book-notes

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

by Charles Duhigg

Prologue: The Habit Cure

• By focusing on just one habit, or a “keystone habit,” we can teach ourselves to reprogram other parts of our lives as well.
• Most of the choices we make each day are not the product of well-considered decision making, but are instead habits.
• Habits can be changed if we understand how they work.

Part One: The Habits of Individuals

Ch 1: The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

• If you picture the brain as an onion, then the outside layers are the most recent additions from an evolutionary perspective.
• The outside layers are where the most complex thinking occurs; the inside layers control our automatic behaviors.
• The basal ganglia, near the center, recalls and acts on patterns, storing habits while the rest of the brain goes to sleep.
• Chunking is when the brain converts a sequence of habits into an automatic routine, and is at the root of how habits form.
• Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
• An efficient brain makes for a smaller head and therefore easier childbirth, and also allows us to devote mental energy to other tasks.
• Our brain looks for a cue to signal which pattern to use. Upon receiving a reward, it assesses whether this routine is worth remembering.
• Over time, the cue-routine-reward loop becomes more automatic, and the cue and reward cause anticipation and craving. Eventually a habit is born.
• Our brain cannot tell the difference between good and bad habits, and so bad habits are always lurking, waiting for the right cues and rewards.
• Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life.
• It is possible to learn and make unconscious choices without remembering anything about the lesson or decision making.
• By learning to observe the cues and rewards of habit loops, we can change the routines.

Ch 2: The Craving Brian: How to Create New Habits

• To cultivate a new habit, create a craving. A craving is what makes cues and rewards work, and what powers the habit loop.
• As a habit becomes stronger, the cue begins eliciting a pleasure response from our brain, thereby creating anticipation and cravings.
• New habits form by putting together a cue, routine, and reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.
• To overpower a habit, we must recognize which craving is driving the behavior. Otherwise we will subconsciously submit to it.
• A cue and reward, on their own, are not enough for a new habit to last; a craving prompted by the cue is always required.
• Think about a reward to create a craving; this will make it easier to endure the routine.
• What we crave doesn’t have to have any material benefit, such as tingling from toothpaste or foaming from shampoo.
• Cravings are what drive habits, and figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.

Ch 3: The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

• It is easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there is something familiar at the beginning and end.
• To change a habit, you must keep the old cue and deliver the old reward, but must insert a new routine.
• To create a new habit you must trigger a new craving; but to change an old habit, you must address an old craving with a new routine.
• Often, we don’t really understand the cravings driving our behaviors until we look for them.
• Habit replacement can work well until a stressor appears. But a strong belief can help preserve the reworked habit loop.
• People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a community creates belief.
• When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real.
• Attacking the behaviors we think of as addictions by modifying the behaviors surrounding them is one of the most effective modes of treatment.

Part Two: The Habits of Successful Organizations

Ch 4: Keystone Habits, or the Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

• Keystone habits are the habits that matter most when remaking businesses and lives. They start a process that, over time, transforms everything.
• Success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.
• Exercise, eating with your family, and making your bed, when done habitually, start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold.
• Small wins have an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves, and are how keystone habits create widespread change.
• They fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.
• The second way keystone habits encourage change by creating structures that help other habits flourish.
• The final way keystone habits encourage widespread change is by creating cultures where new values become ingrained. They make hard choices easier.
• Grit is the tendency to work strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.
• Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values that, in a difficult or uncertain moment, we might otherwise forget.

Ch 5: Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

• Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.
• Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does individual talent.
• Willpower is not a skill, but instead like a muscle; it gets tired as it works harder, and you can completely exhaust it.
• If you strengthen your willpower muscles in one part of your life, that strength will spill over and touch everything.
• We can teach ourselves how to handle moments of adversity by creating willpower habit loops.
• Starbucks teaches the LATTE method: Listen to the customer, Acknowledge the problem, Take action, Thank them, then Explain why the problem occurred.
• Willpower becomes habit by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.
• Increasing someone’s agency, or their feeling of control or decision-making authority, taxes them less in situations that require self-control.

Ch 6: The Power of Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and Design

• Destructive organizational habits are usually the product of thoughtlessness, or of leaders who avoid curating a culture.
• Organizations do not make rational choices based on deliberate decision making, even though it may seem that way.
• Instead, organizations are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions.
• These habits, or “routines,” provide hundreds of unwritten rules that companies need to operate.
• Among the most important benefits of routines is that they create truces between potentially warring groups or individuals within an organization.
• If you follow the established patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won’t destroy the company or your livelihood.
• Leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make clear who is in charge.
• During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equatable balance of power.
• Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits. Wise leaders prolong a sense of emergency on purpose.

Ch 7: How Target Knows What You Want Before You Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

• Customers act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past behavior with little regard to current goals.
• People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event; and they often don’t notice or care.
• Our brains crave familiarity in music because familiarity is how we manage to hear without becoming distracted by all the sound.
• By playing a new song between songs that are already popular, you make that new song seem familiar, thereby mitigating its risk.
• If you dress something new in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it. You make the novel seem familiar.

Ch 8: Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

• Movements begin as the habits of friendship, grow through habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants’ sense of self.
• On the whole, our deepest relationships tend to be with people who look like us, earn the same amount of money, and come from similar backgrounds.
• There is a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.
• Weak ties are people who share membership in social circles, but aren’t directly connected by the strong ties of friendship.
• Weak ties give us access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong. They move a political or social movement beyond an initial clique.
• The habits of peer pressure spread through weak ties, and gain their authority through communal expectations.
• The strong ties of friendship and the weak ties of peer pressure merge to create incredible momentum and permit widespread social change.
• For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must be self-propelling. This requires giving people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own.
• Everyone’s identity must change in a movement. You start to see yourself as part of a vast social enterprise, and then you really believe you are.

Ch 9: The Neurology of Free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

• Courts and juries have decided that some powerful habits overwhelm our capacity to make choices, and so we’re not responsible for what we do.
• People with sleep terrors are in the grip of terrible anxieties, but their brains have shut down except for primitive regions, or “central pattern generators.”
• These generators create habits, or automatic behaviors so ingrained that they happen with almost no input from higher regions of the brain.
• For problematic gamblers, a near miss is a prompt to put down another bet; for others, it creates apprehension and is a prompt for quitting.
• For Aristotle, habits reigned supreme. He thought that the behaviors that occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves.
• Every habit is malleable, but we must decide to change it. You have not just the freedom, but the responsibility, to remake them.
• The will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change, and an important method for creating that belief is habits.
• If you believe you can change, that change becomes real. Your habits are what you choose them to be.