Book of the Week: Smarter Faster Better
02 May 2016
This week, I read Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Product in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit. I think everyone wouldn’t mind being smarter, faster and better. The books describes concepts related to being smarter, faster and better, but I didn’t come away with concrete things I need to do to make myself better. It was more about how to think about things. Charles found 8 key concepts repeated in his learnings on productivity. Each chapter describes a concept and jumps between a few stories.
There are some people who pretend at productivity, whose resumes appear impressive until you realize their greatest talent is self marketing.
8 Key Concepts
- Motivation - belief in control and having choices, involved in something bigger
- Teams - psychological safety, believe their work is important, feel work is personally meaningful, clear and defined roles, can depend on one another.
- Focus
- Goal Setting
- Managing Others - commitment cultures more successful
- Decision Making - think about outcomes as a range of probabilities. successful people look at failures.
- Innovation - need the right level of disturbance like an asshole pushing you more.
- Absorbing Data - lots of data causes information blindness, need to actively engage with data for it to be useful.
Creativity is just connecting things. 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. Thats’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. —Steve Jobs, 1996
The appendix goes over how Charles used the concepts on himself to become more productive. You want to become smarter, faster and better, so you can be more productive. Productive people produce more value for society. Purchase Smarter Faster Better on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.