Notes on Smarter Faster Better

MOTIVATION

People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and say they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.

Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we have authority over our actions and surroundings

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.

One way to prove to ourselves that we are in control is by making decisions. “Each choice—no matter how small—reinforces the perception of control and self-efficacy,”

Moreover, 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. “It’s the difference between making decisions that prove to yourself that you’re still in charge of your life, versus falling into a mindset where you’re just waiting to die,”

We need to prove to ourselves that our choices are meaningful. When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves “why.” Why are we forcing ourselves to climb up this hill? Why are we pushing ourselves to walk away from the television? Why is it so important to return that email or deal with a coworker whose requests seem so unimportant?

How to motivate others?

People are more motivated to complete difficult tasks when those chores are presented as decisions rather than commands. Complimenting someone for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings.

We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.

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. Choosing to climb a mountain can become an articulation of love for a daughter. An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.

TEAMS

Qualities of a good manager

1. is a good coach
2. empowers and does not micromanage
3. expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ 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

Qualities of good teams

1. Leaders encouraged people to speak up
2. Teammates feel like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another
3. Teammates can suggest ideas without fear of retribution
4. The culture discourages people from making harsh judgments

Good teams create a sense of togetherness while also encouraging people to take a chance.

Good teams have psychological safety - It’s a shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks. A sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up. (Ability to critique without the fear of punishment)

Good teams don’t necessarily require individual stars

Research example; Putting ten smart people in a room doesn’t mean they solve problems more intelligently—in fact, those smart people were often outperformed by groups consisting of people who had scored lower on intellect tests, but who still seemed smarter as a group.

Two behaviors that all the good teams share.

1. All the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion (equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking). As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well, But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.
2. 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 seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. They spent time asking one another what they were thinking about. The good teams also contained more women.

The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader

1. They invite people to speak up.
2. They talk about their own emotions.
3. They don’t interrupt other people.
4. When someone was concerned or upset, they showed the group that it was okay to intervene.
5. They tried to anticipate how people would react and then worked to accommodate those reactions.

Beliefs of good teams

1. Teams need to believe that their work is important.
2. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful.
3. Teams need clear goals and defined roles.
4. Team members need to know they can depend on one another.
5. Most important, teams need psychological safety.

If you are leading a team, think about the message your choices reveal. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you showing you are listening by repeating what people say and replying to questions and thoughts? Are you demonstrating sensitivity by reacting when someone seems upset or flustered? Are you showcasing that sensitivity, so other people will follow your lead?

FOCUS

Brain’s attention span is like a spotlight that can go wide and diffused, or tight and focused. We choose, in most situations, whether to focus the spotlight or let it be relaxed.

Cognitive tunneling

When some kind of emergency happens— suddenly the spotlight in your head has to ramp up all of a sudden and, at first, it doesn’t know where to shine. So the brain’s instinct is to force it as bright as possible on the most obvious stimuli, whatever’s right in front of you, even if that’s not the best choice. That’s when cognitive tunneling happens.

Cognitive tunneling can cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks. It’s what keeps someone glued to their smartphone as the kids wail or pedestrians swerve around them on the sidewalk. It’s what causes drivers to slam on their brakes when they see a red light ahead.

Once in a cognitive tunnel, we lose our ability to direct our focus. Instead, we latch on to the easiest and most obvious stimulus, often at the cost of common sense.

How to overcome cognitive tunneling?

Keep asking questions to yourselves. We aid our focus by building mental models—telling ourselves stories—about what we expect to see.

Creating mental models

Make a habit of telling stories all the time. Engage in constant forecasting. Daydream about the future and then, when life clashes with your imagination, the attention gets snagged.

To stay focused

1. 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.
2. Avoid too much dependency on technology

Characteristics of superstars (most productive workers)

1. They work on fewer projects than others. They are more careful about how they invest their time.

Conventional wisdom holds that productivity rises when people do the same kind of tasks over and over. Repetition makes us faster and more efficient because we don’t have to learn fresh skills with each new assignment. But as the economists looked more closely, they found the opposite

1. Superstars sign up for projects that requires them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities. Meeting new people and learning new skills takes a lot of additional hours. Hence they take fewer projects
2. They are drawn to assignments that are in their early stages. The beginning of a project is also more information rich. Hence they automatically have advantages over others, when the projects became big.
3. They love to generate theories—lots and lots of theories, about all kinds of topics. They try to explain the world to themselves and their colleagues as they went about their days. They reconstruct a conversation, analyzing it piece by piece. And then they ask you to challenge them on their take. They’re constantly trying to figure out how information fits together.

Anyone can learn to habitually construct mental models. By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes.

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

Decisiveness

People who are more decisive and self-assured are seen to get success in life. Determined and focused people tend to work harder and get tasks done more promptly. They stay married longer and have deeper networks of friends. They often have higher-paying jobs.

Caution - A high need for closure has been shown to trigger close-mindedness, authoritarian impulses, and a preference for conflict over cooperation. Individuals with a high need for closure “may display considerable cognitive impatience or impulsivity: They may ‘leap’ to judgment on the basis of inconclusive evidence and exhibit rigidity of thought and reluctance to entertain views different from their own.”

An instinct for decisiveness is great—until it’s not. When people rush toward decisions simply because it makes them feel like they are getting something done, missteps are more likely to occur.

GOAL SETTING

Specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals.

Create a stretch goal, something to spark big ambitions.(If you know how to get there—it’s not a stretch target.) Forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark out-sized jumps in innovation and productivity.

Convert that to a SMART goal, to form a concrete plan.

SMART goals - Stretch & Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timeline

Caution

Experiments have shown that 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. “You get into this mindset where crossing things off your to-do list becomes more important than asking yourself if you’re doing the right things,”

Solution

Get people to identify the ambition first, and then figure out the plan afterward, it would encourage bigger thinking. Only after a goal is finalized, begin the formal process of determining how to make it realistic and achievable and all the other SMART criteria.

There is a fine line between an ambition that helps people achieve something amazing and one that crushes morale. For a stretch goal to inspire, it often needs to be paired with something like the SMART system.

The reason why we need both stretch goals and SMART goals is that audaciousness, on its own, can be terrifying. It’s often not clear how to start on a stretch goal. And so, 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.

Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.

Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.

Caution

In addition to having audacious ambitions and plans that are thorough, we still need, occasionally, to step outside the day-to-day and consider if we’re moving toward goals that make sense. We still need to think!

MANAGING OTHERS

Lean manufacturing - Pushing decision making to the lowest possible level.

Toyota - Our basic philosophy was that no one goes to work wanting to suck. If you put people in a position to succeed, they will.

No matter how great the product or loyal the customers—things would eventually fall apart unless employees trusted one another.

Impact of culture on company's success - Hands down, a commitment culture outperformed every other type of management style in almost every meaningful way.

Commitment company - ‘I want to build the kind of company where people only leave when they retire or die,’ “That doesn’t necessarily mean the company is stodgy, but it does imply a set of values that might prioritize slow and steady growth.”

Agile methodology based on NUMMI culture

Work backward to figure out what kind of software should accommodate each need. Every morning, the team conducts a “stand-up”—meetings where everyone stands to encourage brevity—and recounts the previous day’s work and what they hope to accomplish over the next twenty-four hours. Whoever is closest to a particular problem or a piece of code is considered the expert on that topic, but any programmer or agent, no matter their rank, is free to make suggestions.

? 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.

? By pushing decision making to whoever is closest to a problem, managers take advantage of everyone’s expertise and unlock innovation.

? 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.

DECISION MAKING

Many successful people, spend an enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures.

We all have a natural proclivity to be optimistic, to ignore our mistakes and forget others’ tiny errors. But making good predictions relies on realistic assumptions, and those are based on our experiences. If we pay attention only to good news, we’re handicapping ourselves.

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.

You never know where you’ll end up. you have to be comfortable not knowing exactly where life is going. All we can do is learn how to make the best decisions that are in front of us, and trust that, over time, the odds will be in our favor.

How do we learn to make better decisions?

We can train ourselves to think probabilistically. To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures—to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously—and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true.

INNOVATION

Combinations of existing material are centerpieces in theories of creativity, whether in the arts, the sciences, or commercial innovation.

Combination of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves make anything important.

Make sure to connect your past experiences you’ve had and synthesize new things. Its best to keep your experiences in mind or have more experiences.

Learn to pay attention to how things make you react and feel.

What to do when you get stuck?

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 by disturbing things just enough to let some light through. Sometimes, a little disturbance can help jolt us out of the ruts that even the most creative thinkers fall into, as long as those shake-ups are the right size.

Innovation becomes more likely when old ideas are mixed in new ways. We know the odds of success go up when people with fresh, different perspectives, who have seen ideas in a variety of settings draw on the diversity within their heads.

Stress

Stress that emerges amid the creative process isn’t a sign everything is falling apart. Rather, creative desperation is often critical: Anxiety can be what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways.

Critique

Remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to alternatives. By forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from different perspectives, by giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before, we retain clear eyes.

Creativity summarized

1. Look at your own experiences

2. Stress and anxiety is good

3. Self criticism is important

ABSORBING DATA

Disfluency - The quality of people’s 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.

“Our brains crave reducing things to two or three options,”

How to get a good idea out of data?

The point isn’t to have a good idea. Generate an idea, any idea at all, and then test it.

Thinking with multiple perspectives (Formal decision-making system)

Experiments in which people were presented with decisions ranging from the vital, such as end-of-life choices, to the costly, such as buying a car. 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.

Define the Dilemma - Collect Data - Brainstorm Solutions - Debate Approaches - Experiment - Define the Dilemma

Having much involved in the process/data improves our productivity. 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 as compared to people who took notes in laptop.

When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data. It’s not enough for your bathroom scale to send daily updates to an app on your phone. If you want to lose weight, force yourself to plot those measurements on graph paper and you’ll be more likely to choose a salad over a hamburger at lunch. If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you’ll be more likely to apply them in your life. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend—and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.

To absorb data better

? When we encounter new information, we should force ourselves to do something with it. Write yourself a note explaining what you just learned, or figure out a small way to test an idea, or graph a series of data points onto a piece of paper, or force yourself to explain an idea to a friend. 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.

Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It’s about making certain decisions in certain ways. The way we choose to see our own lives; the stories we tell ourselves, and the goals we push ourselves to spell out in detail; the culture we establish among teammates; the ways we frame our choices and manage the information in our lives. Productive people and companies force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently.