The Power of Habit – why we do what we do and how to change, by Charles Duhigg
Prologue
Lisa had focused on changing just one habit – smoking – at first. By focusing on one pattern – what is known as a “keystone habit” – lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well.
More than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.
The book is divided into 3 parts. The first section focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives. The second part examines the habits of successful companies and organizations. The third part looks at the habits of societies.
Transforming a habit isn’t necessarily easy or quick. It isn’t always simple. But it is possible.
Ch 1 – the habit loop. How habits work.
The process in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine is known as “chunking” and it’s at the root of how habits form.
Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
The process within our brain is a 3 step loop. 1st 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.
Habits aren’t destiny. Habits can be ignored, changed or replaced. When a habit emerges, the brains 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.
Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.
We might not remember the experiences that create our habits, but once they are lodged within our brains they influence how we act, often without our realization.
Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same – the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines.
Ch 2 – the craving brain. How to create new habits.
Claude Hopkins turned Pepsodent into one of the best known products on earth and in the process helped create a toothbrushing habit.
He showed how new habits can be cultivated and grown. He created a craving and that craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.
Pepsodent customers, during research by the company, said that if they forgot to use Pepsodent, they realized their mistake because they missed that cool, tingling sensation in their mouths. They expected – they craved – that slight irritation. Claude Hopkins wasn’t selling beautiful teeth. He was selling a sensation. Once people craved that cool tingling – once they equated it with cleanliness – brushing became a habit.
The tingling doesn’t make the toothpaste work any better. It just convinces people it’s doing its job.
First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second clearly define the rewards.
Habits create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that we’re not aware they exist, so we’re often blind to their influence.
Most food sellers locate their kiosks in food courts. Cinnabon tries to locate their stores away from other food stalls. Why? Because Cinnabon executives want the smell of cinnamon rolls to waft down the hallways and around corners uninterrupted, so that shoppers will start subconsciously craving a roll. By the time a consumer turns a corner and sees the Cinnabon store, that craving is a roaring monster inside his head and he’ll reach, unthinkingly, for his wallet. The habit loop is spinning because a sense of craving has emerged.
This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine and a reward and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.
Particularly strong habits produce addiction-like reactions so that “wanting evolves into obsessive craving” that can force our brains into auto pilot, “even in the face of strong disincentives, including loss of reputation, job, home & family”.
Ch 3 – the golden rule of habit change. why transformation occurs.
In the field of sports, champions don’t 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 they have learned.
Tony Dungy, head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (National football league) knew from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there was something familiar at the beginning and the end.
If you use the same cue & provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit.
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 behaviour.
We do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible.
We know that a habit can’t be eradicated – it must, instead, be replaced. And we know that habits are most malleable when the Golden rule of habit change is applied: if we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted. But that’s not enough. For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.
Part 2 – the habits of successful organisations
Ch 4 – keystone habits, or the ballad of Paul O’Neill. Which habits matter most.
Paul O’Neill (CEO of the Aluminum Company of America – or Alcoa) believed that some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything. Keystone habits say that 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.
O’Neill figured his top priority would have to be something that everybody – unions and executives – could agree was important. He decided on focusing changing everyone’s safety habits. He set an audacious goal – zero injuries.
What most people didn’t realize was that O’Neill’s plan for getting to zero injuries entailed the most radical realignment in Alcoa’s history. They key to protecting Alcoa employees was understanding why injuries happened. To understand that, you had to study how the manufacturing process was going wrong. For that you had to bring in people who could educate workers about quality control and the most efficient work processes, so that it would be easier to do everything right, since correct work is also safer work.
In other words, to protect workers, Alcoa needed to become the best, most streamlined aluminum company on earth.
It’s not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes better grades or less frivolous spending. But somehow those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold.
Identifying keystone habits is tricky. They offer what is known within academic literature as “small wins”. Small wins are exactly what they sound like and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes.
Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage. Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favour another small win. Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.
When Michael Phelps was a teenager, at the end of each practice, his coach Bob Bowman would tell him to go home and “watch the videotape. Watch it before you go to sleep and when you wake up”. The video tape wasn’t real. Rather, it was a mental visualization of the perfect race. Each night before sleeping and each morning after waking up, Phelps would imagine a perfect race. He would lie in bed with his eyes shut and watch the entire competition, the smallest details, again and again, until he knew each second by heart.
During practice, when Bowman ordered Phelps to swim at race speed, he would shout “Put in the videotape!” and Phelps would push himself, as hard as he could. It felts almost anticlimactic as he cut through the water. He had done this so many times in his head that, by now, it felt rote. He got faster & faster.
Researchers assembled a group of 1600 obese people and asked them to concentrate on writing down everything they ate as least one day per week. Many participants started keeping a daily food log. Eventually it became a habit. Then something unexpected happened. The participants started looking at their entries and finding patterns they didn’t know existed.
Six months into the study, people who kept daily food records had lost twice as much weight as everyone else.
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 intellectual talent.
Starbucks spent millions of dollars developing curriculums to train employees on self discipline. Executives wrote workbooks that serve as guides on how to make willpower a habit in workers’ lives.
What employees needed were clear instructions about how to deal with inflection points – a routine for employees to follow when their willpower muscles went limp.
The company developed new training materials that spelled out routines for employees to use when they hit rough patches. The manuals taught workers how to respond to specific cues, such as a screaming customer or a long line at a cash register. Managers drilled employees, role-playing with them until the responses became automatic. The company identified specific rewards – a grateful customer, praise from a manager – that employees could look to as evidence of a job well done.
Starbucks has dozens of routines that employees are taught to use during stressful inflection points. One of them is the LATTE method – Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, take Action by solving the problem, Thank them and then Explain why the problem occurred.
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.
Willpower is a learnable skill: something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say “thank you”.
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.
Will exercising willpower muscles make them stronger the same way using dumbbells strengthens biceps?
When you force yourself to go to the gym or start your homework or eat a salad instead of a hamburger, part of what’s happening is that you’re changing how you think. People get better at regulating their impulses. They 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.
That’s why signing up kids for piano lessons or sports is so important. It has nothing to do with creating a good musician or a 5 year old soccer star. When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run 15 laps, you start building self-regulatory strength. A 5 year old who can follow the ball for 10 minutes becomes a 6th grader who can start his homework on time.
Starbucks – we’re not in the coffee business serving people. We’re in the people business serving coffee. Our entire business model is based on fantastic customer service
When people are asked to do something that takes self control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons – if they 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.
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.
Ch 6 – the power of a crisis. How leaders create habits through accident and design.
During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power. Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.
Ch 7 – how target knows what you want before you do. When companies predict (and manipulate) habits.
If we start our shopping sprees by loading up on healthy stuff, we’re much more likely to buy Doritos, Oreos and frozen pizza when we encounter them later on. The burst of subconscious virtuousness that comes from first buying butternut squash makes it easier to put a pint of ice cream in the cart later.
Or take the way most of us turn right after entering a store. Or consider cereal and soups: when they’re shelved out of alphabetical order and seemingly at random, our instinct is to linger a bit longer and look at a wider selection, which may cause you to get tempted and grab an extra box of another brand.
People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event.
There’s no greater upheaval for most customers that the arrival of a child. As a result, new parents’ habits are more flexible at that moment than at almost any other period in an adult’s life. So for companies, pregnant women are gold mines.
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, it’s easier for the public to accept it.
That’s how DJs convince listeners to stick with new songs long enough for them to become familiar (they play the new song in the middle of 2 familiar, liked songs) & how Target convinces pregnant women to use diaper coupons without creeping them out (they send coupons for regular items along with pregnancy/child related coupons).
People often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the gym, they were more likely to show up for a workout session. So if a gym wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.
Part 3 – the habits of societies
Ch 8 – saddleback church and the Montgomery bus boycott – how movements happen.
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 neighbourhoods 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.
Weak ties (friends of friends – people who are neither strangers nor close pals) are often more important that strong tie friends because weak ties give us access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong.
For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling. And the surest way to achieve that is to give people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own.
Ch 9 – the neurology of free will. Are we responsible for our habits?
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.
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.
There are these 2 young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ And the 2 young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’
The water is habits, the unthinking choices and invisible decisions that surround us every day – and which, just by looking at them, become visible again.
Appendix – a reader’s guide to using these ideas.
Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.
The framework:
Identify the routine
Experiment with rewards
Isolate the cue
Have a plan
Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings.
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