Best Quotes from The Power Of Habit by Charles Duhigg with Page Numbers

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

Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.

Habits are powerful, but delicate.

Eugene showed that habits, as much as memory and reason, are at the root of how we behave.

Conserving mental effort is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important.

Habits aren’t destiny. Habits can be ignored, changed, or replaced.

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making.

It’s not hard to find an analog in the human world.

Once someone creates a new pattern, it becomes as automatic as any other habit.

Even small shifts can end the pattern.

"If you get those elements right, Hopkins promised, it was like magic."

"That craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work."

"The key, he said, was that he had 'learned the right human psychology.'"

"There is nothing programmed into our brains that makes us see a box of doughnuts and automatically want a sugary treat."

"Only once they created a sense of craving—the desire to make everything smell as nice as it looked—did Febreze become a hit."

"In focusing on tooth film, Hopkins was ignoring the fact that this same film has always covered people’s teeth and hadn’t seemed to bother anyone."

"Hopkins’s experience was driven by the same factors that caused Julio the monkey to touch the lever and housewives to spray Febreze on freshly made beds."

"The irony is that a product manufactured to destroy odors was transformed into the opposite."

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

"That’s basic learning. The habit only emerges once Julio begins craving the juice when he sees the cue."

"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’ve learned."

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

"If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit."

"It seems ridiculously simple, but once you’re aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you’re halfway to changing it."

"The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it."

"Belief is the biggest part of success in professional football."

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

"When you make a self-inventory, you’re figuring out all the things that make you drink."

"When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real."

"The evidence is clear: 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."

I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America.

If we bring our injury rates down, it won’t be because of cheerleading or the nonsense you sometimes hear from other CEOs. It will be because the individuals at this company have agreed to become part of something important.

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.

Keystone habits explain how Michael Phelps became an Olympic champion and why some college students outperform their peers.

There’s something about [the exercise routine] that makes other good habits easier.

I don’t ever want you to say that we haven’t taken every step to make sure people don’t get hurt.

If a machine kept breaking down, it was replaced, which meant there was less risk of a broken gear snagging an employee’s arm.

Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.

Keystone habits create cultures where new values become ingrained.

It was clear what our values dictated. He got fired because he didn’t report the incident, and so no one else had the opportunity to learn from it.

"Your apron is a shield. Nothing anyone says will ever hurt you. You will always be as strong as you want to be."

"Starbucks is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. I owe everything to this company."

"Willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success."

"Sometimes it looks like people with great self-control aren’t working hard—but that’s because they’ve made it automatic."

"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."

"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."

"Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything."

"When your parents are addicts, you grow up knowing you can’t always trust them for everything you need. But I’ve been really lucky to find bosses who gave me what was missing."

"When you put together a series of plans ahead of time, the determination to fulfill your goals increases exponentially."

"I really, genuinely believe that if you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you right."

"There are no organizations without institutional habits. There are only places where they are deliberately designed, and places where they are created without forethought."

"Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits."

"Something similar happened at Rhode Island Hospital in the wake of the eighty-six-year-old man’s death and the other surgical errors. Since the hospital’s new safety procedures were fully implemented in 2009, no wrong-site errors have occurred."

"To deal with these tensions, the staff had developed informal rules—habits unique to the institution—that helped avert the most obvious conflicts."

"Organizational habits offer a basic promise: If you follow the established patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won’t destroy the company."

"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."

"Truces create a type of rough organizational justice, and because of them, conflict within companies usually follows largely predictable paths and stays within predictable bounds that are consistent with the ongoing routine."

"If you can somehow diagram all your work habits—and the informal power structures, relationships, alliances, and conflicts they represent—you would create a map of your firm’s secret hierarchy."

"During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power."

"Sometimes, even destructive habits can be transformed by leaders who know how to seize the right opportunities."

"The only way to increase profits was to figure out each individual shopper's habits and to market to people one by one."

"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."

"Consumers sometimes act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past behavior with little regard to current goals."

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

"The surprising aspect of these studies, however, was that even though everyone relied on habits to guide their purchases, each person’s habits were different."

"We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week, and a coupon for it.’"

"The data doesn’t mean anything on its own. Target’s good at figuring out the really clever questions."

"What’s the biggest life event for most people? What causes the greatest disruption and ‘vulnerability to marketing interventions’? Having a baby."

"To market a new habit—be it groceries or aerobics—you must understand how to make the novel seem familiar."

"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.'"

"That small refusal was the first in a series of actions that shifted the battle over race relations from a struggle fought by activists in courts and legislatures into a contest that would draw its strength from entire communities and mass protests."

"Rosa Parks would become a hero, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a shining example of how a single act of defiance can change the world."

"Parks’s experiences offer a lesson in the power of social habits—the behaviors that occur, unthinkingly, across dozens or hundreds or thousands of people which are often hard to see as they emerge, but which contain a power that can change the world."

"A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances."

"It endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership."

"When the strong ties of friendship and the weak ties of peer pressure merge, they create incredible momentum. That’s when widespread social change can begin."

"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."

"If you want to have Christ-like character, then you just develop the habits that Christ had. All of us are simply a bundle of habits."

"A once fear-ridden people had been transformed."

"As we go back to the buses let us be loving enough to turn an enemy into a friend. We must now move from protest to reconciliation."

"I always felt like the untalented one. 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."

"If you could win, then gambling wouldn’t be legal, right?"

"I feel so guilty, so ashamed of what I’ve done. I feel like I’ve let everyone down. I know that I’ll never be able to make up for this, no matter what I do."

"You have to be able to play through the rough patches until your luck turns."

"The behaviors that occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves, he said. So 'just as a piece of land has to be prepared beforehand if it is to nourish the seed, so the mind of the pupil has to be prepared in its habits if it is to enjoy and dislike the right things.'"

"I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."

"Once we choose who we want to be, people grow to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds."

"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. Shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes?"

"There are these two 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?'"

"You now know how to redirect that path. You now have the power to swim."