The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business Reviews
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
- by Charles Duhigg The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.
Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.
An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is
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Curing Your Habits,
In this wonderful book, Charles Duhigg, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, tackles an important reality head on. That is, people succeed when they identify patterns that shape their lives–and learn how to change them. This idea–that you can indeed change your habits–draws on recent research in experimental psychology, neurology, and applied psychology.
As you can see from the TOC below, Duhigg really goes after a broad range of topics. He looks at the habits of individuals, how habits operate in the brain, how companies use them, and how retailers use habits to manipulate buying habits. This provides some fascinating research and stories, such as the fact that grocery stores put fruits and vegetables at the front of the store because people who put these healthy items in their carts are more apt to buy junk food as well before they leave the store. The author’s main contention is that “you have the freedom and responsibility” to remake your habits. He says “the most addicted alcoholics can become sober. The most dysfunctional companies can transform themselves. A high school dropout can become a successful manager.” He makes a convincing case for all this. The only problem is that’s all he does. He doesn’t show you how to do it.
PART ONE: THE HABITS OF INDIVIDUALS
1. The Habit Loop – How Habits Work
2. The Craving Brain – How to Create New Habits
3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change – Why Transformation Occurs
PART TWO – THE HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATIONS
4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill – Which Habits Matter Most
5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success – When Willpower Becomes Automatic
6. The Power of a Crisis – How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and Design
7. How Target Knows What You Want Before You Do – When Companies Predict (and manipulate) Habits
PART THREE – THE HABITS OF SOCIETIES
8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott – How Movements Happen
9. The Neurology of Free Will – Are We Responsible for Our Habits?
My chief complaint is he doesn’t really show you how to break bad habits. For this you should consider Emotional Intelligence 2.0. That book was great for my self-control.
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|Change Your Habits, Change Your Life,
This is a great book about the power of habit and what we can do to change our habits in business, life, and society. The book is divided into three sections, first focusing on the individual, then companies, and finally societies.
The first three chapters are my favorite, and really make up the heart of the book.
Chapter 1, “The Habit Loop” explains exactly what a habit is. Some estimate, according to the author, that habits make up 40% of our daily routine. Favorite quote from this chapter: “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 behavior to use. The there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is the reward . . .” (19)
Chapter 2, “The Craving Brain” includes the story of Pepsodent and lays out a simple formula for creating new habits in others. “First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the reward.” (37) The rest of the chapter will fill you in on the missing part of this formula and you will learn how Febreze went from near bust to a product bringing in over a billion dollars a year.
Chapter 3, “The Golden Rule of Habit Change” is my favorite chapter. In this chapter you will learn what part of the habit loop to modify and how you should go about doing it. You will also learn how Tony Dungee reinvented the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts by instilling habits into his teams. Very good information, if you read one chapter in this book, make sure it is this one. Of interest to everyone, from smokers to businessmen to nail-biters to football coaches.
The remaining two sections of the book were not quite as strong as the first. They consist mainly of anecdotes and examples of how companies and societies (and a church) changed habits in others successfully. They are worth reading, but not as good as the first third of the book. The Starbucks story of instilling willpower in their employees and the story of Rosa Parks and Saddleback church were the most interesting.
All in all, this book is definitely worth picking up. I was a little disappointed by the last couple of sections of the book and thought that one of the anecdotes the author used in the first chapter was overused (same story, same person covered thoroughly in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything if you have read it). The core of the book that explains what habits are and how to change them make this book a valuable read. Recommended.
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|One or two chapters of interest, the rest filler,
The first two chapters weren’t bad. They made me think that the succeeding chapters would be even more interesting. They weren’t. The book fell off a cliff at that point. Chapters on companies that turned around — I thought I was watching CNBC. The science, which is what I was interested in, apparently is only enough to fill one or two chapters. Then the author manufactured a bunch of filler to make it book-length, most of which only seemed to relate to the topic marginally. And if you’re looking for a self-help book to help you break bad habits, go somewhere else. The advice is: find out what reward you get out of the habit, then do something else to get that same reward. There, you don’t have to read the book.
If the book is intended as an advertisement for Febreze, it’s fairly effective. I found myself actually wanting to buy a bottle, but then realized I was probably being manipulated. (Years ago, I read the label on a Febreze bottle. It said make sure the fabric you’re spraying is clean first. If my couch was clean, I wouldn’t be spraying it with something to remove odors! Give me a break.)
And woven throughout the book, you have to suffer through the author’s admonitions about the habits that *he* thinks *you* ought to practice: the usual boring, politically correct, cultural-narrative-approved, scientifically unproven advice like eat more vegetables, cut down on fat consumption, and wear sunscreen just to go outside. What a hack. I see why he’s won some “journalism” awards — he pushes the cultural narrative of the news media.
It made me realize that one habit I could try to break is buying books on Amazon based on other people’s reviews.
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