Book Byte #229 "Smarter Faster Better" by Charles Duhigg

The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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“Every choice we make in life is an experiment.”

“The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.”

“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.”

“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 won’t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.”

“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. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in 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. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.”

“Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel. “Most people are too narrow in how they think about creativity,” Ed Catmull, the president of Disney Animation, told me. “So we spend a huge amount of time pushing people to go deeper, to look further inside themselves, to find something that’s real and can be magical when it’s put into the mouth of a character on a screen. We all carry the creative process inside us; we just need to be pushed to use it sometimes.”

“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.”

?? Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea

In the end, staying competitive, productive, and driven comes down to making the proper decisions in both your day-to-day activities and your most ambitious endeavors. Make yourself some stretch goals and then break them down into manageable chunks. Avoid distractions by being organized. Not only are the decisions you make better for you personally, but they also benefit your team and the business as a whole.

Write or speak about a new idea to acquire it.

Inform a friend or compose a brief essay about something you read about that interests you the next time. Engaging with a topic causes your brain to comprehend ideas more thoroughly and creates new neural connections. The more brain connections you make, the more fully you will comprehend a concept and be able to retain it.

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Try out the "Think and Grow Rich Challenge" by Russell Brunson and Learn more about the First Self Help Author Napoleon Hill