Top Quotes: “The Power of Habit” — Charles Duhigg

Background: A lot of my goals require me to change how I do things, so I thought I could get some guidance in that arena from this book. This read is a favorite of CEOs and entrepreneurs as it provides guidance on how to build a strong company by fostering habits like willpower and communication. The book is split into three parts: personal habits, company culture, and social change.While I was in it mostly for the personal habits, I found the latter two sections to be just as engaging. It’s a very popular book and I can see why — it can offer anyone some literally life-changing tips on how to enact (and solidify) changes you need or want to make.

Changing Your Habits

“More than 40% of the actions people perform each day aren’t actual decisions but habits.”

“It’s easier to adopt a new behavior if there is something familiar at the beginning and end. This is the Golden Rule of habit change: to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.” Example: a smoker chews gum every time she feels stressed or anxious (instead of smoking) and gets satisfaction.

“For habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible. Belief grows out of a communal experience, even if that community is only as large as two people.” Example: AA meetings where folks tell their stories of quitting drinking even when it was tough and make it seem possible.

Keystone Habits

“Keystone habits help other habits to flourish by creating new structures, and they establish cultures were change becomes contagious (especially in a company culture).”

“Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill focused on the keystone habit of worker safety through daily incident reports and encouragement for everyone to speak up with concerns and ideas, which increased employee satisfaction, productivity, and communication — therein also increasing profits. Alcoa workers handling molten aluminum are now less likely to get injured than tax accountants.”

“Starbucks needed to train its employees to deliver a burst of pep with every coffee to justify the high cost. They chose to focus on the keystone habit of willpower (aka self-discipline), which allows baristas to put aside personal problems and treat all customers well, putting all employees through 50 hours in classrooms in their first year and assigning them mentors.”

Small Wins

“Small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win — leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach. The American Library Association’s Force on Gay Liberation decided to focus on one modest goal: convincing the Library of Congress to reclassify books about the gay liberation movement from Abnormal Sexual Relations, which included sexual crimes, to a less pejorative category. It was a minor tweak, but news of the policy spread throughout the nation, spurring openly gay politicians to run for office and pushing the American Psychiatric Association to rewrite the definition of homosexuality so it was no longer a mental illness — paving the way for state laws that made it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation.”

“Small wins are often like miniature experiments that test implicit theories about resistance and opportunity and uncover both resources and barriers that were invisible before.”

Willpower

“Willpower can be measured through delayed gratification — wait a few minutes to eat a marshmallow and you’ll then get another marshmallow. Kids who chose delayed gratification later in life had better grades, friendships, and ability to handle problems, plus lower drug use rates.”

“Willpower is a skill but also a muscle that gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things. If you want to do something that requires willpower later in the day, you have to conserve your willpower energy during the day. In an experiment, students who ate cookies and couldn’t eat radishes in front of them had more patience and persistence working on a puzzle afterward than those with radishes and cookies in front of them but couldn’t eat the cookies.”

“When you force yourself to be disciplined about something like going to the gym, part of what’s happening is that you’re changing how you think. People get better at regulating impulses and learn how to distract themselves from temptations. And once you’ve gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is practiced at helping you focus on a goal. This is why signing kids up for piano lessons or sports is so important — they can start building self-regulatory strength. A five year old who can follow the ball for 10 minutes becomes a 6th grader who can start his homework on time.”

“In an experiment, patients recovering from surgery who wrote plans for the week built around inflection points when they knew their pain — and thus the temptation to quit — would be strongest were much quicker to recover than those who didn’t write these plans. They detailed every obstacle they would confront, and came up with a solution for each ahead of time. The patients were telling themselves how they were going to make it over the hump.”

“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. When treated poorly, it takes a lot more willpower to do something difficult or unpleasurable. Giving employees control to make decisions over their schedules, work environment, uniforms, store layout, greeting to customers, etc. (asking them to use their intellect and creativity) increases productivity.”

Timing & Context

“A serious and prolonged sense of crisis at an organization is the best possible opportunity to make large, lasting positive changes. After a fire killed 30 people in London’s Underground, the investigator called for 90 days of public hearings and told reporters that commuters were in danger while riding subways, allowing for leadership to be fired, regulatory laws to be passed, and a safety manager to be installed at each station.”

“Radio listeners listen longer to songs that sound familiar and fit cleanly within what you expect for a genre or an artist. This is because familiarity is how we manage to hear important sounds without becoming distracted by all the sounds we hear in songs and in life.”

“’Hey Ya’ was a very catchy yet very different and unfamiliar type of song so it needed to be played sandwiched between two extremely familiar and sticky songs from popular artists. Radio stations have to take risks on new songs; otherwise, people stop listening. But what listeners really want are songs they already like. So you have to make new songs seem familiar as fast as possible. To make new things seem similar, they must be dressed in old clothes.”

“Companies can’t openly market to habits we haven’t adopted or, even worse, are unwilling to admit to ourselves — like our secret affinity for soapy ballads or ice cream. So supermarket owners tout their apples and tomatoes while making sure you pass M&Ms by the register.”

“When marketing to pregnant women based on predictive data like buying lots of washcloths, lotions, or DHA vitamins, Target had to sandwich targeted coupons between unrelated coupons like lawnmowers [to avoid seeming creepy].”

Social Ties

“Rosa Parks was sitting in a center row of a bus where either whites or blacks could sit because the back black section was full. When one white passenger was standing, the driver asked her and 3 others to move. She refused after the other three did since only the one passenger was standing and was arrested.”

“There had been several other black people jailed for breaking Montgomery’s bus segregation laws before Parks, but none of those arrests had resulted in boycotts or protests. But Parks was deeply respected and embedded in her community. Her membership in dozens of social networks across Montgomery allowed her friends to muster a response before the community’s normal apathy could take hold. Everyone agreed she gave more than she got — she was Secretary of a local NAACP chapter, attended church, oversaw a youth organization, and volunteered at shelters, botanical gardens, and hospitals. She had strong ties with groups that didn’t usually come into contact with each other — like field hands and college professors.”

“A few hours after [Parks’] arrest, a friend called an impromptu meeting and suggested that everyone boycott the buses on the day Parks was to appear in court. She and others passed out flyers and since many folks knew [Parks], they were willing to fight against her being treated unjustly. People have no problem ignoring strangers’ injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize.”

“The sense of obligation that held Montgomery’s black community together (weak ties) was activated after Parks’ friends started spreading the word.”

“Every black minister in town told his congregations that every black church in the city had agreed to the one day protest. The message was clear: it would be embarrassing for any parishioner to sit on the sidelines. A newspaper article said that it was assumed every black citizen would participate. Black taxi drivers agreed to take black passengers that day for the same cost as a bus fare.”

“King preached non-violence which gave the city’s black community a new sense of identity and taught them new habits of meeting weekly (or nightly when incidents occurred). A year after Parks’ arrest, the Supreme Court ruled that the bus segregation law was outlawed by the Constitution and the buses had to be integrated.”

“Peer pressure is key to organizing; if you ignore the social obligations of your neighborhood, you risk losing your social standing and the social benefits you have from being part of an alumni association, church, etc.”

“A social movement starts because of social habits of friendship and strong ties; it grows because of the habits of a community and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods together; it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.”

“The students who applied and actually participated in the Freedom Summer (rather than applying but then deciding to stay home) were enmeshed in the types of communities where both their close friends and casual acquaintances expected them to get on the bus (religious or do-gooder organizations rather than frats or student organizations). Once their communities knew they’d been accepted into the Freedom Summer, it was impossible to stay home. Students in other communities could withdraw and suffer little or no decline in social hierarchy.”

Using Habits for Evil

“Casinos track customers through loyalty programs and encourage employees to get to know patrons, offering free gambling money, rooms, etc. to them knowing that they’ll go and succumb to spending lots of their own money and increase company profit.”

“Slot machines have been updated to deliver more near wins, free spins, and small payouts that make people who are pathological gamblers respond to these cues as signs they’re about to win big and continue playing.”

The Framework to Habit Change

“If you believe you have control over yourself and your destiny, that you have the free will to change, you can. You have to believe you can change and make it a habit to make the change real. Once that choice occurs and becomes automatic — it’s not only real, it starts to become inevitable.”

“The way we habitually think of our surroundings and ourselves creates the world that each of us inhabits. Unthinking choices and invisible decisions that surround us every day become visible again just by looking at them.”

“To Make a Change: 1. Identify the routine. What are you doing and why are you doing it? 2. Experiment with rewards. Test different hypotheses to determine which craving is driving the cue — are you going to the cafeteria for ice cream every day to socialize, because you’re hungry, or because you need a break from work? Try a routine that meets each of these needs to test. After each tests, write down the first 3 things that come to mind when you finish the routine — emotions, thoughts, reflections on how you’re feeling, or the first 3 words that pop into your head. Set an alarm for 15 minutes and ask if you’re still craving your original routine. 3. Isolate the cue. Almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people, immediately preceding action. Turn these into questions and ask yourself these questions a few days in a row: Where was I? What was my emotional state? Who else was around? What action preceded the urge? 4. Have a plan. Make it specific and set an alarm. Eventually, it’ll become a routine.”