

In 2012, Google’s Project Aristotle embarked on a mission to discover why and, more importantly, when this is true. It will be much easier to start now.Īs any sports fan knows, the sum is often greater than its parts. Explain to yourself why a certain boring task such as writing emails might matter: linking it to a meaningful future goal lights up your striatum because of the promised reward in the future.

Your striatum wants you to be on top of things – and gives up on you when you’re strictly following orders. Studies have shown that the striatum lights up even when you’re playing boring games since its activity is often elicited by feelings of expectation and excitement, studies – such as guessing if a number is higher or lower than five – just because you have an option to choose. Fascinatingly enough, because of this, it is also directly responsible for your motivation as well: a couple of burst vessels inside it, and there’s a big chance that you might become apathetic and lose your drive or momentum altogether.įortunately, in the absence of injury, you can always trick your striatum into cooperating. Located in your forebrain, the striatum is a cluster of neurons that coordinates multiple aspects of cognition, including reinforcement and reward perception.

So, get ready to explore each of these eight ideas and prepare to learn how to separate yourself from the merely busy and become genuinely productive in this relentless and rapidly changing world of ours. It delves into the eight ideas that seem most important in expanding your efficiency and demonstrates how you can connect these ideas to become smarter, faster, and better at everything you do. “Smarter Faster Better” by Charles Duhigg is a book about how to recognize these choices that fuel true productivity. Most people think that productivity is about “working more or sweating harder.” As it happens, nothing could be further from the truth than that: rather than being simply “a product of spending longer hours at your desk or making bigger sacrifices,” productivity is “about making certain choices in certain ways.”
