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

Once again, Charles Duhigg has written a book that “elevates the life-hacking genre,” said Joel Stein in Bloomberg Businessweek. Like Malcolm Gladwell before him, the New York Times business reporter and author of The Power of Habit culls academic studies for potential lessons on how to live better, and then finds a memorable anecdote or two to drive home each such insight. “His writing is smart, measured, and fun,” and because he never oversells any one idea, you stay with him through every turn. In this follow-up to his 2012 best-seller, we’re thrust inside the cockpit of a crippled Qantas jet; we’re locked inside a trunk with a kidnap victim; and we’re given a seat at the brainstorming meetings that shaped the Disney hit Frozen. Every story yields a lesson, and most seem worth putting into practice. Still, the so-called Secrets of Being Pro ductive seem “less like secrets and more like common sense,” said Paul Bloom in The New York Times. Of course we should set both short-term and long-term goals, as Duhigg reminds us. And like the anxious cognitive scientist we meet who becomes a poker champ, we all should think about probabilities, not certainties, when laying bets on the future. Eventually, I tired of seeking real wisdom and simply “gave myself over to the stories,” said Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times. Duhigg never does pull his thoughts together enough to make the book a coherent guide to being productive. “But I learned from it, and I never felt like putting it down.”

Maybe the biggest lesson of Smarter Faster Better is what it tells us about who we’ve become, said Louis Menand in The New Yorker. “People don’t read these books to find out how to be better human beings. People read them to figure out how to become the kind of human being the workplace is looking for”—and Duhigg is just the latest messenger reminding us that each of us had better be innovative, adaptable, and efficient if we expect a footing in today’s information economy. In the end, it’s not really surprising that the model worker changes over time, “but it is mildly disheartening to realize how readily we import these models into our daily lives.” Duhigg himself shared a story in The Power of Habit about how he used management principles to correct a weakness he had for interrupting each workday to indulge in an afternoon chocolate-chip cookie. That anecdote saddened me deeply. “Charles—life is short; eat the cookie.”