Charles Duhigg Quotes

Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It's not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.

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.

If you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they'll prove you right

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.

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

Shampoo doesn’t have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpaste—now every company adds sodium laureth sulfate to make toothpaste foam more. There’s no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when there’s a bunch of suds around their mouth. Once the customer starts expecting that foam, the habit starts growing.

Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit -- unless you find new routines -- the pattern will unfold automatically.

There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

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

This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.

The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.

However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consiously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits' routines, and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it -- and every chapter in this book is devoted to illustrating a different aspect of why that control is real.

Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.

Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.

What we know from lab studies is that it's never too late to break a habit. Habits are malleable throughout your entire life. But we also know that the best way to change a habit is to understand its structure - that once you tell people about the cue and the reward and you force them to recognize what those factors are in a behavior, it becomes much, much easier to change.

The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

Hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it.

But countless studies have shown that a cue and a reward, on their own, aren't enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward--craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment--will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come.

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

The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.

Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.

Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.

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

Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.

A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement's leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.

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

What studies say the number one best way to start an exercise habit is to give yourself a reward that you genuinely enjoy.

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.

Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.

If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.

It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.

Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place, and put in the rat, and, by golloy, the old habit will rememerge right away. habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the sturctures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

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

As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.

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.

At some point, if you're changing a really deep-seated behavior, you're going to have a moment of weakness.

Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war. Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines—habits—that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done.

Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.

Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.

The waste from power plants is essentially what is left over when you burn coal. And as we all know, coal is a relatively dirty mineral.

I think I'm smart, and I know I was a good mom. But there wasn't a lot I could point to and say, that's why I'm special.

Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

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.

There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.

If you want to do something that requires willpower - like going for a run after work - you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day.

Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.