Charles Duhigg Quotes

If you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they'll prove you right

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.

Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

If you believe you can change - if you make it a habit - the change becomes real.

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.

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.

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 realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.

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 habit -- unless you find new routines -- the pattern will unfold automatically.

This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.

There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.

Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the orther team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.

Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.

Shampoo doesn’t have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpaste—now every company adds sodium laureth sulfate to make toothpaste foam more. There’s no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when there’s a bunch of suds around their mouth. Once the customer starts expecting that foam, the habit starts growing.

Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.

Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.

However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consiously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits' routines, and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it -- and every chapter in this book is devoted to illustrating a different aspect of why that control is real.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

What we know from lab studies is that it's never too late to break a habit. Habits are malleable throughout your entire life. But we also know that the best way to change a habit is to understand its structure - that once you tell people about the cue and the reward and you force them to recognize what those factors are in a behavior, it becomes much, much easier to change.

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.

For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.

The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.