Houston Southard

Charles Duhigg - Smarter, Faster, Better

"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."

Every Fortune employee has at least been recommended Duhigg's breakout book The Power of Habit, and these are the leftovers.

We're just a story we tell ourselves. These stories we form early on aren't adaptive, but we hold onto them because they made sense when we did. We end up telling ourselves the same ones decades later, even though we're not that person anymore. Like any story, we have the power to edit so they make sense for who we are now instead of staying stuck in the rut of our life story's first draft.

We're creative when we realize feeling scared is a good sign, that anxiety and creative desperation are two sides of the same coin. We just have to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.

It's about remembering list-making isn't enough. Just 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're more wrapped up in the feeling writing a list gives us than actually getting things done.

It's about framing daily decisions, the big ambitions we embrace and the easy goals we ignore, the cultures we establish as leaders to innovate, the way we interact with data. These separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.

In it, mental models help pilots land planes. Bayesian thinking transforms basket cases into award-winning card players. Innovation brokers transform West Side into the highest-grossing animated film of all time via intermediate disturbance.

People don’t read these books to find out how to be better human beings, but to figure out how to become the kind of human being the workplace is looking for. It's disheartening how readily we import these models into our daily lives, applying technologies of the self to ourselves and measuring our worth by its standards, self-punishing our efforts to become the sort of person who matches models the workplace wants.

The best way to be smarter, faster, and better is by improving self-worth, not work worth.