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.