Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business Read online

  Smarter Faster Better is a work of nonfiction. Nonetheless, some names and personal characteristics of individuals or events have been changed in order to disguise identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  As of the time of initial publication, the URLs displayed in this book link or refer to existing websites on the Internet. Penguin Random House LLC is not responsible for, and should not be deemed to endorse or recommend, any website other than its own or any content available on the Internet (including without limitation at any website, blog page, information page) that is not created by Penguin Random House.

  Copyright © 2016 by Charles Duhigg

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Excerpts from early drafts of West Side Story housed at the New York Public Library appear courtesy of Estate of Arthur Laurents.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Duhigg, Charles, author.

  Title: Smarter faster better: the secrets of productivity in life and business / Charles Duhigg.

  Description: New York : Random House, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015034214| ISBN 9780812993394 | ISBN 9780679645429 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mental efficiency. | Performance. | Motivation (Psychology) | Decision making. | Success.

  Classification: LCC BF431 .D8185 2016 | DDC 158—dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.​loc.​gov/​2015034214

  eBook ISBN 9780679645429

  Illustrations by Anton Ioukhnovets

  randomhousebooks.​com

  Book design by Liz Cosgrove, adapted for eBook

  Cover design and illustration: Anton Ioukhnovets

  v4.1

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  1. MOTIVATION

  Reimagining Boot Camp, Nursing Home Rebellions, and the Locus of Control

  2. TEAMS

  Psychological Safety at Google and Saturday Night Live

  3. FOCUS

  Cognitive Tunneling, Air France Flight 447, and the Power of Mental Models

  4. GOAL SETTING

  Smart Goals, Stretch Goals, and the Yom Kippur War

  5. MANAGING OTHERS

  Solving a Kidnapping with Lean and Agile Thinking and a Culture of Trust

  6. DECISION MAKING

  Forecasting the Future (and Winning at Poker) with Bayesian Psychology

  7. INNOVATION

  How Idea Brokers and Creative Desperation Saved Disney’s Frozen

  8. ABSORBING DATA

  Turning Information into Knowledge in Cincinnati’s Public Schools

  APPENDIX:

  A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  By Charles Duhigg

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  My introduction to the science of productivity began in the summer of 2011, when I asked a friend of a friend for a favor.

  At the time, I was finishing a book about the neurology and psychology of habit formation. I was in the final, frantic stages of the writing process—a flurry of phone calls, panicked rewrites, last-minute edits—and felt like I was falling farther and farther behind. My wife, who worked full-time, had just given birth to our second child. I was an investigative reporter at The New York Times and spent my days chasing stories and my nights rewriting book pages. My life felt like a treadmill of to-do lists, emails requiring immediate replies, rushed meetings, and subsequent apologies for being late.

  Amid all this hustle and scurry—and under the guise of asking for a little publishing advice—I sent a note to an author I admired, a friend of one of my colleagues at the Times. The author’s name was Atul Gawande, and he appeared to be a paragon of success. He was a forty-six-year-old staff writer at a prestigious magazine, as well as a renowned surgeon at one of the nation’s top hospitals. He was an associate professor at Harvard, an adviser to the World Health Organization, and the founder of a nonprofit that sent surgical supplies to medically underserved parts of the world. He had written three books—all bestsellers—and was married with three children. In 2006, he had been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant—and had promptly given a substantial portion of the $500,000 prize to charity.

  There are some people who pretend at productivity, whose résumés appear impressive until you realize their greatest talent is self marketing. Then there are others, like Gawande, who seem to exist on a different plane of getting things done. His articles were smart and engaging, and, by all accounts, he was gifted in the operating room, committed to his patients, and a devoted father. Whenever he was interviewed on television, he appeared relaxed and thoughtful. His accomplishments in medicine, writing, and public health were important and real.

  I emailed him to ask if he had some time to talk. I wanted to know how he managed to be so productive. Mainly, what was his secret? And, if I learned it, could I change my own life?

  “Productivity,” of course, means different things in different settings. One person might spend an hour exercising in the morning before dropping the kids at school and consider the day a success. Another might opt to use that time locked in her office, returning emails and calling a few clients, and feel equally accomplished. A research scientist or artist may see productivity in failed experiments or discarded canvases since each mistake, they hope, gets them closer to discovery, while an engineer’s measure of productivity might focus on making an assembly line ever faster. A productive weekend might involve walking through the park with your kids, while a productive workday involves rushing them to daycare and getting to the office as early as you can.

  Productivity, put simply, 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. It’s a process of learning how to succeed with less stress and struggle. It’s about getting things done without sacrificing everything we care about along the way.

  By this definition, Atul Gawande seemed to have things pretty well figured out.

  A few days later, he responded to my email with his regrets. “I wish I could help,” he wrote, “but I’m running flat out with my various commitments.” Even he, it seemed, had limits. “I hope you’ll understand.”

  Later that week, I mentioned this exchange to our mutual friend. I made it clear I wasn’t offended—that, in fact, I admired Gawande’s focus. I imagined his days were consumed with healing patients, teaching medical students, writing articles, and advising the world’s largest health organization.

  No, my friend told me, I had it wrong. That wasn’t it. Gawande was particularly busy that week because he had bought tickets to a rock concert with his kids. And then he was heading on a mini-vacation with his wife.

  In fact, Gawande had suggested to our mutual friend that I should email him again, later that month, when he would have more time in his schedule for chatting.

  At that moment, I realized two things:

  First, I was clearly doing something wrong because I hadn’t taken a day off in nine months; in fact, I was growing worried that, give
n a choice between their father and the babysitter, my kids would pick the sitter.

  Second, and more important, there were people out there who knew how to be more productive. I just had to convince them to share their secrets with me.

  This book is the result of my investigations into how productivity works, and my effort to understand why some people and companies are so much more productive than everyone else.

  Since I contacted Gawande four years ago, I’ve sought out neurologists, businesspeople, government leaders, psychologists, and other productivity experts. I’ve spoken to the filmmakers behind Disney’s Frozen, and learned how they made one of the most successful movies in history under crushing time pressures—and narrowly averted disaster—by fostering a certain kind of creative tension within their ranks. I talked to data scientists at Google and writers from the early seasons of Saturday Night Live who said both organizations were successful, in part, because they abided by a similar set of unwritten rules regarding mutual support and risk taking. I interviewed FBI agents who solved a kidnapping through agile management and a culture influenced by an old auto plant in Fremont, California. I roamed the halls of Cincinnati’s public schools and saw how an initiative to improve education transformed students’ lives by, paradoxically, making information more difficult to absorb.

  As I spoke to people—poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, cognitive scientists—a handful of key insights began to emerge. I noticed that people kept mentioning the same concepts over and over. I came to believe a small number of ideas were at the core of why some people and companies get so much done.

  This book, then, explores the eight ideas that seem most important in expanding productivity. One chapter, for example, examines how a feeling of control can generate motivation, and how the military turns directionless teenagers into marines by teaching them choices that are “biased toward action.” Another chapter looks at why we can maintain focus by constructing mental models—and how one group of pilots told themselves stories that prevented 440 passengers from falling out of the sky.

  This book’s chapters describe the correct way to set goals—by embracing both big ambitions and small-bore objectives—and why Israel’s leaders became so obsessed with the wrong aspirations in the run-up to the Yom Kippur War. They explore the importance of making decisions by envisioning the future as multiple possibilities rather than fixating on what you hope will happen, and how a woman used that technique to win a national poker championship. They describe how some Silicon Valley companies became giants by building “commitment cultures” that supported employees even when such commitment gets hard.

  Connecting these eight ideas is a powerful underlying principle: Productivity isn’t about working more or sweating harder. It’s not simply a product of spending longer hours at your desk or making bigger sacrifices.

  Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.

  We now exist in a world where we can communicate with coworkers at any hour, access vital documents over smartphones, learn any fact within seconds, and have almost any product delivered to our doorstep within twenty-four hours. Companies can design gadgets in California, collect orders from customers in Barcelona, email blueprints to Shenzhen, and track deliveries from anywhere on earth. Parents can auto-sync the family’s schedules, pay bills online while lying in bed, and locate the kids’ phones one minute after curfew. We are living through an economic and social revolution that is as profound, in many ways, as the agrarian and industrial revolutions of previous eras.

  These advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, they often seem to fill our days with more work and stress.

  In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity—the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists—rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us.

  There are some people, however, who have figured out how to master this changing world. There are some companies that have discovered how to find advantages amid these rapid shifts.

  We now know how productivity really functions. We know which choices matter most and bring success within closer reach. We know how to set goals that make the audacious achievable; how to reframe situations so that instead of seeing problems, we notice hidden opportunities; how to open our minds to new, creative connections; and how to learn faster by slowing down the data that is speeding past us.

  This is a book about how to recognize the choices that fuel true productivity. It is a guide to the science, techniques, and opportunities that have changed lives. There are people who have learned how to succeed with less effort. There are companies that create amazing things with less waste. There are leaders who transform the people around them.

  This is a book about how to become smarter, faster, and better at everything you do.

  MOTIVATION

  Reimagining Boot Camp, Nursing Home Rebellions, and the Locus of Control

  The trip was intended as a celebration, a twenty-nine-day tour of South America that would take Robert, who had just turned sixty, and his wife, Viola, first to Brazil, then over the Andes into Bolivia and Peru. Their itinerary included tours of Incan ruins, a boat trip on Lake Titicaca, the occasional craft market, and a bit of birding.

  That much relaxation, Robert had joked with friends before leaving, seemed unsafe. He was already anticipating the fortune he would spend on calls to his secretary. Over the previous half century Robert Philippe had built a small gas station into an auto parts empire in rural Louisiana and had made himself into a Bayou mogul through hard work, charisma, and hustle. In addition to the auto-parts business, he also owned a chemical company, a paper supplier, various swaths of land, and a real estate firm. And now here he was, entering his seventh decade, and his wife had convinced him to spend a month in a bunch of countries where, he suspected, it would be awfully difficult to find a TV showing the LSU–Ole Miss game.

  Robert liked to say there wasn’t a dirt road or back alley along the Gulf Coast he hadn’t driven at least once to drum up business. As Philippe Incorporated had grown, Robert had become famous for dragging big-city businessmen from New Orleans and Atlanta out to ramshackle bars and forbidding them from leaving until the ribs were picked clean and bottles sucked dry. Then, while everyone nursed painful hangovers the next morning, Robert would convince them to sign deals worth millions. Bartenders always knew to fill his glass with club soda while serving the bigwigs cocktails. Robert hadn’t touched booze in years.

  He was a member of the Knights of Columbus and the chamber of commerce, past president of the Louisiana Association of Wholesalers and the Greater Baton Rouge Port Commission, the chairman of his local bank, and a loyal donor to whichever political party was more inclined to endorse his business permits that day. “You never met a man who loved working so much,” his daughter, Roxann, told me.

  Robert and Viola had been looking forward to this South American trip. But when they stepped off the plane in La Paz, midway through the monthlong tour, Robert started acting oddly. He staggered through the airport and had to sit down to catch his breath at the baggage claim. When a group of children approached him to ask for coins, Robert threw change at their feet and laughed. In the bus to the hotel, Robert started a loud, rambling monologue about various countries he had visited and the relative attractiveness of the women who lived there. Maybe it was the altitude. At twelve thousand feet, La Paz is one of the highest cities in the world.

  Once they were unpacked, Viola urged Robert to nap. He wasn’t interested, he said. He wanted to go out. For the next
hour, he marched through town buying trinkets and exploding in a rage whenever locals didn’t understand English. He eventually agreed to return to the hotel and fell asleep, but woke repeatedly during the night to vomit. The next morning, he said he felt faint but became angry when Viola suggested he rest. He spent the third day in bed. On day four, Viola decided enough was enough and cut the vacation short.

  Back home in Louisiana, Robert seemed to improve. His disorientation faded and he stopped saying strange things. His wife and children, however, were still worried. Robert was lethargic and refused to leave the house unless prodded. Viola had expected him to rush into the office upon their return, but after four days he hadn’t so much as checked in with his secretary. When Viola reminded him that deer hunting season was approaching and he’d need to get a license, Robert said he thought he’d skip it this year. She phoned a doctor. Soon, they were driving to the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans.

  The chief of neurology, Dr. Richard Strub, put Robert through a battery of tests. Vital signs were normal. Blood work showed nothing unusual. No indication of infection, diabetes, heart attack, or stroke. Robert demonstrated understanding of that day’s newspaper and could clearly recall his childhood. He could interpret a short story. The Revised Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale showed a normal IQ.

  “Can you describe your business to me?” Dr. Strub asked.

  Robert explained how his company was organized and the details of a few contracts they had recently won.

  “Your wife says you’re behaving differently,” Dr. Strub said.

  “Yeah,” Robert replied. “I don’t seem to have as much get-up-and-go as I used to.”

  “It didn’t seem to bother him,” Dr. Strub later told me. “He told me about the personality changes very matter of fact, like he was describing the weather.”

  Except for the sudden apathy, Dr. Strub couldn’t find evidence of illness or injury. He suggested to Viola they wait a few weeks to see if Robert’s disposition improved. When they returned a month later, however, there had been no change. Robert wasn’t interested in seeing old friends, his wife said. He didn’t read anymore. Previously, it had been infuriating to watch television with him because he would flip from channel to channel, looking for a more exciting show. Now, he just stared at the screen, indifferent to what was on. She had finally convinced him to go into the office, but his secretary said he spent hours at his desk gazing into space.