charles duhigg – madin118

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p13

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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, it’s easier for the public to accept it.

People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.

Social habits are what fill streets with protesters who may not know one another, who might be marching for different reasons, but who are all moving in the same direction. Social habits are why some initiatives become world- changing movements, while others fail to ignite. And the reason why social habits have such influence is because at the root of many movements— be they large- scale revolutions or simple fluctuations in the churches people attend— is a three- part process that historians and sociologists say shows up again and again:
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.
Usually, only when all three parts of this process are fulfilled can a movement become self- propelling and reach a critical mass.

In general, sociologists say, most of us have friends who are like us. We might have a few close acquaintances who are richer, a few who are poorer, and a few of different races— but, on the whole, our deepest relationships tend to be with people who look like us, earn about the same amount of money, and come from similar backgrounds.

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. Studies show that people have no problems ignoring strangers’ injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize.

When job hunters approached strangers for assistance, they were rejected. When they appealed to friends, help was provided.

When sociologists have examined how opinions move through communities, how gossip spreads or political movements start, they’ve discovered a common pattern: Our weak- tie acquaintances are often as influential— if not more— than our close- tie friends.

Convincing
thousands of people to pursue the same goal— especially when that pursuit entails real hardship, such as walking to work rather than taking the bus, or going to jail, or even skipping a morning cup of coffee because the company that sells it doesn’t support organic farming— is hard. Most people don’t care enough about the latest outrage to give up their bus ride or caffeine unless it’s a close friend that has been insulted or jailed. So there is a tool that activists have long relied upon to compel protest, even when a group of people don’t necessarily want to participate. It’s a form of persuasion that
has been remarkably effective over hundreds of years. It’s the sense of obligation that neighborhoods or communities place upon themselves.
In other words, peer pressure.

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p12

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There is evidence that a preference for things that sound “familiar” is a product of our neurology. Scientists have examined people’s brains as they listen to music, and have tracked which neural regions are involved in comprehending aural stimuli. Listening to music activates numerous areas of the brain, including the auditory cortex, the thalamus, and the superior parietal cortex. These same areas are also associated with pattern recognition and helping the brain decide which inputs to pay attention to and which to ignore.

Scientists at MIT discovered that behavioral habits prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by the endless decisions we would otherwise have to make each day, listening habits exist because, without them, it would be impossible to determine if we should concentrate on our child’s voice, the coach’s whistle, or the noise from a busy street during a Saturday soccer game.

Listening habits allow us to unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored. That’s why songs that sound “familiar”—even if you’ve never heard them before— are sticky. Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard. Much of the time, we don’t actually choose if we like or dislike a song. It would take too much mental effort. Instead, we react to the cues (“This sounds like all the other songs I’ve ever liked”) and rewards (“It’s fun to hum along!”) and without thinking, we either start singing, or reach over and change the station.

“Soldiers were more likely to eat food, whether familiar or unfamiliar, when it was prepared similar to their prior experiences and served in a familiar fashion.”

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p11

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Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits. In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose. A company with dysfunctional habits can’t turn around simply because a leader orders it. Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisis— or create the perception of crisis— and cultivate the sense that something must change, until everyone is finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with each day.

“This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

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 later put a pint of ice cream in the cart.

There are thousands of hours of videotapes showing shoppers turning right once they clear the front doors.) As a result of this tendency, retailers fill the right side of the stores with the most profitable products they’re hoping you’ll buy right off the bat.

“Consumers sometimes act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past behavior with little regard to current goals,” two psychologists at the University of Southern California wrote in 2009.

A firm named Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’ political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, the number of cars they own, and whether they prefer religious news or deals on cigarettes. Other companies analyze photos that consumers post online, cataloging if they are obese or skinny, short or tall, hairy or bald, and what kinds of products they might want to buy as a result.

If you use your Target credit card to purchase a box of Popsicles once a week, usually around 6:30 P.M. on a weekday, and megasized trash bags every July and October, Target’s statisticians and computer
programs will determine that you have kids at home, tend to stop for groceries on your way back from work, and have a lawn that needs mowing in the summer and trees that drop leaves in the fall.

People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event. When someone gets married, for example, they’re more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When they move into a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they get divorced,
there’s a higher chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.

“Changing residence, getting married or divorced, losing or changing a job, having someone enter or leave the household, are life changes that make consumers more “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” And what’s the biggest life event for most people? What causes the greatest disruption and “vulnerability to marketing interventions”? Having a baby. There’s almost no greater upheaval for most
customers than 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. 🧈🧈

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p10

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Crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.

By hiring psychologists who peddled vaguely scientific tactics they claimed could make customers spend more. Some of those methods are still in use today. If you walk into a Walmart, Home Depot, or your local shopping center and look closely, you’ll see retailing tricks that have been around for decades, each designed to exploit your shopping subconscious.

Take, for instance, how you buy food. Chances are, the first things you see upon entering your grocery
store are fruits and vegetables arranged in attractive, bountiful piles. If you think about it, positioning produce at the front of a store doesn’t make much sense, because fruits and vegetables bruise easily
at the bottom of a shopping cart; logically, they should be situated by the registers, so they come at the end of a trip. But as marketers and psychologists figured out long ago, 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 later put a pint of ice cream in the cart.

Take the way most of us turn to the right after entering a store. (Did you know you turn right? It’s almost certain you do. There are thousands of hours of videotapes showing shoppers turning right once they clear the front doors.) As a result of this tendency, retailers fill the right side of the stores with the most profitable products they’re hoping you’ll buy right off the bat.

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Book Summary: The Power of Habit p9

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Just as choosing the right keystone habits can create amazing change, the wrong ones can create disasters.

even destructive habits can be transformed by leaders who know how to seize the right opportunities. Sometimes, in the heat of a crisis, the right habits emerge.

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. Organizational habits offer a basic promise: If you follow the established patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won’t destroy the company, the profits will roll in, and, eventually, everyone will get rich.

The problem with sabotage is that even if it’s good for you, it’s usually bad for the fi rm. So at most companies, an unspoken compact emerges: It’s okay to be ambitious, but if you play too rough, your peers will unite against you. On the other hand, if you focus on boosting your own department, rather than undermining your rival, you’ll probably get taken care of over time.

Most of the time, routines and truces work perfectly. Rivalries still exist, of course, but because of institutional habits, they’re kept within bounds and the business thrives. However, sometimes even a truce proves insufficient. Sometimes, an unstable peace can be as destructive as any civil war.

Truces are only durable when they create real justice. If a truce is unbalanced— if the peace isn’t real— then the routines often fail when they are needed most.

Creating successful organizations isn’t just a matter of balancing authority. For an organization to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge.

Sometimes, one priority— or one department or one person or one goal— needs to overshadow everything else, though it might be unpopular or threaten the balance of power. Sometimes, a truce can create dangers that outweigh any peace.

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.

💪 Develop powerful habits 🔥🔥

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p8

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Starbucks taught their employees how to handle moments of adversity by giving them willpower habit loops. LATTE method: We Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred.

There are learned habits to help baristas tell the difference between patrons who just want their coffee and those who need a bit more coddling.

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.

When people are asked to do something that takes self- control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons— if they feel 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.

❤️‍🔥 Build powerful habits ❤️‍🔥

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p7

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Small wins 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,”

Concentrate on tiny moments of success and build them into mental triggers.

Keystone habit creates a structure that helps other habits to flourish.

At the core of that Starbucks education is an intense focus on an all- important habit: willpower. Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.

Students who exerted high levels of willpower were more likely to earn higher grades in their classes and gain admission into more selective schools.

“Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic- performance variable.” Self- discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit.

Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say “thank you.” As willpower muscles strengthened, good habits seemed to spill over into other parts of life.

“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 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.”

“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.”

Firms such as Starbucks— and the Gap, Wal- Mart, restaurants, or any other business that relies on entry- level workers— all face a common problem: No matter how much their employees want to do a great job, many will fail because they lack self- discipline. They show up late. They snap at rude customers. They get distracted or drawn into workplace dramas. They quit for no reason.

If someone has trouble with self- discipline at work, they’re probably also going to have trouble attending a program designed to strengthen their self- discipline after work.

The solution, Starbucks discovered, was turning self- discipline into an organizational habit.

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☕︎ Develop Powerful habits ☕︎

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p6

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Attack one habit and then watch the changes ripple through the organization.

You can’t order people to change. That’s not how the brain works. Start by focusing on one thing. If we disrupt the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company.

Some habits have the power to start a chain reaction. Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. 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.

The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.

Keystone habits explain how Michael Phelps became an Olympic champion and why some college students outperform their peers. They describe why some people, after years of trying, suddenly lose
forty pounds while becoming more productive at work and still getting home in time for dinner with their kids. And keystone habits explain how Alcoa became one of the best performing stocks in the Dow Jones index, while also becoming one of the safest places on earth.

Researchers have found institutional habits in almost every organization or company they’ve scrutinized. “Individuals have habits; groups have routines,” wrote the academic Geoffrey Hodgson. “Routines are the organizational analogue of habits.”

“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.”

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

Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well- being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget. 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.

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.

Book Summary: The Power of Habit p5

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Alcoholics who practiced the techniques of habit replacement, the data indicated, could often stay sober until there was a stressful event in their lives— at which point, a certain number started drinking again, no matter how many new routines they had embraced. However, those alcoholics who believed that some higher power had entered their lives were more likely to make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety intact. It wasn’t 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.

You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.

What can make a difference is believing that they can cope with that stress without alcohol. It lets people practice believing that things will eventually get better, until things actually do.

There is, unfortunately, no specific set of steps guaranteed to work for every person. We know that a habit cannot 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.

For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.

If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group.

We know that change can happen. Alcoholics can stop drinking. Smokers can quit puffing. Perennial losers can become champions. You can stop biting your nails or snacking at work, yelling at your
kids, staying up all night, or worrying over small concerns. And as scientists have discovered, it’s not just individual lives that can shift when habits are tended to. It’s also companies, organizations, and communities, as the next chapters explain.

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Book Summary: The Power of Habit p4

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A salesperson, for example, knows she can boost her bonus by giving favored customers hefty discounts in exchange for larger orders.

It’s okay to be ambitious, but if you play too rough, your peers will unite against you. On the other hand, if you focus on boosting your own department, rather than undermining your rival, you’ll probably get taken care of over time.

Sometimes, a truce can create dangers that outweigh any peace.