“100 years ago, most people couldn’t imagine a world with antibiotics or immunizations. Let alone MRI-guided robotic surgery performed on a patient in Cleveland, Tennessee, by a surgeon in Cleveland, Ohio,” Michael Roizen, the Chief Wellness Officer Emeritus at the Cleveland Clinic, and his co-authors Peter Linneman and Albert Ratner write in The Great Age Reboot: Cracking the Longevity Code for a Younger Tomorrow.
“But these breakthroughs … continue reading
1: So what exactly is a habit?
Yes, it is an outfit a nun wears, Tynan writes in Superhuman by Habit: A Guide to Becoming the Best Possible Version of Yourself, One Tiny Habit at a Time.
But, more importantly, “it’s an action that you take on a repeated basis with little or no required effort or thought,” he writes.
The key part of the definition? The second half … continue reading
1: The year was 1975.
Psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham measured how fast forty-five of the fastest typists at a large company were able to generate text.
“The typists knew they were among the best in the company, but they had never measured how quickly they typed,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better.
On average, each typist generated ninety-five lines of output per hour, setting a clear … continue reading
1: Why do some teams succeed and others fail?
The People Analytics team at Google had spent two years attempting to answer this question.
The initiative was code-named “Project Aristotle.” Â The team gathered survey data, conducted hundreds of interviews, analyzed a mountain of data and statistics, ran regression models, and built software programs.
There were no clear patterns or trends on what makes teams perform at the highest … continue reading
1: What makes a great team great?
Is it simply a matter of intelligence? Do teams with the smartest people perform the best?
Is “group intelligence nothing more than the intelligence of the individuals making up the team?” Charles Duhigg asks in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.
Actually, no.
In 2008, psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT recruited 699 people and divided them into 152 … continue reading
1: Back in 1991, Amy Edmondson, a first-year Harvard PhD student, began visiting two Boston hospital wards.
She was studying organizational behavior and was “on the prowl for a dissertation topic,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.
Her idea was that good teamwork would reduce medical mistakes. That “the units with the strongest sense of teamwork,” Charles notes, “would have the … continue reading
1: “If I was going to reach my goals, something would have to change,” Tynan writes in Superhuman by Habit.
“I went to sleep at random hours late at night and woke up in the mid-afternoon. My vehicle registrations and inspections were always delinquent, sometimes by years. I was consistently late to almost everything,” Tynan writes.
“The lengths of time by which I procrastinated on important things could be … continue reading
1: Google’s People Analytics group wanted to understand how to build the perfect team.
Google has consistently been ranked by Fortune magazine as one of America’s top workplaces.
This result was no accident. “Even as it had grown to fifty-three thousand employees, Google had devoted enormous resources to studying workers’ happiness and productivity,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.
The People Analytics … continue reading
1: “Julia Rozovsky was twenty-five years old and uncertain what to do with her life when she decided it was time for a change,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.
After graduating from Tufts, Julia worked for a consulting firm, but she didn’t find it satisfying. She then worked as a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which Julia enjoyed, but wasn’t … continue reading
1: Why do some seniors thrive in nursing homes while others experience rapid physical and mental declines?
The answer may surprise you.
Those who flourish tend to be those who rebel “against the rigid schedules, set menus, and strict rules that the nursing homes tried to force upon them,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.
What do researchers call this group? The … continue reading
