Smarter Faster Better

• Internal locus of control translates into our belief that we can influence our destiny through the choices we make; it has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and a longer life span. This is a skill that can be learned.
• Having an external locus means believing that our life is primarily influenced by events outside our control; it is correlated with higher levels of stress because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities.

The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation convince us we’re in control and 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.

Google spent 2 years and enormous amounts of resources studying over 180 teams to figure out the answer to their question: What makes a team effective?

Their findings - five key norms: Teams need to believe that their work is important. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful. Teams need clear goals and defined roles. Team members need to know they can depend on one another. But, most important, teams need psychological safety.

Psychological safety is a "shared belief, held by members of a team, that a group is a safe place for taking risks. It is a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.”(Amy Edmondson, 1999)

This characterizes a working environment filled with trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.

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.

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.

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.

But the downside of reactive thinking is that habits and reactions can become so automatic they overpower our judgment. Once our motivation is outsourced, we simply react.

The need for cognitive closure, in many settings, can be a great strength. An instinct to make a judgment and then stick with it stops the needless second-guessing and prolonged debate. It feels productive. It feels like progress.

But there are risks associated with a high need for closure: when people begin craving the emotional satisfaction that comes from making a decision, they are more likely to make hasty decisions and less likely to reconsider an unwise choice.

Here is an example of a flowchart to use when setting a goal:

WHAT IS YOUR STRETCH GOAL?

To run a marathon

WHAT IS A SPECIFIC SUB-GOAL?

Run seven miles without stopping

HOW WILL YOU MEASURE SUCCESS?

Twice around the park, no walking

IS THIS ACHIEVABLE?

Yes, if I run three miles a week.

IS THIS REALISTIC?

Yes, if I wake up early on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

WHAT IS YOUR TIMELINE?

Run three miles this week, four miles next week, five miles…

• The “star” model: executives hire from elite universities or other successful companies and give employees huge amounts of autonomy.
• The “engineering” model: engineers, as a group, hold the most sway.
• The “bureaucracies”: Executives write extensive job descriptions, organizational charts, and employee handbooks.
• The “autocracies”: the rules, job descriptions, and organizational charts ultimately point to the desires and goals of one person, usually the founder or CEO.
• The “commitment” model: a throwback to an age when people happily worked for one company their entire life.

At the core of Bayes’ rule is a principle: Even if we have very little data, we can still forecast the future by making assumptions and then skewing them based on what we observe about the world.

Humans are astoundingly good Bayesian predictors, even if we’re unaware of it. Humans can make these kinds of calculations without having to think about them very hard. Sometimes, however, we make mistakes.

Make sure you are exposed to a full spectrum of experiences.

We all have a natural tendency 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

We’re more likely to recognize discoveries hidden in our own experiences when necessity pushes us, when panic or frustrations cause us to throw old ideas into new settings.

• The Post-it note was invented by a chemical engineer who, frustrated by bookmarks falling out of his church hymnal, decided to use a new adhesive to make them stay put.
• Cellophane was developed by an exasperated chemist looking for a way to protect tablecloths from wine spills.
• Infant formula was created, in part, by an exhausted father who suspended vegetable nutrients in powder so he could feed his crying child.

In the past two decades, the amount of information present in our daily lives has skyrocketed. Unfortunately, however, our ability to learn from information hasn’t necessarily kept pace with its proliferation.

In theory, the ongoing explosion in information should make the right answers more obvious. In practice, though, being surrounded by data often makes it harder to decide. This inability to take advantage of data as it becomes more plentiful is called “information blindness.”

This system for making decisions allows us to define our dilemmas, collect data, brainstorm solutions, debate alternative approaches, and conduct iterative experiments.

This approach to problem-solving removes the emotion so we can view our problems more objectively.