Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

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		Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business
		Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of The Power of Habit comes a fascinating book that explores the science of productivity, and why managing how you think is more important than what you think—with an appendix of real-world lessons to apply to your life.

At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key productivity concepts—from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making—that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics—as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters—this painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently.
 
They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.

A young woman drops out of a PhD program and starts playing poker. By training herself to envision contradictory futures, she learns to anticipate her opponents’ missteps—and becomes one of the most successful players in the world.

A group of data scientists at Google embark on a four-year study of how the best teams function, and find that how a group interacts is more important than who is in the group—a principle, it turns out, that also helps explain why Saturday Night Live became a hit.

A Marine Corps general, faced with low morale among recruits, reimagines boot camp—and discovers that instilling a “bias toward action” can turn even the most directionless teenagers into self-motivating achievers.

The filmmakers behind Disney’s Frozen are nearly out of time and on the brink of catastrophe—until they shake up their team in just the right way, spurring a creative breakthrough that leads to one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.

What do these people have in common?

They know that productivity relies on making certain choices. The way we frame our daily decisions; the big ambitions we embrace and the easy goals we ignore; the cultures we establish as leaders to drive innovation; the way we interact with data: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.

In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Duhigg explained why we do what we do. In Smarter Faster Better, he applies the same relentless curiosity, deep reporting, and rich storytelling to explain how we can improve at the things we do. It’s a groundbreaking exploration of the science of productivity, one that can help anyone learn to succeed with less stress and struggle, and to get more done without sacrificing what we care about most—to become smarter, faster, and better at everything we do.

Praise for Smarter Faster Better

“A pleasure to read . . . Duhigg’s skill as a storyteller makes his book so engaging to read.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Not only will Smarter Faster Better make you more efficient if you heed its tips, it will also save you the effort of reading many productivity books dedicated to the ideas inside.”—Bloomberg Businessweek

“Duhigg pairs relatable anecdotes with the research behind why some people and businesses are not as efficient as others.”—Chicago Tribune

“The book covers a lot of ground through meticulous reporting and deft analysis, presenting a wide range of case studies . . . with insights that apply to the rest of us.”—The Wall Street Journal

网友对Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business的评论

原版书，什么包装没有，直接塞在塑料袋里就送来了。角翻卷得不成样子，真气人

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.

A brief warning to busy and smart people: the book contains some interesting insights and pieces of valuable advice. But, in the tradition of most self-help books, its worthwhile points could be communicated in a book 70 to 80 percent shorter. It is just unbelievably tedious with runaway background information and stories. It contains so much superfluous material that it is actually painful to listen to. And the good points get buried and forgotten in a flood of words. I normally prefer unabridged versions of books but this one begs for a most severe abridgement.

Absolutely loved this book- I'm a sucker for books on productivity, but this was one of the best in awhile. Duhigg is a great storyteller and builds suspense as you read through the anecdotes in each chapter, anxiously awaiting the wisdom that can be gleaned from each one. Unlike many books, Duhigg doesn't just proselytize general aphorisms about how to be efficient but gives very concrete examples and advice - for example, outlining how to set very detailed and precise goals and keep yourself motivated. As a Neuro resident at a busy academic center I definitely felt that this book will help with keeping myself focused on very specific tasks - eg for research, how to go about breaking down a seemingly large an insurmountable project into bite size tasks I can finish in my spare time. I loved this book and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wishes they had more focus in their life.

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