“The Power of Habit. Why we do what we do and how to change it” by Charles Duhigg. Book highlights.
I read books, highlight the most interesting insights and share them with you.
I have a theory that once you set an intention on something, you will immediately start getting all the information you need to cover it. It happens to me all the time and it happened with this book as well. I was struggling to make a habit of my yoga practice and wasn’t getting any luck, I started to wonder how it works and what should I do to create a habit when a friend mentioned this book in a conversation. I purchased it right away on Amazon and it turned out being much more than a “how to” kind of a book. It is full of personal stories, interviews, amazing studies, and experiments, and it is not only about habits.
About habits
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. Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
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 can cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.
Habits — even once they are rooted in our minds — aren’t destiny. We can choose our habits once we know how.
Once you understand that habit habits can change, you have the freedom — and the responsibility — to remake them.
To modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously 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.
Habits are what allow us to do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. 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.
About willpower
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. And once you’ve gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is practiced at helping you focus on the goal.
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.
About control
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.
Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs. People want to be in control of their lives.
About marketing
It used to be that companies only knew what their customers wanted them to know. That world is far behind us. You’d be shocked how much information is out there — and every company buys it, because it’s the only way to survive.
About friendship
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 with 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 treaded unjustly. Studies show that people have no problem ignoring stranger’s injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize.
On a playground peer pressure is dangerous. In adult life, it’s how business gets done and communities self-organize.
About faith
If you try to scare people into following Christ’s example, it’s not going to work for too long. The only way you get people to take responsibility for their spiritual maturity is to teach them habits of faith. Once that happens, they become self-feeders. People follow Christ not because you’ve led them there, but because it’s who they are.
If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted. But that’s not enough. For a new habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.
