Heroic Interview: Smarter Faster Better with Charles Duhigg

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Charles Duhigg, the author of Smarter, Faster, Better, the Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, which is going to be what we discussed today. And he also wrote a great book called the Power of Habits. We talk about that a lot in habits 101 it. And he is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the New York Times, Harvard Business School, Yale undergrad, and just an incredible writer able to bring science and practical wisdom together in a really, really cool way. So, Charles, I appreciate you taking the time and I'm excited to chat.

Thanks for having me.

Let's start at the very top. Smarter, Faster, Better. Gotta be one of the better titles out there. Who doesn't wanna be Smarter, Faster, Better? Tell us about what you were thinking when you named the book that.

So this project started back in 2013, which the power of Habit. My first book had just come out and I was working on this big project for the New York Times, looking at Apple as sort of a lens for looking at the global economy. And everything was going really well professionally. And I would come home each night and, you know, sort of see my wife and my kids and hope to sit down and have dinner. And I would have like 150 emails to deal with. And all this stuff that I had wanted to get done at the office that didn't get done waiting for me. And I remember turning to my wife and saying, if this is what success feels like, sign me back up for failure, because this is kind of terrible. I felt like I should have been enjoying life. And what I found was that the harder and harder I was working, the more and more I felt like I was falling behind, the more and more it felt like there was just more work to be done, more emails to be responded to, more demands on me. And I felt like there were these people out there whom I looked at who seemed to have it all figured out, who seemed to get really important, great work done, but not be stressed all the time, not have to sacrifice time with their families. And I wanted to figure out what those people's secrets were. And so I started reaching out to researchers and to people who seemed like they were particularly productive and asking them, what. What am I doing wrong? And what I found was that there were these, these rules, these general principles that, that there were all these people who were getting more done and having more productive and rewarding lives without having to make huge sacrifices, without having to work all the time. And in part it was because they had trained themselves to think a little bit differently, to think a little bit more. They knew a little bit more about how their brain worked. And as a result, what once you train yourself how to think right, you can be smarter and you can be faster and you can be better. And more importantly, you can understand the trade offs that exist in getting there.

I love it. Super inspiring. You talk about eight key insights that you gleaned in your research. I want to start with number one. So the first chapter is motivation and love. For you to share kind of your two facets of motivation that you talk about in the book, the locus of control and meaning, if you can.

Sure. So in the book we tell the story of motivation through bikes, examining and explaining some of the changes that the US Marine Corps has made to boot camp. So we're all programmed to think about Marine Corps boot camp as this place where you learn to follow orders and obedience and discipline. And there's still a healthy dose of that when you go to boot camp. But about 15 years ago, the head of the Marines, a guy named Charles Krulak, decided that they needed to change how boot camp worked because of two things. First of all, they were getting a lot more recruits that basically just didn't know how to motivate themselves. These were kids who had grown up playing video games their whole life, sitting on the couch. They were millennials and they hadn't learned how to sort of generate self motivation. But the second and most important thing, more important thing, was that what Marines have to do today is very different. Right. It is just as likely if you're a U.S. marine, that you will be dropped someplace in the middle of nowhere and you will be told that in the next two weeks you need to accomplish some large goal. But you're not going to be in contact with your commanding officer who's going to tell you how to do it. You have to learn how to make decisions on your own and how to generate self motivation, how to figure out how to take that hill. And so Krulak wanted to figure out how do we make our recruits, US Marine recruits, into these sort of self motivated, self determined machines, creatures. So we started looking at the research of what we know about self motivation. And there was a really interesting strain of research that said that some of the most successful Marines were individuals who had what's known as a strong internal locus of control. Now an internal locus of control is this concept from psychology that's been around for a long time that says, how much do you believe that you have control over your own life versus how much do you believe that other people or just fate determines what happens to you? The people who are great Marines, the ones who really were successful, were ones who believed that they could influence their own destiny through the choices that they made. And oftentimes the way that they learned to believe that was by simply being trained to make choice after choice after choice. By being put in situations where they had to make decisions, they learned how influential making those decisions could be. And they also learned how good it felt just to take control. In fact, we know from neurology that this is real, right? That it does feel good to take control. That when we're in charge of our own life, it feels really rewarding. One of my favorite examples of this, because everyone's experienced it, is, you know, when you're going down the freeway and you're stuck in like a traffic jam and you see the exit off to the side, and you know that if you take that exit, it's going to take just as long to get home as if you stay in the traffic jam. But there's some part of your brain that's saying, turn the wheel, take the exit. Like, just take control. That's this neurological instinct that we all feel to want to be in control in our life, to be able to want to make decisions that make us feel like we have agency, like we have control over our destiny. And so what the Marine Corps boot camp did is they changed everything in order to push recruits to make a lot more decisions. So for instance, one of the things that oftentimes happens is that you show up for basic training sometime in the first two weeks. You go into the mess hall and you have lunch. And then your commanding officer tells your platoon, after lunch, clean the mess hall. But they don't tell you where the cleaning supplies are. They don't tell you how to load the complicated dishwasher, you know, the industrial sized dishwasher. They don't tell you whether to throw away the leftover hamburgers or put them in the fridge. Instead, they make people take leadership. They make people make decisions. Because once you've been through an experience like that, you begin to say, like, it feels good just to make a choice. It feels good to take control. And that's the first step in generating self motivation is to figure out how to make a chore into a choice. Find some decision in an activity. If it's an activity you don't want to do, if it's something you've been avoiding, find some small decision that you can make at first, something that helps you believe that you are in control and it's going to be easier to start. Which brings up the next question, which is, how do you keep going? How do you generate the self motivation to keep turning that crank? And what we know from research is that people start self motivation by finding a choice they can make and then they continue self motivating by linking what they're doing to bigger values and ambitions and aspirations. So a great example of this is that is going back to the Marines again. One of the things that they teach Marine recruits to do is when you're on a long hike that's really hard, or when you're doing something that's kind of unpleasant, is to turn to your pack mate, the guy next to you and say, why are you doing this? Now imagine for a minute that you're on some long, painful hike that you didn't want to take and the guy next to you says, why are you doing this? Their first instinct is to say, I have no idea why I'm doing this. This is terrible. But if you start thinking about it, you start saying, okay, well look, the reason why I'm trying to climb up this hill is because I really want to make it through basic training. Because if I make it through basic training, it's going to be a job. And my wife just had a baby and this is how I can support her and my baby. And you know, this is how this is. This is how I'm proving to myself and the world that I'm a good dad. This is how I'm building my future. So suddenly you're going from climbing up a hill to thinking about, the reason I'm doing this is because it's something that's important to me, something that is really deeply meaningful. And once you do that, it's easy to climb that hill, right? Once we prove to ourselves why we're doing it, once we ask why, we start coming up with all these reasons for why we're doing this thing that's hard and it's really easy to lose sight of that. Why? We forget to ask ourselves why all the time. We get into this reactive mindset where you just reply to emails or you go to that meeting because someone asked you to, or you just climb up that hill because someone told you to. But once we start asking ourselves why, once we start reminding ourselves that we're making these choices because they're really meaningful, that's when it becomes a lot easier to self motivate for them.

That's fantastic. First key and the first secret to being productive have that motivation. I love the chore to choice. And then simply, why are you doing this? To capture the meaning. And just to highlight, too, just the way you just shared that story is reflective of how you wrote the story in the book and just how compelling it is. So, again, love it. Let's go to the third insight. Focus. Talk to us about the importance of focus, our attention, spotlight, mental models, all that good stuff.

Well, so focus is increasingly important these days, right? I mean, one of the things that we know is that 50 or 60 years ago, most people in America went to a job where a boss told them what to do. Right? And by the way, they didn't have email. Right. They weren't distracted by. By Twitter and by Facebook. Life was in many ways kind of easier because you showed up at work, it was very clear what you're supposed to get done that day, and there wasn't something to distract your attention from it. And then you went home and, you know, you watched TV or you read the newspaper. In today's economy, though, and we're living through an economic revolution that most economists at this point agree is as profound as the agrarian revolution and the industrial revolution. In today's world, almost half of Americans don't work for boss. They're either independent contractors or they're freelancers, or they're entrepreneurs. They're people who have to decide each day what to do with that day. And as we all know, we live in this world where the number of distractions, potential distractions, is astronomical. Most of our job at this point is actually choosing among potential distractions to determine which one deserves our focus and which one we can safely ignore. And the reason why this is important is because we actually know a lot now about how focus works. We know a lot now about why some people are better than others at focusing. And one of the big things that we've learned is that in order to focus, what we ought to do is we ought to get into a habit of telling ourselves a story about what we expect to see. So this is within psychology. They call this building a mental model. And a great example of it is that there's been a number of studies that have looked at the most successful office workers and executives. And what they found is that executives who are really productive are people who are really, really good at telling themselves a story about what they expect to occur at their office. So most of us say, like, oh, I have a meeting today with Jim, right? And so that's what I'm going to do from 9 to 10 o'. Clock. But really productive executives, they tend to say, I have a meeting today from 9 to 10 o'. Clock. And Jim's going to start by bringing up this thing that he always brings up at the beginning of meetings. And then Sus is going to disagree with him because Susie hates Jim and she disagrees with everything that he says and that that's when I can swoop in with this brilliant idea and everyone's going to think I'm a genius. Now, this only takes like 10 extra seconds, right? Maybe 15, to visualize this meeting a little bit to think about what is going to happen, to tell ourselves a story about how we expect that meeting to unfold, to build a ment, what's known as a mental model of what we expect. But the act of building that mental model, it tends to train our brain and our near subconscious to figure out what to pay attention to and what to ignore much, much faster. So when you're sitting in that meeting and somebody says something out of left field, your brain automatically says, you know what, what was just said? It has nothing to do with the story that I told myself about how I expect this meeting to unfold. So I'm just going to automatically kind of ignore that distraction. But then Jim, Jim pipes up and he comes up with some idea. And Susie, instead of disagreeing with him, she suddenly agrees with him. And your brain automatically pays attention to that. It doesn't let that pass by as a distraction because it fits into the story of your head. It fits into something that's surprising, that's unexpected. And your brain automatically says, I need to rethink what I'm going to say next. Being focused is incredibly important. And one of the things we know is that it's much, much easier to ignore these distractions like emails coming in or phone calls or social media when we have a mental model, some type of story that we've told ourselves about how we expect the day to unfold. Because that way, when I'm sitting at my desk and I told myself, okay, between 9 and 12 this morning, I expect to be able to write this memo. And to write this memo, I need to call three experts. As a result, when my phone rings and it's one of those experts, I can immediately say, oh, pick up the phone. That's something I've got to pay attention to. But when someone comes and they stick their head in my office and they say, hey, can you come to this emergency meeting? I can immediately say, no, I can't make it. I'm really sorry. I'm focused on this other thing because my brain automatically knows that's a distraction that doesn't fit into my mental model. That's something I can set aside and say, deal with that later.

I love it. And it comes back to the consistent theme, which is just making slightly better choices. Right. Of. Can I tell just a little bit of a story? Create this mental model. It's not a huge deal, but that small choice aggregated and compounded with the others can create this significant impact.

That's exactly right. And this is what we know about the most productive people is that the most productive people, they're not actually doing anything that amazing. What they're doing is they're just coming up with routines, with tactics, with habits that allow them to think just half an inch deeper about the choices that they're making. And that half an inch over a day and over a week, a month, a year, a lifetime time that half an inch that ends up making them a huge success. Right. They. They do things like they tell. They force themselves to or encourage themselves to just visualize their day with just, you know, 30 or a minute, 30 seconds or minutes more specificity. They. They get themselves to figure out way to look for the choice that's inside the chore. These aren't things that are really hard and they're not revolutionary, but they all add up and they make for people who are much more successful, really powerful.

One of my favorite chapters was on goals. And I just love the way that you combined stretch and smart goals. Can you walk us through your thinking on that?

Yeah. So in the book, we sort of talk about what we know about the science of goal setting. What we know is that most people, the most successful people, they're people who tend to figure out how to get themselves to think about their bigger schools on a regular basis. And psychologists call this stretch goals. In fact, one of the things that they talk about, there's a lot of academic research on is how you should write a to do list correctly. Most people write to do lists the way that I used to write to do lists, which is that you use it as an external memory aid. You kind of have like a list of tasks that you want to get done. And rather than having to remember all of them, you write them down on a sheet of paper. And oftentimes you put the easiest tasks at the top of the sheet of the paper. In fact, sometimes, and I used to do this myself, people will write down something that they've already done at the top of their to do list because it feels so good, right, to cross it off when you get to your desk. But the problem with that is that what we know from studies is that if you write down a list of tasks, your brain will actually focus on the easiest ones. It will encourage you to focus and to do first things that are easy to get done because it feels so good to cross them off. So what are the most productive people do that's different? Well, they use to do lists, not simply as a way to keep track of an external memory aid. They use to do lists as a device for making themselves think about their priorities. And the way that they do that is at the top of the page. They tend to write their stretch goals, their biggest goal for the day, for the week and for the month. And because it's at the top of the page and it's right there in big letters, every time they look down at that list, they are reminded, this is the most important thing. This is what you ought to be focusing on. So if you just spent the last 45 minutes replying to emails and trying to clean out your inbox and you look at your to do list and at the top of your to do list it says that your most important goal for this week is writing that memo that you've been putting off for days. Then you know, I shouldn't have been spending that time on emails, I should spend that time writing that memo. But then the other question becomes, so how do I start if I've been putting it off for days? There's clearly something there, some type of. I'm having trouble starting that. And that's where this thing called smart goals comes in. Because one of the things we know is that it's easiest to start a task when we can break it down into very specific, very easy, bite sized chunks. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to just have a criteria for how we write out how we're going to start. And Smart goals is a good example because it's the type of thing, because SMART is actually an acronym. It says that when you want to start something, some big goal, take that big goal and break it down and say specifically what you want to do first. How are you going to measure when you're done with that first step? Is it achievable? Is it something that you can actually do if you are going to start writing that memo? Do you have all the information you need in order to start writing it? Is it realistic? What do I need to do to make it realistic. Do I need to turn off my email so I am not distracted by my dinging computer? Do I need to close my door so no one will come in? What's the timeline for starting? Am I going to start it at 9 o'? Clock? Am I going to start it at 10 o'? Clock? How long do I think the first step is going to take? It only takes about a minute to sort of do smart, figure out all those five things. But as a result, you now have this plan. You know exactly how you're going to start and how long it's going to take and what you need in place in order to be successful. That's kind of the point is that when you have to do lists that are combinations of these stretch goals that remind us what we ought to be thinking about and these smart goals, a device for helping us start, that's when suddenly you can get an amazing amount of stuff done.

And I love your emphasis on the starting. Right. It's not the completion per se, it's what's the next step you're going to take. You know one of the best ways to reduce procrastination, right? Not just do it, just get started.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

Love it. Okay, I'm not sure which chapter it was in where you talked about disfluency. Was that decision making or data?

That was actually data. That's looking at data. So. So one of the kind of interesting questions that's come up as we've entered this age where there's so much data all around us is why aren't people learning faster? We live in an age where you can find the answer to any question literally just by typing it into a computer, right? Where you can figure out how many steps you've taken, how much weight you've lost in the last week, what you've eaten over the last month. All of that is data that we can collect and that we can deliver to ourselves. So why isn't everyone running a marathon and super thin and making great decisions all the time? Well, it's because although data has proliferated, that doesn't mean that necessarily knowledge or learning has therefore become easier. So what do we know about information? What do we know about how people translate data into knowledge? Well, it turns out that paradoxically, one of the best ways to learn from data information sometimes is to slow it down and make it a little bit harder to absorb. And within psychology, this is known as creating disfluency. One of my favorite Examples of this has to do with a study that was done where they took students and they set them in a lecture, and they asked half of them to take notes on their laptop and the other half to take notes by hand through handwriting. Now, one of the things we know about taking notes on a laptop is that you can type much faster than you can write. So you can go, so if I sat down a lecture with a laptop, I'm actually going to collect more information than my handwriting peers. I'm going to collect more verbatim sentences, I'm going to collect more data points. I'm going to be able to type much faster than I can write. And so they had everyone listen to the same lecture. Half the group taking notes by hand, half the group, group taking notes on a laptop. And then a week later, they asked them to come back and they tested them on that lecture. And overwhelmingly, the people who had taken notes by hand scored better on that test. Even though they had collected less information in their notes, they remembered they had learned that information better. So the question becomes, why? Well, it turns out that when you take notes by hand, it's a little bit harder. You have to actually not only write, which you know is harder than typing, but more importantly, because you can't write as fast as someone speaks very frequently, you have to try and figure out what they're actually saying. You have to summarize what they're saying. You have to think a little bit more deeply. What's the most important idea that this person is saying to me? Let me write down that idea, because I can't capture everything that they're saying. And that act of thinking, that's how we learn. So that's what. When people say that in order to make data, in order to learn more from data, that we should make it more disfluent. That's what they're talking about. They're saying that what we need to do is you need to figure out a way to interact with the information in a way that makes you learn from it. So if you have some scale like I do, a scale that sends your weight every day to your iPhone, and it creates this pretty chart that, that shows you how your weight has increased or decreased over the last week and month. That doesn't mean that you're actually going to lose weight. That's not going to help you be healthier. Because I can just glance at that chart and I think to myself, oh, that's pretty. And I don't actually do anything with the data. In fact, it's much better to actually take that data and to draw a chart by hand, draw a graph by hand. Because then when you're drawing it by hand, when you're making the information something you have to interact with, you start thinking to yourself, oh, you know, on Wednesday, actually I gained a pound and a half. And I remember on Wednesday, that's the day that I had like a hot dog for lunch and I didn't go running that afternoon. And you learn eating unhealthily and not moving, that causes my weight to go up. So the key is, if you're around a lot of data, if you want to help your kids learn from this information, if you want to help make them data literate, teach them how to take an idea and instead of just recording it, do something with it. If you're reading a book and you think the ideas are really interesting, put the book down and turn to the person next to you and explain the idea that you just learned. Because that's going to lock it into your brain when you have to recount it to someone else. That's how we make information disfluid. That's how we learn from it.

By paradox, we're making it harder, we make it easier to learn. That's awesome.

Yeah.

We only scratch the surface of your book, of course, but what, what of the idea? What have we not talked about, do you think would be important to highlight real quick?

Well, I think there's an underlying theme here which is that, as I mentioned, the most productive people are the people who have these rituals or these routines that get them to think a little bit more about the choices that they're making. For some of us, that's like writing a to do list in a way that gets us to focus on our priorities or it's spending our commute in the morning thinking with a little bit more specificity what this day is going to be like rather than just listening to the radio. But for other people, it means engaging in these social practices that go back centuries, that help us think about who we are and what our goals ought to be. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the most important things over human history are things like prayer or meditation or going to church or listening to music or reading books and then having book clubs to talk about them. You know, the Talmudic study, when you think about it, is basically a big book club with one book at the center of it. And the reason why those things are so long lived, why they're so important, why they happen in so many different cultures is because they're routines that allow us to think about what our goals ought to be. The most productive people are the people who give themselves the space and the time to. To think about what's actually important to them. Those are the ones who say, look, I'm wasting a lot of time doing this other stuff and it feels really busy, but it's not actually productive. We have to have time to think. And so the more that we create routines, practices, the more that we give ourselves time to think about our lives, the more we end up getting actually done.

I love it. Thank you so much for so eloquently sharing so much of your wisdom in such a brief period of time. Smarter, Faster, Better. It's a phenomenal book. If you want to be more productive with less stress in life and business, highly recommend it. Along with the Power of Habit. I'd like to wrap up these chats, Charles, with one final question, which is if you're going to share one piece of wisdom with someone passionate about optimizing their lives, it might be something we chatted about today, or outside of that, what would that one piece of wisdom be?

I think the piece of wisdom would be indulge those eccentricities that allow you to think right. We tend to look at people who are very successful and we look at their quirks. Andrew Carnegie used to take a bath every morning. Bill Gates takes two weeks off to just go into the woods and read every day. He does that each year. And we say, oh, those people are so rich now. They can indulge that quirk, but we've got it backwards. The reason they're so rich now is because they have that quirk. The reason why Andrew Carnegie was so successful is because he took a bath every day and he would think about what he wanted to get done that day in the bath. Or Bill Gates takes time to actually indulge his curiosity and to look for connections that other people miss. Take the thing. Identify the eccentricity in your life, the quirk, the thing that lets you think and lean into it, invest in it, because that's going to pay off huge.

It's brilliant. Indulge our eccentricities and help us think. I love it. My current one is getting out of email completely, so I appreciate the further confirmation and this is good. Where can people connect with you? If they want to drill in more deeply to you and your work.

They can come to. Well, they can look up the power of habit or Smarter, Faster, Better in Amazon or any bookseller, or they can look me up charlesduhigg.com or if you just Google the Power of Habit or Charles Duhigg, I'll come up.

Fantastic Charles. Thanks again.

Thank you. Take care.

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