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

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Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “creating mental models.” Understanding how people build mental models has become one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology. All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not. The plane was descending at fourteen feet per second. The maximum certified speed the undercarriage could absorb was only twelve feet per second. But there were no other options now. At some point in your working life, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll need to work in a team. In this situation, maintaining your personal productivity isn’t always enough for you to meet your goals. Instead, the team as a whole must be productive. How can you ensure that this is the case? What are the secrets to building an effective team? The Hallmarks of an Effective Team

The Power of Mental Models: How Flight 32 Avoided Disaster The Power of Mental Models: How Flight 32 Avoided Disaster

Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation of meaningful projects, goals, and values. We start to recognize how small chores can have outsized emotional rewards because they prove to ourselves that we are making meaningful choices, that we are genuinely in control of our own lives.” 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.” People who are particularly good at managing their attention are in the habit of telling themselves stories all the time. They engage in constant forecasting. They daydream about the future and then when life clashes with their imagination, their attention gets snagged. 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. 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. Reactive thinking, in a sense, outsources the choices and control that, in other settings, create motivation.”

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Type #2: SMART goals. These are smaller, more focused objectives. They are often the smaller steps you’ll need to take to fulfill your stretch goal. For stretch and SMART goals to be effective, they must be used together. For instance, you may choose to set an ambitious stretch goal and then break it down into actionable steps using SMART goals. The second technique that you should implement is the creation of a “commitment culture.” This is a workplace culture in which employers are truly committed to their employees’ growth, success, and happiness, causing their employees to commit to the company in return. Lean Manufacturing Successful people spend a lot of time seeking information on failures. You’ve got to be comfortable not knowing where your life is going. Innovation

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in “Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in

The changed engagement with data led to a changed engagement with teaching, and a series of innovative moves to help struggling students. In less than a year, the school’s overall scores had more than doubled. A year after that, Johnson was named Cincinnati’s Educator of the Year. Being able to self-motivate is becoming an increasingly important skill in the modern economy. Currently, more than a third of working Americans are self-employed, and this figure continues to rise. When you’re self-employed, you have no boss to motivate you. You have to set your own goals, manage your own time, and make your own choices. To do this effectively, you need a degree of self-motivation.

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.

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Cognitive closure can also be counterproductive because people can make hasty decisions just because they need closure. The first airplane de Crespigny had ever flown was a Cessna, one of the single-engine, nearly noncomputerized planes that hobbyists loved. A Cessna is a toy compared to an Airbus, of course, but every plane, at its core, has the same components: a fuel system, flight controls, brakes, landing gear. What if, de Crespigny thought to himself, I imagine this plane as a Cessna? What would I do then? Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel. “Most people are too narrow in how they think about creativity,” Ed Catmull, the president of Disney Animation, told me. “So we spend a huge amount of time pushing people to go deeper, to look further inside themselves, to find something that’s real and can be magical when it’s put into the mouth of a character on a screen. We all carry the creative process inside us; we just need to be pushed to use it sometimes.” De Crespigny, in other words, was prepared to pivot the mental model he was relying upon, because he knew that the models he had worked out ahead of time were insufficient to the task at hand. De Crespigny asked one of his copilots to calculate how much runway they would need. Inside his head, de Crespigny was envisioning the landing of an oversized Cessna. “Picturing it that way helped me simplify things,” he told me. “I had a picture in my head that contained the basics, and that’s all I needed to land the plane.”

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Cognitive closure: “the desire for a confident judgment on an issue, any confident judgment, as compared to confusion and ambiguity.” Similarly, the groundbreaking musical West Side Story simply takes the familiar story of Romeo and Juliet and transplants it among New York City street gangs. It is a fresh and surprising combination of conventional elements. And the runaway hit movie Frozen was a very conscious attempt to take the standard princess fairy tale and turn it on its head. Scripps Howard Foundation Announces National Journalism Awards Winners". Scripps Howard Foundation. March 12, 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-05-01 . Retrieved May 4, 2010. Reactive thinking is at the core of how we allocate our attention, and in many settings, it’s a tremendous asset.” Reactive thinking: a cognitive process in which the brain triggers an instinctive, automatic reaction to a stimulus or event.