Smarter, Faster, Better

Charles Duhigg

Being a story we tell ourselves

• A raft is a good thing to have when you’re crossing the river. But when you get to the other side, put it down

• We are just a story we tell ourselves, and usually it comes from early in life, around the time when we begin to develop the stories of our life. But these stories aren't always adaptive. We hold onto these stories because they made sense at the time, but we end up telling ourselves the same stories decades later. We are not the same person decades later, and so the stories we tell ourselves aren't useful anymore.

• What people don’t realize is that just like writing a conventional story, we have the power to edit them so they make sense for who we are now

• We get stuck in this rut of constantly telling ourselves the first draft of our story

Striatum and motivation

• A small change in how blood flows through the brain can affect motivation

Changing little things for control

• Change your route from work or something else

• The downside of to-do lists: Simply the act of writing out a list allows your brain to seize on the sense of accomplishment you’d get out of actually doing the task, and if it’s something that’ll be arduous or long-winded, then we’re less likely to do them. We get more wrapped up in the feeling writing a list gives us than we do actually getting things done. 

Forecasting and probabilistic thinking

• The ability to think probabilistically is inhibited by the human tendency to highlight successes over failures.

Creativity, innovation and anxiety

• Look to your own life as creative fodder, and broker your own experiences into the wider world.

• Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn’t a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, it’s the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new. Creative desperation can be critical; anxiety is what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways. The path out of that turmoil is to look at what you know, to reinspect conventions you’ve seen work and try to apply them to fresh problems. The creative pain should be embraced.

• People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign. We just have to learn how to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.”

Cognitive Pruning

• Not using neural connections leads to pruning, and we begin to become what we hear and see and do every day [survival of the busiest]