Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business (Charles Duhigg, 2016)

1. Motivation
• People want to play because they believe they are in control.
• Need for control is a biological imperative.
• Motivation become automatic when you can self-direct choices into a habit.
• Marine is one of the lower paid but high motivation trade.
• Explain to yourself why this task will help you get closer to a meaningful goal.
2. Team
• Group norms play a critical role in shaping our emotional experience.
• Norms determine whether we feel safe or threathened,  or excited, and motivated or discouraged.
• Saturaday Night Live is successful because everyone know one another.
• It's all about leadership: how to make everyone come together.
• To make everyone feel included, the entire team is rooting for each other and everyone feels like a star.
3. Focus
• Cognitive tunneling is overly focused on whatver is directly in front of our eyes, e.g. gluing to smartphone.
• You will lose focus in cognitive tunnel and latch on to the easiest and most obvious stimulus.
• Firefighters, nurse, commandos, etc. stay calm in emergency because they have built sufficient mental model.
4. Goal setting
• 6 days war.
• SMART by GE
5. Managing others
• No one goes to work wanting to suck. If you put people in a position to succeed, they will.
• Culture
• Star: hiring elites
• Engineering: startup like Facebook
• Bureaucratic: thnk ranks of middle managers
• Autocratic: you do what I said
• Committment: same company till you die
6. Decision making
• Bayesian psychology.
• Train yourself to make small predictions daily.
• Envision multiple futures.
7. Innovation
• Creative desperation, not all creativity relies on panic.
• You are more likely to recognize discoveries hidden in your own experiences when necessity pushes you.
8. Absorbing data
• It is not how much information a person know but understanding it.
• A formal decising-making system like flowchart, questions, engineering design process denies the easy way out and able to force us rethnk it.