead of on external circumstances and environmental influences.
Ex. Focus on things you can improve, like work ethic and work rate, not intelligence.
To teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to link smaller tasks into larger aspirations.
Making choices is the most important part of generating motivation because they do two things: convince us we're in control and endow our actions with larger meaning.
The best teams usually encourage people to speak up, and teammates should feel like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another.
This is called "psychological safety"
Team members need to feel that it is a safe place to take risks. A team should be characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect.
Good teams have two main properties:
Everyone speaks the same amount. This does not have to be equal every minute, but in the long run everyone should have about the same amount of time talked. A single small group or leader should not hog most of the conversation.
Second, good teams tested as having "high average social sensitivity" which is similar to empathy. Members were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on tone of voice, expressions, and posture.
Effective groups are not based on individual intelligence, instead a coherent group potency which comes out of more than the sum of each individual's strengths.
The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader. When the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel important and listened to... or asks for the opinion of a group member who has not spoken in a while, it sets the tone for the whole group.
You can take a team of average performers, and if you teach then to interact in the right way, they'll do things no superstar could ever accomplish.
Key norms to an effective team:
- Teams need to believe their work is important
- Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful
- Teams need clear goals and defined roles
- Teams need psychological safety.
Team leaders must:
- Not interrupt teammates during conversations.
- Demonstrate that they are listening intently by summarizing what people say after they say it.
- They should admit what they don't know.
- They shouldn't end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once.
- They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways.
- They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.
Cognitive tunneling is the phenomenon when, after some kind of emergency or incident occurs, the brain has to ramp up the intensity of your spotlight, and it doesn't know where to shine.
The brain's instinct is to focus as strongly as possible on the most obvious stimuli, what's right in front of you, even if its not the best choice.
Once in a cognitive tunnel, we lose our ability to direct our focus.
Instead, we latch on to the most obvious stimulus, often at the cost of common sense.
Habitually construct mental models.
By developing a habit of telling stories about the world around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes.
If you want to make yourself more attentive to small details, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do throughout your day.
You'll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head.
Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you'll encode these experiences deeper into your brain.
If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do.
Ex. If you are in a meeting and the CEO suddenly asks for your opinion, your mind is likely to snap from passive listening to active involvement - and if you're not careful, a cognitive tunnel might prompt you to say something you regret.
To become genuinely productive, we must take control of out attention; we must build mental models which put us firmly in charge.
Stretch goals are necessary, however stretch goals cannot be too audacious. There is a fine line between an ambition which helps people achieve something amazing and one that crushes morale.
Stretch goals should be paired with something like the SMART system, a framework which offers a disciplined mindset and roadmap of how to achieve that goal.
That ambitious goal must be transformed into a series of realistic short-term aims.
Craving for closure is one of the ways we can get sucked into completely simple, instant-gratification tasks repeatedly, like clearing out an inbox. Tasks like these are relatively unimportant and are the antithesis of productivity.
Lean management (lean manufacturing.. etc.) can be broken down into a few key components:
- Team members have to make suggestions
- Team members must have the ability and responsibility to call a time-out if they feel the project is moving in the wrong direction
- The person closest to a problem has the primary responsibility for figuring out how to solve it (not just management, but the hands-on workers should have the power to recommend solutions as well)
Quick productivity for teams:
Conduct "stand-up" meetings in which everyone stood, and briefly recounted the previous days work (this keeps members accountable) and what they hoped to accomplish over the next twenty-four hours (framework to achieve goals).
People need to know their suggestions won't be ignored, and that their mistakes won't be held against them. And they need to know everyone else on the team has their back.
When making decisions it is important to remember that 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 all those futures can be combined in order for someone to predict which one is more likely to occur.
This is probabilistic thinking.
It is the ability to hold multiple, conflicting outcomes in your mind and estimate their relative likelihoods.
The best entrepreneurs are acutely conscious of the risks that come from only talking to people who have succeeded.
Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.
Innovation is taking existing building blocks and stacking them in new ways.
Most creativity is an import-export business. Individuals regarded as creative are usually "intellectual middlemen" who have learned how to transfer successful principles from one industry to another.
Such creativity is also more credible as it can be endorsed by the other industries which it has succeeded in in the past.
3 things to help you in your creative process:
- Pay attention to how things make you feel. Look inward.
- Recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn't a sign that everything is falling apart.
- Remember that the relief accompanying creative breakthrough, while sweet, can blind us to seeing alternatives.
When we encounter new information which we want to internalize, we must force ourselves to do something with it.
Write it down by hand.
Make a graph and draw conclusions.
Explain the concept to someone near you.
Motivation becomes easier when we transform a chore into a choice. Doing so gives us a sense of control.