Charles Duhigg is the master of the life hack. Three years ago, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter penned The Power of Habit, which has been translated into forty languages and is basically as permanent a feature in airport bookstores as gum or water. Now he’s back with his follow-up, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. We caught up with him and demanded he tell us how to get better at, well, everything.
What I love in the book is that you illuminate: Creativity is really problem-solving.
That’s exactly right! Creativity is not about being wildly original. It is instead often about taking two pedestrian ideas and mushing them together in a new way. I think that is super-empowering, because otherwise our vision of the creative individual is the drama-filled artist where ideas come out of nowhere. Most real creativity is by people who have seen a lot of things and paid attention to how it has made them feel and said, “This reminds me of that,” in a way that no one else has thought of.
If you were sitting with the 25-year-old you and could distill the knowledge in this book, what are some of the takeaways you’d give yourself?
We are living through an economic revolution that is going to be as profound as the agrarian revolution and the industrial revolution. And at the center of all of these revolutions is a change in the definition of what productivity is. For most people who are productive, you get very good at focusing on execution. When you are young, you think the reason you succeed is because “I’m in a hurry! I’m ambitious. And I want to make things happen!”
But the first step—how am I going to motivate myself; how am I going to structure this team; how am I going to create creativity—rather than merely “be” creative, this is becoming so much more proportionally influential. So, to answer your question, what I’d say is: Before you start a big project, sit down and come up with a list of questions to ask yourself. If you are going to join a team, rather than just ask, “Who is on it?” ask instead, “What is the ideal of a team I want to be on, and how do I want it to feel? And who is the person I want to be on this team? And how do I get into the habit of telling myself the right stories about myself every morning? Am I getting worked up about what this one person said to me, or this one e-mail that I felt slighted me—or am I disciplining myself and imagining my day and I want to think through what I want to happen in this meeting, and I want to tell myself a story about it so that at the end of the day I will feel it was a success and I feel good about myself?”
[#article: /articles/558d261af99a90d605040ca1]||||||
Understanding you can choose to control how you think—that you can recognize choices that other people don’t even see, and that making that choice is incredibly powerful. I would have told myself at 25 to slow down half a pace. And spend a little more time in the morning thinking a little bit harder. And looking for the choice that I had ignored yesterday.
Or, that they see between these two things or choices that there is an absence, and they think, “I am going to fill in that space; I am going to probe that tension.”
Tension is key. And one of the things I noticed about creative people is that they embrace a tension that other people shy away from. This—making a decision that others won’t; seeing things others can’t—there’s anxiety inside of that until you have solved it. But productive people embrace that tension; they see it not as a sign that things are bad, but as a sign that things are good.
If you had to name the one tool that has allowed you to succeed, what would you say?
I feel like I stumbled into this solution. I met my wife in college. And marrying someone who is temperamentally different than me, and deciding early on that I needed one person in my life whom I would be completely honest with and she would tell me when I was full of shit or being an asshole—that, I think, is the most important thing. Because ultimately each of these choices that you can make are hard choices—but having someone in my life who, when I have something that is bothering me and I don’t want to admit that it is bothering me, but then to be able to admit it and have a conversation with my wife about it? It’s just so valuable.
Maybe that is one other factor: Stability in the emotional core allows one to take risks in other areas.
The people in this book, and the people I like the most, are people who have found a system that allows them to access the true in themselves.
So tell us how someone reading this can bring these ideas—and these actions—into their own work world. Especially a world in which they are not the boss, where they are not “in control.”
There are two things that are important when I am with a team. One, look for the social signals that are being sent, and show that I am receiving them. Nonverbal cues. And two, to show them back in their own language. The mode of communication that we choose shows our sensitivity. We send a message to them: I hear you in the unique way you want to be heard; and I am communicating back to you in the way in which you want to be communicated. Rather than taking your message and repeating it in my language, I give it back to you in your language.
You know how sometimes you are in a meeting and someone just talks incessantly? I used to think, before I wrote this book, that I should try and “model” that they should talk less. And then I was talking to a researcher, and he said, “If there is someone who is talking incessantly, the way that they listen is by you talking incessantly.” The key is not to model how you want them to change; the key is to use what makes them comfortable. Mirror it. “I am meeting you on your terms. I’ll talk for the next seven minutes about something I can say in seven seconds.” To them, that’s a signal of grace and generosity.
I’d say if you are in a meeting, look at how the other guy is communicating and then, just as an experiment, try and pretend you are them for a few minutes. Show them that you are really listening by pretending you are them. And see how it works. Do you unlock a new empathy that you didn’t have?
So it’s like being in a restaurant in Paris and thinking the waiter is being an asshole, when instead I need to understand the setting and meet this person on their cultural terms; speak to them in the language and inside the rules by which they communicate.
Yes. Am I going to force my mental model on this group, or create psychological safety for the group?
You talk about the difference between setting what you call “smart” goals and “stretch” goals. Tell me more.
In terms of setting goals, people do one of two things. They usually have huge ambition and get overwhelmed. Or they get very focused on small, achievable goals; the kind of things where people put on their list of to-do’s—“eat breakfast”—something they can cross off. Psychologists call this mood repair.
The best way to achieve goals is to mush the two kinds of lists together, so you have positive tension. At the top of the list, I write a “stretch goal” that reminds me what my ultimate goal is. And then under it I will have “smart goals”—things that take a small piece of the stretch goal and make me think, “What specifically do I want to get done; how will I make it measurable and actionable; what is the timeline?” So you are creating a tension between the huge ambition and an actual plan for tomorrow. The plan for tomorrow tells you what you will do when you wake up, and the huge ambition will create that good bit of positive tension that makes you stretch and move on to the next task. It reminds you there is a bigger thing you want to accomplish.
