The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Following a prologue in which a subject transforms utterly transforms herself, Duhigg lays out the structure of the book. "Part One: The Habits of Individuals" is broken into three chapters. Chapter 1, "The Habit Loop" describes the (wait for it...) the habit loop, which is the foundation for everything that follows. This is a 3-step process, in which a cue triggers a routine which is reinforced by a reward. Duhigg does a great job of describing the science that describes this pattern, and the science which explains it, without making the information so dry that you can't absorb it. Chapter 2, "The Craving Brain," examines individuals who suffered neurological damage and the impact that habits had on their ability to perform various functions and routines. This chapter had heart: imagining the daily lives of these individuals and their caregivers brought some real drama to the study of how habits operate in our brains. The point of the chapter was basically that habits are surprisingly delicate, to use Duhigg's term, and can be easily disrupted, with the right information. Chapter 3, "The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs" focused on the coaching career of of NFL coach Tony Dungy, and how he used his understanding of habits to transform the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indiana Colts. The Golden Rule is You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. Midway through Chapter 3 Duhigg breaks away from NFL to consider Alcoholics Anonymous. If Chapter 2 is the heart of Part One, then Chapter 3 is the soul: both AA and Dungy's football program achieve their greatest success when the people operating under their respective guidance both arrive at belief in something greater than the individual. Duhigg shares more than that in this chapter, but there is a ton of information in this chapter about how habits can be disrupted to make way for more positive patterns. In Chapter 4, "Keystone Habits, Or the Ballad of Paul O'Neill: Which Habits Matter Most," Duhigg offers Paul O'Neill of Alcoa to illustrate how altering a single habit in an organization (albeit in a highly focused and disciplined manner) can transform the total organization. Chapter 5, "Starbucks and the Habit of Success," opens with a powerful story of a young man who was raised by drug addicts, and his subsequent struggles to maintain his employment. His pattern of failure changed when he went to work at Starbucks. This chapter discusses the importance of willpower and its limitations, how willpower can be strengthened, and planning for success. Chapter 6, "The Power of a Crisis," uses the examples of doctor error in a Rhode Island hospital, which Duhigg asserts was made inevitable by the toxic atmosphere in the workplace, and a fire in King's Cross Station, London, which was made inevitable by strictly observed divisions of labor, to provide opportunities for transforming the cultures of those two organizations into something stronger and more effective than could have been created as Paul O'Neill did, just by sheer force of leadership. Chapter 7, "How Target Knows What You Want Before You Do" is probably the most widely read section of the book, as it was excerpted by the New York Times (Duhigg's employer) and Forbes, among others. It's readable and informative, and fairly creepy in disclosing how much information we unwittingly distribute about ourselves, and how unlikely we are to curtail the activities that make it possible for Target to know a woman is pregnant before any of her immediate family members do. Several reviewers have described these sections as "filler," but I found that they addressed complaints common to people who claim to want to change their habits but lack willpower, and provided guideposts to an attentive reader for what qualities set one up for success. I did not find these sections to be filler, but powerful illustrations of how a thorough understanding of the mechanisms behind habits can provide the tools for large scale change, and a discussion of the nature of personal responsibility. Although the sections were more directly addressing corporate bodies, the information was driven by the individuals within those organizations and therefore applicable to me and my own private attempts to alter my habits. Part Three was an interesting summing up. Chapter 8, "Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott" addressed the components that made those movements (if one can call a mega-church a movement) successful. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, particularly, was really interesting: we celebrate Rosa Parks's heroism, deservedly, but the fact is, several other individuals had made similar stands without sparking the Civil Rights Movement. Duhigg's explanation for why Parks had the right stuff to make it happen makes for informative reading (the short version being, Parks was a genuinely nice and widely connected member of Montgomery society). Chapter 9, "The Neurology of Free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?" puts all the preceding information in perspective. It contrasts Brian Thomas, an Englishman who killed his wife while sleepwalking, with Angie Bachmann, a compulsive gambler who lost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. He describes the neurology of sleepwalking activity and of a compulsive activity such as gambling (or drinking, or binge eating) and concludes that habits are under are control and can be altered, which argues for self-awareness and personal responsibility. The information provided in the body of the book was enough for me to understand how to create a road map for how to change my habits, but Duhigg did provide a digest of the material in his Appendix, "A Reader's Guide to Using These Ideas." Overall, I found this book to be both readable and powerful, and I look forward to implementing what I've learned to further my own goals.

New York Times investigative reporter Charles Duhigg has assembled a compelling set of stories about the overarching influence habit plays in our lives, its neurological underpinnings, how habits develop, how they may be altered, and how they may be used to undermine us. Duhigg's curiosity leads him to variegated and interesting applications of the concept of habit formation, from Tony Dungy's quest for a super bowl ring to the selling of Pepsodent, a milestone in advertising history. These stories of corporate manipulation are among Duhigg's most persuasive. Most appalling was his story of an Iowa housewife who married early and accomplished little, except that she was adept at gambling. Her humdrum life became rewarding when she was able to order comped suites for friends' weddings because Harrah's valued her patronage so highly. Her anxiety was always relieved when she sat down at the black jack table. Harrah's casino showered her with personal attention. Even after she went bankrupt, Harrah's continued to call, making offers of benefits she could not refuse. Finally, after many hard knocks, she was given a second chance when her parents left a nice inheritance. Of course, she continued to answer Harrah's calls (they got upset when she declined to come) and gambled the inheritance away. Then there is Boutique Target, spending vast sums to find statistical changes in spending patterns when women get pregnant. Once identified as a likely pregnancy (when her receipts show increased purchases of lotions, expanded waist pants, etc.), a woman begins to receive relevant discount offers, subtly hidden within coupon books. Pregnant women are "a gold mine," leading to infant, child, and family expenditures worth thousands. The Boutique is going to be sure they get their share of the action. Like Harrah's, they take advantage of customer habit to influence purchases to their benefit. To the good, Duhigg recounts the story of a young man named Travis whose drug-addicted parents taught him none of the social skills required for success or even for holding down a menial job. He was a bright kid who knew that when the house was clean, that meant mom and dad had switched from heroin to meth and things were about to get seriously out of control. Travis dropped out of school, failed at McDonald's, then got a break when he was hired as a barista at Starbucks. It seems that Starbucks had determined that world domination was based on convincing large numbers of people to pay four dollars a throw for a cup of coffee. This meant not only the addition of special nutrients such as heavy cream and sugary Italian flavoring, but also the emphatic recognition of the customer's personal value to the outlet. Starbucks taught its baristas to show care and consideration for customers. Travis took fifty hours of in-house courses, equivalent of a college semester, learning habits of positive customer relations. He wrote out and memorized the LATTE method: Listen to the customer. Acknowledge their complaint. Take action by solving the problem. Explain why the problem occurred. Travis paid attention. At age 26, he managed two Starbucks outlets, had no debt and a 401K. Travis had been socialized by a corporation. The first third of the book deals with habit formation (cue, craving, routine, reward) and an appendix tells the reader how to change habits. The program is a bit reductive and sounds like cognitive behavioral therapy by another name, which it pretty much is. Nuances of interpersonal differences, the effects of various psychological states and diagnoses, the limits imposed by life circumstance, these are not factors that Duhigg treats in detail. To his credit, Duhigg deals with higher functions than the simple changing of unconscious processes, like changing a pattern of cookie eating in the afternoon (a rather facile but helpful piece about his own habit change). His discussion of the success of Alcoholics Anonymous includes speculations that belief is sometimes necessary to overcome a life-long, pervasive habit, such as alcohol addiction. It is insufficient to deal with the physical addiction and to replace the habit with a new routine (e.g., calling a sponsor or going to a meeting instead of a bar). The application of a belief that things can get better has been shown to assist addicts who suffer stress or temptation. Duhigg points out that when the chips were down, Tony Dungy's football team failed to apply the positive habits that had taken them to the playoffs. They failed to believe that the habits would work in the clutch. After Dungy lost a son, the team thereafter came together for his sake and won the Superbowl. Duhigg attributes the win to belief. It seems equally likely that this success came from increased motivation and affiliation among team members rallying around their beloved coach. In my experience, clients often change when they embrace values more important to them than the rewards of a self-destructive habit. Rather than drinking, the client chooses to establish habits consistent with enhancing a child's life. A four-decade smoker stops cold turkey when his new love demands kissing sweet breath. It is the researcher's job to perform the experiments necessary to establish such a point. Duhigg, as a reporter, has done a yeoman's job of ferreting out the available findings and interviewing the authors. He cannot be held responsible for what social science has not yet ascertained. What Duhigg does best is to spin a fine story, from Paul O'Neill turning Alcoa around by concentrating on habits of safety to the seeming exclusion of everything else (he knew that establishment of habits of safe production would lead to habits of efficient production), to the story of Travis's socialization at Starbucks. If he goes a bit far afield by shoe horning the Montgomery bus boycott into a story of habit change, so what? It's still a fun story and well worth reading. The world may not change, but lots of people will be better off for having read this book.

I absolutely love this book! It is well written, clear and incredibly helpful to understand ourselves, and how our brain works. I use this new knowledge every day. Thank you.

Lo recomiendo, aún no lo concluyó pero está muy bueno el libro

الكتاب مهم جدا لان فهمك سيكولوجية العاده و قدرتك على انك توقف عاده زي التدخين او تبني عاده زي الجيم العادات هي الي بتشكل شخصيتك حياتك فلوسك انصح جدا بيه لو الانجليزي بتاعك كويس

Nem veya ıslaklıktan dolayı kitap kabarmış bir şekilde elime ulaştı

Through the slow, incremental work of science we are diligently reverse engineering our aeon-old soft and hardware to arrive at deep insights into how we tick. In The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg uses his considerable journalistic skills of brevity and story-telling to take us inside how we build some of our most common psychological routines. Like a container ship ploughing the world's oceans can't help pick up a community of marine fauna, our minds, scything through an ocean of experience, get stuck with a seething mass of often chaotic, sometimes damaging, habits. Turns out the ones we often focus on, the bad ones, are simply a particular species of a panoply of simple cue-routine-reward cycles that means we can get from one complex task to the next without blowing mental gaskets. Which means, basically, much of our daily experience is constructed from habits, or, as the more-quoted business aphorism goes, we are indeed, '...what we repeatedly do.' We develop habits because we only have a limited strip of deep thinking neocortex wrapped around the outer edges of our brains and if this was constantly used for every response we would very soon run out of gigabytes to think with. Habits are small sub-routines downloaded into the deeper, more primitive parts of our brain when we have mastered a skill or process. They are initiated virtually automatically by a cue, involve a repeat behaviour - routine - and always finish up with a reward, which serves to reinforce them. Without habits, brushing your teeth or tying your shoelaces would absorb your attention fully and there'd be no thinking space left to plan the day ahead. So, knowing that these automatic thinking routines stick in our brains like those barnacles on a ship, we need to attend very carefully to the ones we let stick around. Most habits are about simple efficiency, taking learnt things and clearing our mind space so new things can be taken on board and some are overwhelming good, like the habit of exercise or reading daily. It is the conscious choice to adapt your habits and look at your behaviours in a new light that this book provides which is so very helpful. Select any habit, good or bad, and you can forensically unpack it, unpicking its antecedents and understanding its triggers before, armed with this knowledge, you can go at the wild garden of your psychology with the pruning shears. Habits are everywhere and they can be tamed and beaten, even some of the really damaging ones, if we explore the cues and the rewards that drive them, replacing the unwanted routines they set us unthinkingly performing. And this is the most powerful insight of this book, the opportunity it gives us to gain a deep insight into our worst habits and bring them within the scope of our will through that awareness. The way to do this, break the cycle, involves using the cue and delivering the reward, but changing the routine in the middle. It also means using an experimental approach to your own psychological reactions and trying out solutions that might move you forward. The author uses an example of how he tried to tackle a new habit that arose whilst he was writing the book. The habit involved getting up mid-afternoon from his desk at work and wondering down to the cafeteria, having a chat with co-workers over a coffee and eating a chocolate cookie. These additional calories five times a week inevitably caused him to put on a few pounds, so he reverse-engineered the cycle and tried to understand this new and irritating habit from the inside out. He decided that the cue was the need to stretch his legs after a long afternoon of working and after some failed attempts to prevent the purchase of the cookie, that the reward wasn't actually the chocolatey snack, but the social connection he gained with his co-workers. Once the cue and reward were nailed, he just needed to amend the routine in the middle which he did by making sure he packed enough fruit to replace the biscuit as he went through the habit of going to the cafeteria and meeting up with co-workers. So, in a sense, the habit remained via the cue and the reward, but he'd just changed the automatic and slightly damaging routine in the middle of it. A book full of powerful insights into how our minds work and it also has sections dealing with the organisational habits of large businesses and how these can be maximised for the benefit of the company. It also goes onto the explore in its least convincing section how paradigm shifts in social values can be driven by processes as automatic as habits. Intelligent, readable and insightful and therefore highly recommended. ***** 5 stars