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Top positive review
99 people found this helpful
5.0 out of 5 starsMastering what separates “the merely busy from the genuinely productive”
ByRobert Morrison April 20, 2016
Mastering what separates “the merely busy from the genuinely productive”
In Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg sets the table: Various advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. “Instead, they often seem to fill o0ur days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity — the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists — rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us…This book is about how to recognize the choices that fuel true productivity…This is a book about how to become smarter, faster, and better at everything you do.”
He focuses on — and devotes a separate chapter to — “a handful of key insights” shared by hundreds of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists who kept mentioning the same concepts again and again and again. In this book, he explores “the eight ideas that seem most important to expanding productivity.” Here they are, accompanied by my own annotations:
1. Motivation: Make choices that place you in control of a situation. If empowered, you will speak and act more decisively and accelerate gaining the respect and trust of others.
2. Teams: Manage the [begin italics] how [end italics], not the [begin italics] who [end italics] of teams. Send messages that empower others. Keep in mind this passage from Lao-tse’s Tao Te Ching:
"Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves."
3. Focus: Envision what will probably happen. What will happen first? Obstacles? How to avoid, pre-empt, or overcome them?
4. Goal Setting: Choose a stretch goal (a BHAG), then break that into sub-goals and develop SMART objectives.
5. Managing Others: Employees work smarter and better when they feel they have the power (see #1) to help make the right decisions about what to be done and how best to do it. They will be more motivated if convinced that others recognize and appreciated what they think, feel, and do.
6. Decision Making: Envision multiple futures as well as their potential implications and possible consequences. Obtain a variety of different (and differing) perspectives from those closest to the situation. Although this 360º process is helpful, you must be prepared to make the given decision.
7. Innovation: Combine new ideas in old ways and old ideas in new ways. Constantly challenge assumptions and premises. If they are sound, they will survive. Incremental innovation makes disruptive innovation even better.
8. Absorbing Data: When encountering new information, do something with it. Write it down. Read it aloud. Formulate Qs that it evokes. Put it to a small test. Ask others “Did you know that…?” Most new information is really unfamiliar information.
These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Duhigg’s coverage:
o Motivation (Pages 13-21 and 33-47)
o U.S. Marine Corps boot camp (22-31)
o Teamwork at Google (41-46, 50-51, and 65-68)
o Mental Models (88-93, 97-98, 101-102, and 277-279)
o Qantas Airways flight 32 and mental models (93-101 and 277-278)
o Prelude to Yom Kippur War (103-106 and 109-112)
o Stretch goals (125-128)
o Frank Janssen (134-139 and 161-165)
o Rick Madrid (139-144, 150-151, and 154-155)
o James Baron (145-150)
o Categories of culture (146-148)
o Productivity and control (153-155)
o Bayesian psychology (192-193)
o How Idea Brokers and Creative Desperation Saved Disney’s Frozen (205-215)
o West Side Story (210-212, 216-220, and 223-224)
o Information blindness (243-247)
o Debt collection (247-252)
o Stretch goals paired with SMART goals (274-279)
In addition to his lively as well as eloquent narrative, I commend Duhigg on his provision of the most informative annotated notes that I have as yet encountered. I urge everyone who reads this brief commentary to check them out (Pages 293-368). They enliven and enrich his narrative in ways and got an extent that must be experienced to be believed.
The best journalists as well as the best leaders are terrific storytellers and that is certainly true of Duhigg. He anchors his reader in hundreds of real-world situations to illustrate key points. Dozens of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists that he interviewed learned valuable lessons with regard to the dos and don’ts of being productive in life and business, especially when under severe duress.
I highly recommend Smarter Faster Better as well as Charles Duhigg’s previously published book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, also published by Random House.
In Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg sets the table: Various advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. “Instead, they often seem to fill o0ur days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity — the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists — rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us…This book is about how to recognize the choices that fuel true productivity…This is a book about how to become smarter, faster, and better at everything you do.”
He focuses on — and devotes a separate chapter to — “a handful of key insights” shared by hundreds of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists who kept mentioning the same concepts again and again and again. In this book, he explores “the eight ideas that seem most important to expanding productivity.” Here they are, accompanied by my own annotations:
1. Motivation: Make choices that place you in control of a situation. If empowered, you will speak and act more decisively and accelerate gaining the respect and trust of others.
2. Teams: Manage the [begin italics] how [end italics], not the [begin italics] who [end italics] of teams. Send messages that empower others. Keep in mind this passage from Lao-tse’s Tao Te Ching:
"Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves."
3. Focus: Envision what will probably happen. What will happen first? Obstacles? How to avoid, pre-empt, or overcome them?
4. Goal Setting: Choose a stretch goal (a BHAG), then break that into sub-goals and develop SMART objectives.
5. Managing Others: Employees work smarter and better when they feel they have the power (see #1) to help make the right decisions about what to be done and how best to do it. They will be more motivated if convinced that others recognize and appreciated what they think, feel, and do.
6. Decision Making: Envision multiple futures as well as their potential implications and possible consequences. Obtain a variety of different (and differing) perspectives from those closest to the situation. Although this 360º process is helpful, you must be prepared to make the given decision.
7. Innovation: Combine new ideas in old ways and old ideas in new ways. Constantly challenge assumptions and premises. If they are sound, they will survive. Incremental innovation makes disruptive innovation even better.
8. Absorbing Data: When encountering new information, do something with it. Write it down. Read it aloud. Formulate Qs that it evokes. Put it to a small test. Ask others “Did you know that…?” Most new information is really unfamiliar information.
These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Duhigg’s coverage:
o Motivation (Pages 13-21 and 33-47)
o U.S. Marine Corps boot camp (22-31)
o Teamwork at Google (41-46, 50-51, and 65-68)
o Mental Models (88-93, 97-98, 101-102, and 277-279)
o Qantas Airways flight 32 and mental models (93-101 and 277-278)
o Prelude to Yom Kippur War (103-106 and 109-112)
o Stretch goals (125-128)
o Frank Janssen (134-139 and 161-165)
o Rick Madrid (139-144, 150-151, and 154-155)
o James Baron (145-150)
o Categories of culture (146-148)
o Productivity and control (153-155)
o Bayesian psychology (192-193)
o How Idea Brokers and Creative Desperation Saved Disney’s Frozen (205-215)
o West Side Story (210-212, 216-220, and 223-224)
o Information blindness (243-247)
o Debt collection (247-252)
o Stretch goals paired with SMART goals (274-279)
In addition to his lively as well as eloquent narrative, I commend Duhigg on his provision of the most informative annotated notes that I have as yet encountered. I urge everyone who reads this brief commentary to check them out (Pages 293-368). They enliven and enrich his narrative in ways and got an extent that must be experienced to be believed.
The best journalists as well as the best leaders are terrific storytellers and that is certainly true of Duhigg. He anchors his reader in hundreds of real-world situations to illustrate key points. Dozens of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists that he interviewed learned valuable lessons with regard to the dos and don’ts of being productive in life and business, especially when under severe duress.
I highly recommend Smarter Faster Better as well as Charles Duhigg’s previously published book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, also published by Random House.
Top critical review
1,130 people found this helpful
3.0 out of 5 starsToo much reliance on anecdote to prove its points
ByUnus, sed leoon February 14, 2016
Charles Duhigg is a good journalist (his share of a Pulitzer Prize proves that), and his book Smarter Faster Better is a good read. I enjoyed reading it. It's inspiring and insightful.
But the book promises to be more than just entertainment. The title takes off the Olympic motto: Citius Altius Fortius (Faster Higher Stronger), and its cover shows a runner smartly running directly to the center of a maze. A self-help, self-improvement type of book, it promises "the secrets of being productive in life and business". That I don't think the book delivers.
Why not? The book is full of stories. Anecdotes. Case studies. Whatever you want to call them. Charles Duhigg researches a lot of disparate incidents involving various people, and tries to bring them together to show us how to draw on other people's experiences to be more productive. But he fails.
That's because you can pull out of anecdotes pretty much anything you want to. I can find an anecdote to support any argument I want to make. Anecdotes are like statistics. As Simpson's paradox says, often the same statistics can be used to show something and its exact opposite. The same with anecdotes.
Take Charles Duhigg's use of the life of Rosa Parks in his book The Power of Habit. He says that she shows the power of social habits. He tells of how her husband said she was so social she rarely ate dinner at home, instead eating at the home of friends. That gave her the social strength to start a movement.
But Susan Cain (a blurber for this book) in her book Quiet, tells the story of Rosa Parks to support her argument of the power of introverts. While extroverts tend to gain their energy in social situations, introverts typically recharge through solitude and feel drained from too much stimulation. The same person, but one author sees her as a social butterfly and another as an introvert who sought solitude.
That's not to say that Charles Duhigg or Susan Cain is wrong. And I don't want to push this example too strongly. But I do think that many authors, and most TED talk speakers, depend too much on anecdote and story telling to persuade, while they would do better to just entertain. I have no problem using anecdotes to pump people up. But to try to derive secrets from them seems a step too far.
Take another example, this one from this book. Charles Duhigg uses the example of the 2009 Air France Flight 447 jetliner crash in the Atlantic as an example of "cognitive tunneling" and poor mental models. In that tragic accident, the Airbus A330 plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and ran into bad weather. The plane was flying fine, but its pitot tubes apparently froze up and gave the pilots the wrong speed information. They acted on that wrong information, put the plane into a stall, and fell into the ocean.
But does that anecdote unequivocally show cognitive tunneling? And can one take from that anecdote a lesson about how not to cognitively tunnel? I don't see how. I've read several other accounts of that Air France accident, and none of them blamed it on cognitive tunneling (although one did mention tunnel vision as one of many factors).
The Air France accident seems to me more like what Charles Perrow described in Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies. Just like with the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, people do not do well when their instruments lie to them about situations they cannot see with their eyes. Another account blames the Air France accident mainly on over-reliance on automated systems in the Airbus planes. (William Langewiesche's article in Vanity Fair is fascinating reading.)
My point is that any anecdote can, by its nature, be interpreted in many different ways. Just like in the old fable six blind men saw six different things in an elephant. None were wrong, yet none were right.
Rather than books like this one, I prefer my anecdotes in the form of biographies. When I read a good biography, or a good history, the author presents a life or a series of stories in a way that the reader can draw their own conclusions. I'm sure the author's slant comes through to some extent.
But when I read a book by someone like David Halberstam or David McCullough, I usually feel as though I read a gem that provides lessons for my life. I didn't get that with this book. To me, at least, it seemed too shallow, too broad, and too pushy. Not deep, focused, and subtle.
But the book promises to be more than just entertainment. The title takes off the Olympic motto: Citius Altius Fortius (Faster Higher Stronger), and its cover shows a runner smartly running directly to the center of a maze. A self-help, self-improvement type of book, it promises "the secrets of being productive in life and business". That I don't think the book delivers.
Why not? The book is full of stories. Anecdotes. Case studies. Whatever you want to call them. Charles Duhigg researches a lot of disparate incidents involving various people, and tries to bring them together to show us how to draw on other people's experiences to be more productive. But he fails.
That's because you can pull out of anecdotes pretty much anything you want to. I can find an anecdote to support any argument I want to make. Anecdotes are like statistics. As Simpson's paradox says, often the same statistics can be used to show something and its exact opposite. The same with anecdotes.
Take Charles Duhigg's use of the life of Rosa Parks in his book The Power of Habit. He says that she shows the power of social habits. He tells of how her husband said she was so social she rarely ate dinner at home, instead eating at the home of friends. That gave her the social strength to start a movement.
But Susan Cain (a blurber for this book) in her book Quiet, tells the story of Rosa Parks to support her argument of the power of introverts. While extroverts tend to gain their energy in social situations, introverts typically recharge through solitude and feel drained from too much stimulation. The same person, but one author sees her as a social butterfly and another as an introvert who sought solitude.
That's not to say that Charles Duhigg or Susan Cain is wrong. And I don't want to push this example too strongly. But I do think that many authors, and most TED talk speakers, depend too much on anecdote and story telling to persuade, while they would do better to just entertain. I have no problem using anecdotes to pump people up. But to try to derive secrets from them seems a step too far.
Take another example, this one from this book. Charles Duhigg uses the example of the 2009 Air France Flight 447 jetliner crash in the Atlantic as an example of "cognitive tunneling" and poor mental models. In that tragic accident, the Airbus A330 plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and ran into bad weather. The plane was flying fine, but its pitot tubes apparently froze up and gave the pilots the wrong speed information. They acted on that wrong information, put the plane into a stall, and fell into the ocean.
But does that anecdote unequivocally show cognitive tunneling? And can one take from that anecdote a lesson about how not to cognitively tunnel? I don't see how. I've read several other accounts of that Air France accident, and none of them blamed it on cognitive tunneling (although one did mention tunnel vision as one of many factors).
The Air France accident seems to me more like what Charles Perrow described in Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies. Just like with the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, people do not do well when their instruments lie to them about situations they cannot see with their eyes. Another account blames the Air France accident mainly on over-reliance on automated systems in the Airbus planes. (William Langewiesche's article in Vanity Fair is fascinating reading.)
My point is that any anecdote can, by its nature, be interpreted in many different ways. Just like in the old fable six blind men saw six different things in an elephant. None were wrong, yet none were right.
Rather than books like this one, I prefer my anecdotes in the form of biographies. When I read a good biography, or a good history, the author presents a life or a series of stories in a way that the reader can draw their own conclusions. I'm sure the author's slant comes through to some extent.
But when I read a book by someone like David Halberstam or David McCullough, I usually feel as though I read a gem that provides lessons for my life. I didn't get that with this book. To me, at least, it seemed too shallow, too broad, and too pushy. Not deep, focused, and subtle.
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Mastering what separates “the merely busy from the genuinely productive”
In Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg sets the table: Various advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. “Instead, they often seem to fill o0ur days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity — the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists — rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us…This book is about how to recognize the choices that fuel true productivity…This is a book about how to become smarter, faster, and better at everything you do.”
He focuses on — and devotes a separate chapter to — “a handful of key insights” shared by hundreds of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists who kept mentioning the same concepts again and again and again. In this book, he explores “the eight ideas that seem most important to expanding productivity.” Here they are, accompanied by my own annotations:
1. Motivation: Make choices that place you in control of a situation. If empowered, you will speak and act more decisively and accelerate gaining the respect and trust of others.
2. Teams: Manage the [begin italics] how [end italics], not the [begin italics] who [end italics] of teams. Send messages that empower others. Keep in mind this passage from Lao-tse’s Tao Te Ching:
"Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves."
3. Focus: Envision what will probably happen. What will happen first? Obstacles? How to avoid, pre-empt, or overcome them?
4. Goal Setting: Choose a stretch goal (a BHAG), then break that into sub-goals and develop SMART objectives.
5. Managing Others: Employees work smarter and better when they feel they have the power (see #1) to help make the right decisions about what to be done and how best to do it. They will be more motivated if convinced that others recognize and appreciated what they think, feel, and do.
6. Decision Making: Envision multiple futures as well as their potential implications and possible consequences. Obtain a variety of different (and differing) perspectives from those closest to the situation. Although this 360º process is helpful, you must be prepared to make the given decision.
7. Innovation: Combine new ideas in old ways and old ideas in new ways. Constantly challenge assumptions and premises. If they are sound, they will survive. Incremental innovation makes disruptive innovation even better.
8. Absorbing Data: When encountering new information, do something with it. Write it down. Read it aloud. Formulate Qs that it evokes. Put it to a small test. Ask others “Did you know that…?” Most new information is really unfamiliar information.
These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Duhigg’s coverage:
o Motivation (Pages 13-21 and 33-47)
o U.S. Marine Corps boot camp (22-31)
o Teamwork at Google (41-46, 50-51, and 65-68)
o Mental Models (88-93, 97-98, 101-102, and 277-279)
o Qantas Airways flight 32 and mental models (93-101 and 277-278)
o Prelude to Yom Kippur War (103-106 and 109-112)
o Stretch goals (125-128)
o Frank Janssen (134-139 and 161-165)
o Rick Madrid (139-144, 150-151, and 154-155)
o James Baron (145-150)
o Categories of culture (146-148)
o Productivity and control (153-155)
o Bayesian psychology (192-193)
o How Idea Brokers and Creative Desperation Saved Disney’s Frozen (205-215)
o West Side Story (210-212, 216-220, and 223-224)
o Information blindness (243-247)
o Debt collection (247-252)
o Stretch goals paired with SMART goals (274-279)
In addition to his lively as well as eloquent narrative, I commend Duhigg on his provision of the most informative annotated notes that I have as yet encountered. I urge everyone who reads this brief commentary to check them out (Pages 293-368). They enliven and enrich his narrative in ways and got an extent that must be experienced to be believed.
The best journalists as well as the best leaders are terrific storytellers and that is certainly true of Duhigg. He anchors his reader in hundreds of real-world situations to illustrate key points. Dozens of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists that he interviewed learned valuable lessons with regard to the dos and don’ts of being productive in life and business, especially when under severe duress.
I highly recommend Smarter Faster Better as well as Charles Duhigg’s previously published book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, also published by Random House.
In Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg sets the table: Various advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. “Instead, they often seem to fill o0ur days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity — the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists — rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us…This book is about how to recognize the choices that fuel true productivity…This is a book about how to become smarter, faster, and better at everything you do.”
He focuses on — and devotes a separate chapter to — “a handful of key insights” shared by hundreds of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists who kept mentioning the same concepts again and again and again. In this book, he explores “the eight ideas that seem most important to expanding productivity.” Here they are, accompanied by my own annotations:
1. Motivation: Make choices that place you in control of a situation. If empowered, you will speak and act more decisively and accelerate gaining the respect and trust of others.
2. Teams: Manage the [begin italics] how [end italics], not the [begin italics] who [end italics] of teams. Send messages that empower others. Keep in mind this passage from Lao-tse’s Tao Te Ching:
"Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves."
3. Focus: Envision what will probably happen. What will happen first? Obstacles? How to avoid, pre-empt, or overcome them?
4. Goal Setting: Choose a stretch goal (a BHAG), then break that into sub-goals and develop SMART objectives.
5. Managing Others: Employees work smarter and better when they feel they have the power (see #1) to help make the right decisions about what to be done and how best to do it. They will be more motivated if convinced that others recognize and appreciated what they think, feel, and do.
6. Decision Making: Envision multiple futures as well as their potential implications and possible consequences. Obtain a variety of different (and differing) perspectives from those closest to the situation. Although this 360º process is helpful, you must be prepared to make the given decision.
7. Innovation: Combine new ideas in old ways and old ideas in new ways. Constantly challenge assumptions and premises. If they are sound, they will survive. Incremental innovation makes disruptive innovation even better.
8. Absorbing Data: When encountering new information, do something with it. Write it down. Read it aloud. Formulate Qs that it evokes. Put it to a small test. Ask others “Did you know that…?” Most new information is really unfamiliar information.
These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Duhigg’s coverage:
o Motivation (Pages 13-21 and 33-47)
o U.S. Marine Corps boot camp (22-31)
o Teamwork at Google (41-46, 50-51, and 65-68)
o Mental Models (88-93, 97-98, 101-102, and 277-279)
o Qantas Airways flight 32 and mental models (93-101 and 277-278)
o Prelude to Yom Kippur War (103-106 and 109-112)
o Stretch goals (125-128)
o Frank Janssen (134-139 and 161-165)
o Rick Madrid (139-144, 150-151, and 154-155)
o James Baron (145-150)
o Categories of culture (146-148)
o Productivity and control (153-155)
o Bayesian psychology (192-193)
o How Idea Brokers and Creative Desperation Saved Disney’s Frozen (205-215)
o West Side Story (210-212, 216-220, and 223-224)
o Information blindness (243-247)
o Debt collection (247-252)
o Stretch goals paired with SMART goals (274-279)
In addition to his lively as well as eloquent narrative, I commend Duhigg on his provision of the most informative annotated notes that I have as yet encountered. I urge everyone who reads this brief commentary to check them out (Pages 293-368). They enliven and enrich his narrative in ways and got an extent that must be experienced to be believed.
The best journalists as well as the best leaders are terrific storytellers and that is certainly true of Duhigg. He anchors his reader in hundreds of real-world situations to illustrate key points. Dozens of poker players, airline pilots, military generals, executives, and cognitive scientists that he interviewed learned valuable lessons with regard to the dos and don’ts of being productive in life and business, especially when under severe duress.
I highly recommend Smarter Faster Better as well as Charles Duhigg’s previously published book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, also published by Random House.
99 people found this helpful
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Charles Duhigg is a good journalist (his share of a Pulitzer Prize proves that), and his book Smarter Faster Better is a good read. I enjoyed reading it. It's inspiring and insightful.
But the book promises to be more than just entertainment. The title takes off the Olympic motto: Citius Altius Fortius (Faster Higher Stronger), and its cover shows a runner smartly running directly to the center of a maze. A self-help, self-improvement type of book, it promises "the secrets of being productive in life and business". That I don't think the book delivers.
Why not? The book is full of stories. Anecdotes. Case studies. Whatever you want to call them. Charles Duhigg researches a lot of disparate incidents involving various people, and tries to bring them together to show us how to draw on other people's experiences to be more productive. But he fails.
That's because you can pull out of anecdotes pretty much anything you want to. I can find an anecdote to support any argument I want to make. Anecdotes are like statistics. As Simpson's paradox says, often the same statistics can be used to show something and its exact opposite. The same with anecdotes.
Take Charles Duhigg's use of the life of Rosa Parks in his book The Power of Habit. He says that she shows the power of social habits. He tells of how her husband said she was so social she rarely ate dinner at home, instead eating at the home of friends. That gave her the social strength to start a movement.
But Susan Cain (a blurber for this book) in her book Quiet, tells the story of Rosa Parks to support her argument of the power of introverts. While extroverts tend to gain their energy in social situations, introverts typically recharge through solitude and feel drained from too much stimulation. The same person, but one author sees her as a social butterfly and another as an introvert who sought solitude.
That's not to say that Charles Duhigg or Susan Cain is wrong. And I don't want to push this example too strongly. But I do think that many authors, and most TED talk speakers, depend too much on anecdote and story telling to persuade, while they would do better to just entertain. I have no problem using anecdotes to pump people up. But to try to derive secrets from them seems a step too far.
Take another example, this one from this book. Charles Duhigg uses the example of the 2009 Air France Flight 447 jetliner crash in the Atlantic as an example of "cognitive tunneling" and poor mental models. In that tragic accident, the Airbus A330 plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and ran into bad weather. The plane was flying fine, but its pitot tubes apparently froze up and gave the pilots the wrong speed information. They acted on that wrong information, put the plane into a stall, and fell into the ocean.
But does that anecdote unequivocally show cognitive tunneling? And can one take from that anecdote a lesson about how not to cognitively tunnel? I don't see how. I've read several other accounts of that Air France accident, and none of them blamed it on cognitive tunneling (although one did mention tunnel vision as one of many factors).
The Air France accident seems to me more like what Charles Perrow described in Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies. Just like with the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, people do not do well when their instruments lie to them about situations they cannot see with their eyes. Another account blames the Air France accident mainly on over-reliance on automated systems in the Airbus planes. (William Langewiesche's article in Vanity Fair is fascinating reading.)
My point is that any anecdote can, by its nature, be interpreted in many different ways. Just like in the old fable six blind men saw six different things in an elephant. None were wrong, yet none were right.
Rather than books like this one, I prefer my anecdotes in the form of biographies. When I read a good biography, or a good history, the author presents a life or a series of stories in a way that the reader can draw their own conclusions. I'm sure the author's slant comes through to some extent.
But when I read a book by someone like David Halberstam or David McCullough, I usually feel as though I read a gem that provides lessons for my life. I didn't get that with this book. To me, at least, it seemed too shallow, too broad, and too pushy. Not deep, focused, and subtle.
But the book promises to be more than just entertainment. The title takes off the Olympic motto: Citius Altius Fortius (Faster Higher Stronger), and its cover shows a runner smartly running directly to the center of a maze. A self-help, self-improvement type of book, it promises "the secrets of being productive in life and business". That I don't think the book delivers.
Why not? The book is full of stories. Anecdotes. Case studies. Whatever you want to call them. Charles Duhigg researches a lot of disparate incidents involving various people, and tries to bring them together to show us how to draw on other people's experiences to be more productive. But he fails.
That's because you can pull out of anecdotes pretty much anything you want to. I can find an anecdote to support any argument I want to make. Anecdotes are like statistics. As Simpson's paradox says, often the same statistics can be used to show something and its exact opposite. The same with anecdotes.
Take Charles Duhigg's use of the life of Rosa Parks in his book The Power of Habit. He says that she shows the power of social habits. He tells of how her husband said she was so social she rarely ate dinner at home, instead eating at the home of friends. That gave her the social strength to start a movement.
But Susan Cain (a blurber for this book) in her book Quiet, tells the story of Rosa Parks to support her argument of the power of introverts. While extroverts tend to gain their energy in social situations, introverts typically recharge through solitude and feel drained from too much stimulation. The same person, but one author sees her as a social butterfly and another as an introvert who sought solitude.
That's not to say that Charles Duhigg or Susan Cain is wrong. And I don't want to push this example too strongly. But I do think that many authors, and most TED talk speakers, depend too much on anecdote and story telling to persuade, while they would do better to just entertain. I have no problem using anecdotes to pump people up. But to try to derive secrets from them seems a step too far.
Take another example, this one from this book. Charles Duhigg uses the example of the 2009 Air France Flight 447 jetliner crash in the Atlantic as an example of "cognitive tunneling" and poor mental models. In that tragic accident, the Airbus A330 plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and ran into bad weather. The plane was flying fine, but its pitot tubes apparently froze up and gave the pilots the wrong speed information. They acted on that wrong information, put the plane into a stall, and fell into the ocean.
But does that anecdote unequivocally show cognitive tunneling? And can one take from that anecdote a lesson about how not to cognitively tunnel? I don't see how. I've read several other accounts of that Air France accident, and none of them blamed it on cognitive tunneling (although one did mention tunnel vision as one of many factors).
The Air France accident seems to me more like what Charles Perrow described in Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies. Just like with the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, people do not do well when their instruments lie to them about situations they cannot see with their eyes. Another account blames the Air France accident mainly on over-reliance on automated systems in the Airbus planes. (William Langewiesche's article in Vanity Fair is fascinating reading.)
My point is that any anecdote can, by its nature, be interpreted in many different ways. Just like in the old fable six blind men saw six different things in an elephant. None were wrong, yet none were right.
Rather than books like this one, I prefer my anecdotes in the form of biographies. When I read a good biography, or a good history, the author presents a life or a series of stories in a way that the reader can draw their own conclusions. I'm sure the author's slant comes through to some extent.
But when I read a book by someone like David Halberstam or David McCullough, I usually feel as though I read a gem that provides lessons for my life. I didn't get that with this book. To me, at least, it seemed too shallow, too broad, and too pushy. Not deep, focused, and subtle.
ByA. A. Baileson July 30, 2018
This is a disappointing and not very useful book. First, Duhigg sets us up with his introduction about how super-productive people like Atul Gawande are and promises that he'll deliver their secrets. The book is full of anecdotes and their relation to research. There's little to no summarizing with the steps a person should take to be smarter, faster, and better. As a reference book, it's useless because you have to wade through hundreds of pages of text to find any nuggets.
The clincher for me was when I got to the end and read his appendix. This was where he was supposed to tell us how he put the lessons of the book into practice as he wrote the book. It's where he was supposed to tell us how we all can manage the load of commitments we have to be as productive as Gawande, a best-selling author, a well-known surgeon, a Harvard faculty member, an advisor to the World Health Organization...
But it never happened. Instead of finding out how Duhigg managed the responsibilities of work, family, and personal needs, we found out how he organized and managed to write the book. Nope. As far as I know, his family life fell apart and his co-workers hate him for shirking his duties.
In short, this book could have been much better in many ways. Don't waste your money or your time.
The clincher for me was when I got to the end and read his appendix. This was where he was supposed to tell us how he put the lessons of the book into practice as he wrote the book. It's where he was supposed to tell us how we all can manage the load of commitments we have to be as productive as Gawande, a best-selling author, a well-known surgeon, a Harvard faculty member, an advisor to the World Health Organization...
But it never happened. Instead of finding out how Duhigg managed the responsibilities of work, family, and personal needs, we found out how he organized and managed to write the book. Nope. As far as I know, his family life fell apart and his co-workers hate him for shirking his duties.
In short, this book could have been much better in many ways. Don't waste your money or your time.
BySokratis Anastasiadison August 2, 2016
The book goes over eight highlight traits that make people or organizations the most productive.The word productive is a weird name for me. I always feel it has a connotation of producing output better through innovation, marginal gains through doing smarter, and faster by removing any bottlenecks on the development cycle. The same principles the author describes can also be attributed to progressing our ideas into reality. If anything, the act of advancing ourselves may be the whole grand explanation of why we live in this world. I prefer that term better.
As looking into depth on the chapters the author demonstrates, they talk about a general view of different parts of the brain doing some specific stuff. The book may be repetitive to other readers as they are sources they may have read somewhere else. However, it is not about the familiarity but how regularly those concepts emerge within successful individuals and organizations. If they show a pattern, we should pay attention to it. It is a great start for those ideas to be organized with the best stories for someone else later to look those topics in more depth later on.
All the chapters interchange hands. There are connections in between. I have a hypothesis after reading and analyzing a lot of similar self-help books and independent research from others. I have a lot of chances that I may have missed something and have the wrong interpretation, but here goes: The first chapter talks about Motivation. Motivation requires not only action but also the synergy of a mental map to address complicated topics. Motivation is hitting the rubber to the road. The chapter indeed does talk about having a grand explanation when doing things. However, formulating a grand explanation is as much motivating as the bias to act. Eventually, the author discusses them within the third chapter as mental maps. Bayesian Thinking of chapter eight is the one that aids in creating those mental maps. Nonetheless, motivation alone is very sketchy. A bias towards action will not do the best Bayesian thinking. It will not focus much on marginal gains. It will instead be motivated to do something else that is more exciting. For simple problems, that works well. For complicated problems, discipline is required. That is what Chapter 4 is all about: the ability to set plans to have an extended focus on mastering a particular set of skills or mental map. Capacity to set closure helps not to be distracted by his motivation on other exciting stuff. We can see all those mental models intertwine and influence together on how we manipulate the content in what we are and believe in which represent the habits that we possess.
The rest of the chapters talk mainly challenging obstacles every organization faces. Some examples. Psychological safety is primarily a mix of my analysis of the book Feedback Revolution by Peter Mclaughlin and Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed. However, I think Black Box Thinking discusses better which organizations progress better. It is true psychological safety may make employees happy, but there is no guarantee if they stray away from the original mission statement of the company to fit their needs. Chapter 5 on managing others demonstrates the ability to trust your employees not adding technical debt. If you don't trust them, it adds business debt to the overall business. Missing those target points (business and technical debt) reduces the quality output. This chapter overemphasizes business obligations over technical debts. What matters is to have a balance between the two. Not to be too commanding to the point of accumulating business debt and not too meek that we ignore on maintaining the tasks from accumulating technical debt. Those concepts are described well in the diagram of Executive Paradox by Dabid G Jensen.
Great book in overall. I totally recommend it. Another great reference book with strong supporting statements to point out to people.
As looking into depth on the chapters the author demonstrates, they talk about a general view of different parts of the brain doing some specific stuff. The book may be repetitive to other readers as they are sources they may have read somewhere else. However, it is not about the familiarity but how regularly those concepts emerge within successful individuals and organizations. If they show a pattern, we should pay attention to it. It is a great start for those ideas to be organized with the best stories for someone else later to look those topics in more depth later on.
All the chapters interchange hands. There are connections in between. I have a hypothesis after reading and analyzing a lot of similar self-help books and independent research from others. I have a lot of chances that I may have missed something and have the wrong interpretation, but here goes: The first chapter talks about Motivation. Motivation requires not only action but also the synergy of a mental map to address complicated topics. Motivation is hitting the rubber to the road. The chapter indeed does talk about having a grand explanation when doing things. However, formulating a grand explanation is as much motivating as the bias to act. Eventually, the author discusses them within the third chapter as mental maps. Bayesian Thinking of chapter eight is the one that aids in creating those mental maps. Nonetheless, motivation alone is very sketchy. A bias towards action will not do the best Bayesian thinking. It will not focus much on marginal gains. It will instead be motivated to do something else that is more exciting. For simple problems, that works well. For complicated problems, discipline is required. That is what Chapter 4 is all about: the ability to set plans to have an extended focus on mastering a particular set of skills or mental map. Capacity to set closure helps not to be distracted by his motivation on other exciting stuff. We can see all those mental models intertwine and influence together on how we manipulate the content in what we are and believe in which represent the habits that we possess.
The rest of the chapters talk mainly challenging obstacles every organization faces. Some examples. Psychological safety is primarily a mix of my analysis of the book Feedback Revolution by Peter Mclaughlin and Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed. However, I think Black Box Thinking discusses better which organizations progress better. It is true psychological safety may make employees happy, but there is no guarantee if they stray away from the original mission statement of the company to fit their needs. Chapter 5 on managing others demonstrates the ability to trust your employees not adding technical debt. If you don't trust them, it adds business debt to the overall business. Missing those target points (business and technical debt) reduces the quality output. This chapter overemphasizes business obligations over technical debts. What matters is to have a balance between the two. Not to be too commanding to the point of accumulating business debt and not too meek that we ignore on maintaining the tasks from accumulating technical debt. Those concepts are described well in the diagram of Executive Paradox by Dabid G Jensen.
Great book in overall. I totally recommend it. Another great reference book with strong supporting statements to point out to people.
Bycharles h evanson June 18, 2016
Most books today that supposedly intend to use modern data analysis and case studies teach to something end up eating your time and obscuring anything of real value. I think this is because if they simply wrote what they found out it'd be a pamphlet and they'd have a hard time selling it for 30 bucks. This book still does alot of that, and still pretends that they need to tell some kind of story to engage the audience, but the value of the content once you filter out the boring "keep the reader engaged" stuff is pretty remarkable. I recommend the book and taking notes to eliminate the fluff.
I’ve read a lot of management / self-improvement books over my career, and this one (to me) was much better as it was filled with third-party examples that didn’t involve the author as the main character: it’s more refreshing to hear about others than the author beating on his or her chest in order to tell you how great they are. The author does a good job of explaining the chapters in a conversational tone, with real-world life examples having equal footing with outside research. In many of the examples in the book, I could recall people, places, and specific times in my career that were spot-on. Nice read and well worth the time.
ByC. Johnsonon April 20, 2018
Fascinating book! I especially loved the parts about how air crashes happen and can be avoided. It doesn't have as much advice in it as I was hoping (there's a small section at the end about implementing the ideas) but it was still a great read. Mr. Duhigg has a way of making anything interesting. For example, I dislike poker and gambling in general (I'd rather spend my money on shoes... and books), but I found it fascinating to read about Texas hold 'em and how it relates to math.
The only disappointment was how short it was - the last third of the book is the appendix.
The only disappointment was how short it was - the last third of the book is the appendix.
ByDoodleLeton February 12, 2018
Very good & full of insights & examples. I really liked how Duhigg explained, specifically, how he used the insight gained from researching this book to help getting it done. I'm not giving it five stars only because that's for perfection - I do think there's lots of potentially life changing lessons & this is well worth reading & applying to most people's life.
ByF. Vedroon June 14, 2016
I really liked the book, it is an enjoyable read with a number of practical examples that help you to see what you need to focus on to be productive. I especially liked chapter 8 which used the Cincinnati Public School example, to show that in this world with ever increasing quantity and sources of data, you need to do something with the information so that you internalize it. That is key to being able to use it to make good decisions and motivate yourself to change. Otherwise all that data is just noise.
ByM. Rosenthalon July 5, 2016
Very good content focused on elements of TEAM BUILDING and PROJECT MANAGEMENT. The stories are compelling, the concepts are clear. I appreciated the appendix at the end, which walks through a summary of the key concepts, showing how the author applied them to writing the book.
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