Charles Duhigg Quotes

If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you'll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you'll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what's ahead when there's a well-rounded script inside your head.

Charles Wyly was born Oct 13, 1933, in Lake Providence, La., and for a period lived with his family in a shack without electricity or plumbing.

Nelson and Winter had spent more than a decade examining how companies work, trudging through swamps of data before arriving at their central conclusion: "Much of firm behavior," they wrote, is best "understood as a reflection of general habits and strategic orientations coming from the firm's past," rather than "the result of a detailed survey of the remote twigs of the decision tree."6.15

A few decades ago, many people didn't drink water outside of a meal. Then beverage companies started bottling the production of far-off springs, and now office workers unthinkingly sip bottled water all day long.

Between 1857 and 1929, while regulators largely stood idle, the American economy swung through 19 national boom-and-bust gyrations that sometimes threatened to wipe out whole industries within months.

The basal ganglia, in other words, stored habits even while the rest of the brain went to sleep.

You're much better off creating positive rewards, complimenting people for acting correctly, rather than punishing them when they act incorrectly.

Entrepreneurs do not try and create new types of smartphone technologies now because they know it's pointless: They're going to get sued almost immediately.

But to overpower the habit, we must recognize which craving is driving the behavior. If we're not conscious of the anticipation, then we're like the shoppers who wander, as if drawn by an unseen force, into Cinnabon.

And as workers were empowered to make more choices, their motivation skyrocketed. Just as Mauricio Delgado and the U.S. Marine Corps had found in other settings, when workers felt a greater sense of control, their drive expanded. Word

The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.

First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future:

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

For years, agency officials said that atrazine in drinking water posed almost no risk to humans or the environment.

Some of the tactics that are used by Foxconn and other companies throughout China is, if you are late, if you violate one of the small rules, some of the punishment is that you have to copy down quotations from the chairman of Foxconn: you have to write out confessions explaining why you were late and promising never to do it again.

At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit: willpower. Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.

First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards. If you

There is a woman named Wendy Wood, who did a study when she was at Duke, and she followed around college students to try to figure out how much of their day was decision-making versus how much was habit. And what she found was that about 45 percent of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.

Technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age.

In a flash order transaction, buy or sell orders are shown to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds before they are routed to everyone else. They are widely considered to give the few investors with access to the technology an unfair advantage, even by some of the marketplaces that offer the flash orders for a fee.

And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit.

In a sense, habits never really disappear. Once formed, they always remain in our neurology.

By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what's going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These

In his final years of life, Hopkins took to the lecture circuit. His talks on the "Laws of Scientific Advertising" attracted thousands of people.

Unlike other sports, which are largely determined by individual athletic ability or team strength, NASCAR requires its competitors to cooperate in order to win.

Cash from a reverse mortgage can be paid out in several ways, including a lump sum, a monthly payment, a line of credit, or a combination of those. If you do not need money right away, it is usually a bad idea to take all the money upfront, since it starts accumulating interest charges immediately.

Equipment sellers can pocket more than $2,500 every time they send a powered wheelchair to a patient and bill Medicare.

Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.

When the vast baby-boom generation exploded into adolescence in the 1960s, marketers exulted. Advertising consultants, always eager to coin a phrase, began happily explaining to corporations the difference between 'teenyboppers' and 'counterculture consumers.'

If you need five minutes every hour to look at tweets or to just surf the Internet, you need to schedule that into your schedule, allow yourself to do that. Because when people start procrastinating, what they've done is, they've tried to ignore that urge. They try to deny themselves time on Facebook or time surfing the web.

Once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it ... others have done so ... That, in some ways, is the point of this book. Perhaps a sleep-walking murderer can plausibly argue that he wasn't aware of his habit, and so he doesn't bear responsibility for his crime, but almost all of the other patterns that exist in most people's lives - how we eat and sleep and talk to our kids, how we unthinkingly spend our time, attention and money - those are habits that we know exist. And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work.

In surveys, many borrowers say reverse mortgages have improved their lives and provided money they needed for retirement.

How are you going to study tonight? What are you going to do tomorrow? How do you know you're ready for your test?' It trained me to set goals.

A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won't be ignored, that their mistakes won't be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.

Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To

Destructive organizational habits can be found within hundreds of industries and at thousands of firms. And almost always, they are the products of thoughtlessness, of leaders who avoid thinking about the culture and so let it develop without guidance. There are no organizations without institutional habits. There are only places where they are deliberately designed, and places where they are created without forethought, so they often grow from rivalries or fear.

Target isn't alone in its desire to predict consumers' habits. Almost every major retailer, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Kroger supermarkets, 1-800-Flowers, Olive Garden, Anheuser-Busch, the U.S. Postal Service, Fidelity Investments, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, Capital One, and hundreds of others, have "predictive analytics" departments devoted to figuring out consumers' preferences. "But Target has always been one of the smartest at this," said Eric Siegel, who runs a conference called Predictive Analytics World. "The data doesn't mean anything on its own. Target's good at figuring out the really clever questions.

By focusing on one pattern - what is known as a "keystone habit" - Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well. It's not

But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don't intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week - as the cues and rewards create a habit - until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries.

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize - they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.

General Atomics, the progenitor of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, started life in 1955 when a major military contractor, General Dynamics, feared that the military hardware market might dry up. It began exploring peacetime uses of atomic energy, but abandoned the effort when cold-war military spending took off.

The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.2

Government and other scientists have identified hundreds of chemicals that are linked to diseases in small concentrations and that are unregulated in drinking water or policed at limits that still pose serious risks.

And which new designers are most likely to have the right habits? The ones who have formed the right truces and found the right alliances. Truces are so important that new fashion labels usually succeed only if they are headed by people who left other fashion companies on good terms.

Fannie Mae has traditionally only bought and sold mortgages. But when a loan held by the company goes into foreclosure, Fannie Mae gains ownership of the underlying property until it is resold to new investors.

Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.

Older Americans are perfect telemarketing customers, analysts say, because they are often at home, rely on delivery services, and are lonely for the companionship that telephone callers provide.

Bureaucrats and politicians, rather than making decisions, were responding to cues with automatic routines in order to get rewards such as promotions or reelection.

Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals.

By the same rule, though, if we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviors - if we take control of the habit loop - we can force those bad tendencies into the background,

Atrazine - a herbicide often used on corn fields, golf courses and even lawns - has become one of the most common contaminants in American drinking water.

Older consumers don't want to be treated like teenagers; what's more, they don't want to believe they fall into any niche at all.

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores.

For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.

Even though it's hard to learn how to back your car out the driveway at first, once it becomes a habit, you can do it almost automatically and think about something else, like the meeting that you need to go to today or what's on the radio.

But to change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.

Your brain will eventually enjoy exercise for exercise sake, right; endorphins and endocannabinoids will create a sense of reward, but it doesn't know that at first.

Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.

Every choice we make in life is an experiment.

Vast databases of names and personal information, sold to thieves by large publicly traded companies, have put almost anyone within reach of fraudulent telemarketers.

When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons - if they feel like it's a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else - it's much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they're just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster. In both cases, people ignored the cookies. But when the students were treated like cogs, rather than people, it took a lot more willpower.

That's why they asked each other questions starting with "why." Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.

Because of reasons they were just beginning to understand, that one small shift in Lisa's perception that day in Cairo -the conviction that she had to give up smoking to accomplish her goal- had touched off a series of changes that would ultimately radiate out to every part of her life.
When researchers began examining images of Lisa's brain, they saw something remarkable: One set of neurological patterns -her old habits- have been overridden by new patterns. They could still see the neural activity of her old behaviors, but those impulses were crowded out by new urges. As Lisa's habits changed, so had her brain.

If you believe you can change - if you make it a habit - the change becomes real.

In focusing on tooth film, Hopkins was ignoring the fact that this same film has always covered people's teeth and hadn't seemed to bother anyone. The film is a naturally occurring membrane that builds up on teeth regardless of what you eat or how often you brush.2.7 People had never paid much attention to it, and there was little reason why they should: You can get rid of the film by eating an apple, running your finger over your teeth, brushing, or vigorously swirling liquid around your mouth. Toothpaste didn't do anything to help remove the film. In fact, one of the leading dental researchers of the time said that all toothpastes - particularly Pepsodent - were worthless.2.8 That didn't stop Hopkins from exploiting his discovery. Here, he decided, was a cue that could trigger a habit. Soon, cities were plastered with Pepsodent ads. "Just run your tongue across your teeth," read one. "You'll feel a film - that's what makes your teeth look 'off color' and invites decay.

Around New York City, samples collected at dozens of beaches or piers have detected the types of bacteria and other pollutants tied to sewage overflows. Though the city's drinking water comes from upstate reservoirs, environmentalists say untreated excrement and other waste in the city's waterways pose serious health risks.

One survey conducted in 2010 estimated that the average parent spends $6,800 on baby items before a child's first birthday.7.9

Champions don't do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they've learned.

If you look hard enough, you'll find that many of the products we use every day - chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins - are results of manufactured habits.

Fulgham told the bureau's director that if they gave him the authority to distribute control, he would cut the number of people needed from more than four hundred to just thirty employees and deliver Sentinel for $20 million in a bit over a year.

The paradox of learning how to make better decisions is that it requires developing a comfort with doubt. There

Studies of people who have successfully started new exercise routines, for instance, show they are more likely to stick with a workout plan if they choose a specific cue, such as running as soon as they get home from work, and a clear reward, such as a beer or an evening of guilt-free television.2.13 Research on dieting says creating new food habits requires a predetermined cue - such as planning menus in advance - and simple rewards for dieters when they stick to their intentions.

Often in companies, you'll see tensions between sales and marketing. Sales people will want to give discounts to clients because they often get paid a commission based on how much they sell. So they're always pushing to give discounts because that will increase sales. Marketing, however, is judged by overall profitability.

This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: THE HABIT LOOP

Back in Beijing, it was 9:56 A.M. - four minutes before the race's start - and Phelps stood behind his starting block, bouncing slightly on his toes. When the announcer said his name, Phelps stepped onto the block, as he always did before a race, and then stepped down, as he always did. He swung his arms three times, as he had before every race since he was twelve years old. He stepped up on the blocks again, got into his stance, and, when the gun sounded, leapt. Phelps knew that something was wrong as soon as he hit the water. There was moisture inside his goggles. He couldn

Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it's easier for the public to accept it.

In particular, objectives like SMART goals often unlock a potential that people don't even realize they possess. The reason, in part, is because goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires - or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can't match.

That psychology was grounded in two basic rules: First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards.

The evidence is clear: If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group. Belief

Public employee unions, in their defense, say politicians have unfairly made them into simplistic bogeymen, responsible for problems that have myriad causes. Not all government workers receive generous pensions, they note.

The secret, the alcoholics said, was God.

Your brain secretly wants that song, because it's so familiar to everything else you've already heard and liked. It just sounds right." There is evidence that a preference for things that sound "familiar" is a product of our neurology.

It's more like his habits have taken over. When the race arrives, he's more than halfway through his plan and he's been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.

Willpower isn't just a skill. It's a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there's less power left over for other things.

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They're much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are "keystone habits," and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate.

When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength." Heatherton.
The solution, Starbucks discovered, was turning self-discipline into an organizational habit.

And once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it.

Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes. A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. "Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage," one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. "Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win."4.14 Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.

Analysts say that one reason Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were privatized in the first place was to prevent political whims from dominating the mortgage marketplace.

Why does my brain decide that one memory is more important than another?

Keystone habits offer what is known within academic literature as "small wins." They help other habits to flourish by creating new structures, and they establish cultures where change becomes contagious.

When people have a willpower failure, it's because they haven't anticipated a situation that's going to come along.

America is the Saudi Arabia of coal.

Teenagers ultimately don't mind belonging to a group, because there's always the opportunity to eventually become someone new. The elderly, by definition, are running out of opportunities for reinvention.

Millions of people with respiratory diseases have relied on oxygen equipment, delivered to their homes, to help them breathe.

He got fired because he didn't report the incident, and so no one else had the opportunity to learn from it. Not sharing an opportunity to learn is a cardinal sin." Cultures

Everyone dies, and before that, most people eventually lose some of their faculties. So some people worry that as marketers get better at targeting the elderly, the line between advertising and unscrupulous manipulation will be harder to discern.

Choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives. When the Scottish patients filled out their booklets, or Travis studied the LATTE method, they decided ahead of time how to react to a cue - a painful muscle or an angry customer. When the cue arrived, the routine occurred.