Smarter Faster Better Summary Self-motivation is the key to productivity. Leaders need to help resolve conflicts and encourage open discussions. It’s up to them to set their own goals, priorities and make decisions. Once our motivation is outsourced, we simply react.”, ”If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualiSe, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. Smarter, Faster, Better (Book Summary) While everyone can be productive, not everyone knows how: Every day, there is some kind of task we need to achieve, and there are a lot of ways to do that. Instead, we latch on to the easiest and most obvious stimulus, often at the cost of common sense.”, “Reactive thinking is at the core of how we allocate our attention, and in many settings, it’s a tremendous asset.”, “Reactive thinking is how we build habits, and it’s why to-do lists and calendar alerts are so helpful: Rather than needing to decide what to do next, we can take advantage of our reactive instincts and automatically proceed. It’s a crucial factor in being productive for two reasons. Once people know how to make self-directed choices into a habit, motivation becomes more automatic.”, “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.”, “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.”, “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.”, “When we start a new task or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves ‘why.’”, “Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation of meaningful projects, goals, and values. Self-motivation is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing. Leave your email and you will receive a invitation to download the 12min app. Baron and Hannan studied 4 different workplace cultures in a bid to find the most effective. They worked longer and scored better. 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 can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.”, “The problem with many to-do lists is that when we write down a series of short-term objectives, we are, in effect, allowing our brains to seize on the sense of satisfaction that each task will deliver. ”Unless we practice self-determination and give ourselves emotional rewards for subversive assertiveness, our capacity for self-motivation can fade.”. Disrupting. Motivation is the state of which one has desire and energy to continuously be interested in a role or job to attain a goal. Learn how to motivate yourself and feel as if you are in control of your own life. Duhigg was an award-winning New York Times business reporter and worked there from 2006-2011. And innovation and originality are demanded quickly. But it is part of a bigger project that we believe in, that we want to achieve, that we have chosen to do. Then 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 those experiences deeper in your brain.”, “It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.”, “Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us. You need the right norms to make arguments productive rather than destructive. However, sometimes we don’t harness the information right and we might end up as a hinderance as there seems to be just too much going on. Read this Smarter Faster Better summary to learn how to stay motivated with long-term goals, why you should chunk them & how to anticipate distractions. Your view is clouded by your predetermined choice. He identifies the superstar myth, we all thing that we need a superstar on our team. The result is that we spend hours answering unimportant emails instead of writing a big, thoughtful memo—because it feels so satisfying to clean out our inbox.”. Arguably just as influential as Allen’s Getting Things Done is Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. “Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals.”, “Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.”, “Cognitive tunneling can cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks.”, “Once in a cognitive tunnel, we lose our ability to direct our focus. This process does involve some work from you. Individuals are in charge of how they allocate their time and energy. Summary A group of data scientists at Google embark on a four-year study of how the best teams function, and find that how a group interacts is much more important than who is in the group. The first concept that is crucial in increasing your personal productivity is finding motivation.. It’s important to recognise that every small decision adds up to be a large part of you. Guidelines lists 31 rules (or guidelines) that you should follow to improve your productivity, become a better leader, do better in business, improve your health, succeed in life and become a happier person. Another skill that’s important to learn is reframing choices. ”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.”. ”Self-motivation, in other words, is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that presents itself.”. You can’t rely on someone else to tell you what to do or to motivate you. As a result, we’re better at choosing where to focus and what to ignore. Will you open your store in six months or a year? These kinds of initiatives result in happier workers who remain loyal to the company. Research has proven that in order to motivate yourself, you need to feel as if you are in control of your own life and your own actions. Motivation is Duhigg’s first ‘secret’ to becoming more productive. He was a student at both Yale and Harvard. Otherwise, a team never becomes stronger.”. “People who are particularly good at managing their attention are in the habit of telling themselves stories all the time.”, “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.”, “Good decision making is contingent on a basic ability to envision what happens next.”, “Innovation becomes more likely when old ideas are mixed in new ways.”, “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.”, “Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed.”, “The trick [to motivation], researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. Show yourself that you are making meaningful choices and that you are always in control. But he explains that neither is filling a list with stretch goals. ”Within psychology, these smaller ambitions are known as “proximal goals,” and repeated studies have shown that breaking a big ambition into proximal goals makes the large objective more likely to occur.”. “. The specific choice we make matters less than the assertion of control.”, “Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence.”, “People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction.”, “Studies show that someone’s locus of control can be influenced through training and feedback.”, “The students who had been praised for their intelligence—who had been primed to think in terms of things they could not influence—were much more likely to focus on the easier puzzles during the second round of play, even though they had been complimented for being smart.