Charles Duhigg famous quotes

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Exercise #People #Stressed

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Team #Thinking #Champion

The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Differences #Waiting #Brain

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Powerful #People #Community

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Believe #Skills #People

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#People #Too Late #Labs

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

#Self #Discipline #Intellectual

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

#Believe #People #Habit

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Responsibility #Habit #Easier

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

#Effort #Might #Easy

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

#Real #Believe #Habit

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Feel Better #Hair #People

...hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it...
-- Charles Duhigg

#Knowing #Important #Sometimes

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Strong #Powerful #Common Sense

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

#Real #Habit #Insight

The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Focus #Habit

The cooperation of NASCAR - or any other system, it turns out - persists only when everyone believes he has the opportunity to win.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Believe #Winning #Opportunity

What studies say the number one best way to start an exercise habit is to give yourself a reward that you genuinely enjoy.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Exercise #Numbers #Giving

The waste from power plants is essentially what is left over when you burn coal. And as we all know, coal is a relatively dirty mineral.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Dirty #Coal #Waste

Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Bankers #Research #Investment

Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Risk #Experts #Agents

Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Song #Expression #Listening

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Real #Self #Smoking

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.
-- Charles Duhigg

#War #Civil War #Company

The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Children #Shopping #Window

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Agency #Order #People

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

#Routine #Rewards #Habit

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Fighting #Embedded #Instinct

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Hard Work #Tired #Skills

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#War #Years #Long

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Fighting #Focus #Decision

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

#Golden #Habit #Golden Rule

Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Winning #Advantage #Application

As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.
-- Charles Duhigg

#People #Stronger #Management

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Jobs #Agency #Giving

Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Community #Belief #Easier

If you want to do something that requires willpower—like going for a run after work—you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day,
-- Charles Duhigg

#Running #Want #Willpower

I think I'm smart, and I know I was a good mom. But there wasn't a lot I could point to and say, that's why I'm special.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Mom #Smart #Thinking

The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Believe #People #Community

Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place, and put in the rat, and, by golloy, the old habit will rememerge right away. habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the sturctures of our brain, and that’s 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 can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Vacation #Old Habits #Differences

Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Habit

At some point, if you're changing a really deep-seated behavior, you're going to have a moment of weakness.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Weakness #Moments #Really Deep

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

#Memories #Brain #Finding Happiness

America is the Saudi Arabia of coal.
-- Charles Duhigg

#America #Arabia #Coal

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

#Creating #Sparks #Habit

But countless studies have shown that a cue and a reward, on their own, aren't enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward--craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment--will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Morning #Shoes #Accomplishment

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Real #Book #Hard Work

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Choices #Decision #Each Day

If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Old Habits #Dresses #Accepting

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.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Strong #Ties #Giving

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

#Effort #Brain #Way

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

#People #Succeed #Prove

There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.
-- Charles Duhigg

#Habit #Easier #Good Habits