Top highlights from The Power of Habit
Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.
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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. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.
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The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.
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Champions dont 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 theyve learned.
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Willpower isnt just a skill. Its a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so theres less power left over for other things.
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Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.
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If you believe you can change - if you make it a habit - the change becomes real.
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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
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This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.
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THE FRAMEWORK: Identify the routine Experiment with rewards Isolate the cue Have a plan
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As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their livesin the gym, or a money management programthat strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.
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Companies arent families. Theyre battlefields in a civil war.
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Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.
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...hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it...
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Simply giving employees a sense of agency- a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority - can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.
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If you want to do something that requires willpowerlike going for a run after workyou have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day,
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There's a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits - practical, emotional, and intellectual - systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be." - William James
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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 wasnt aware of his habit, and so he doesnt bear responsibility for his crime, but almost all of the other patterns that exist in most peoples 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.
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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 realizethey are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.
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theres nothing you cant do if you get the habits right.
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Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not. Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.5.2
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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.
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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.
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This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.
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Thats why signing kids up for piano lessons or sports is so important. It has nothing to do with creating a good musician or a five-year-old soccer star, said Heatherton. When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength. A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.
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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, its easier for the public to accept it.
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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.
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Champions dont do extraordinary things, Dungy would explain. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits theyve learned.
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Most economists are accustomed to treating companies as idyllic places where everyone is devoted to a common goal: making as much money as possible. In the real world, thats not how things work at all. Companies arent big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that no one can mount a coup.Companies arent families. Theyre 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 days work done.
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Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.
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Foaming is a huge reward, said Sinclair, the brand manager. Shampoo doesnt have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpastenow every company adds sodium laureth sulfate to make toothpaste foam more. Theres no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when theres a bunch of suds around their mouth. Once the customer starts expecting that foam, the habit starts growing.
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Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
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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 habitunless you find new routinesthe pattern will unfold automatically.
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Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.
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It wasnt God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a difference. 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.
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If you believe you can changeif you make it a habitthe change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occursand becomes automaticits not only real, it starts to seem inevitable.
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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.
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the key to victory was creating the right routines.
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Habits never really disappear. Theyre encoded into the structures of our brain, and thats 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 cant tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, its always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards. This explains why its so hard to create exercise habits, for instance, or change what we eat. Once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather than running, or snacking whenever we pass a doughnut box, those patterns always remain inside our heads. By the same rule, though, if we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviorsif we take control of the habit loopwe can force those bad tendencies into the background, just as Lisa Allen did after her Cairo trip. And once someone creates a new pattern, studies have demonstrated, going for a jog or ignoring the doughnuts becomes as automatic as any other habit.
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Want to exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up, and a reward, such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that smoothie, or about the endorphin rush youll feel. Allow yourself to anticipate the reward. Eventually, that craving will make it easier to push through the gym doors every day.
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I love Paul O'Neill, but you could not pay me enough to work for him again" one official told me. "the man has never encountered an answer he can't turn into another twenty hours of work.
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This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that were not really aware they exist, so were often blind to their influence. But as we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning.
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Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but theyre not. Theyre habits.
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Changing any habit requires determination.
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to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits routines, and find alternatives.
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The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.
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Habits, he noted, are what allow us to do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. Once we choose who we want to be, people grow to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.
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Take, for instance, studies from the past decade examining the impacts of exercise on daily routines.4.10 When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. 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. Its not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change. Exercise spills over, said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. Theres something about it that makes other good habits easier.
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Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often.
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A company with dysfunctional habits cant turn around simply because a leader orders it. Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisisor create the perception of crisisand cultivate the sense that something must change, until everyone is finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with each day.
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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 habitunless you find new routinesthe pattern will unfold automatically. However,
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When you learn to force yourself to go to the gym or start your homework or eat a salad instead of a hamburger, part of whats happening is that youre changing how you think, said Todd Heatherton, a researcher at Dartmouth who has worked on willpower studies.5.11 People get better at regulating their impulses. They learn how to distract themselves from temptations. And once youve gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is
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If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause widespread shifts. However, identifying keystone habits is tricky. To find them, you have to know where to look. Detecting keystone habits means searching out certain characteristics. 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. But as ONeill and countless others have found, crossing the gap between understanding those principles and using them requires a bit of ingenuity.
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If you try to scare people into following Christs example, its not going to work for too long. The only way you get people to take responsibility for their spiritual maturity is to teach them habits of faith. Once that happens, they become self-feeders. People follow Christ not because youve led them there, but because its who they are.
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If you want to have Christ-like character, then you just develop the habits that Christ had, one of Saddlebacks course manuals reads. All of us are simply a bundle of habits.Our goal is to help you replace some bad habits with some good habits that will help you grow in Christs likeness. Every Saddleback member is asked to sign a maturity covenant card promising to adhere to three habits: daily quiet time for reflection and prayer, tithing 10 percent of their income, and membership in a small group. Giving everyone new habits has become a focus of the church. Once we do that, the responsibility for spiritual growth is no longer with me, its with you. Weve given you a recipe, Warren told me. We dont have to guide you, because youre guiding yourself. These habits become a new self-identity, and, at that point, we just need to support you and get out of your way.
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Later, he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change. And that one of the most important methods for creating that belief was habits. Habits, he noted, are what allow us to do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. Once we choose who we want to be, people grow to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.
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everything was a reactionand eventually a habitrather than a choice.
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the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change.
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Were not in the coffee business serving people, Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks, told me. Were in the people business serving coffee.
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