The power of habit

Comment: There are so many case studies and stories which make the book fun to read and the ideas easy to follow.
Note:

• The habit loop
  • This process – in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine – is known as “chunking,” and it’s at the root of how habits form.
  • Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
  • 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 habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.
  • Unless you deliberately fight a habit – unless you find new routines – the pattern will unfold automatically.
  • Habits are often as much a curse as a benefit.
  • 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 realized – 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 craving brain
  • Habits create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings so gradually that we’re not aware they exist, so we’re often blind to their influence. But as we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning.
  • This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.
• The golden rule of habit change
  • If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.
  • If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine. At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there’s one other ingredient that’s necessary: belief.
  • Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.
  • Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
• Keystone habits, or the ballad of Paul O’Neill
  • Keystone habits matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. They can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.
  • Success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into power levers.
  • The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.
  • Routines are the organizational analogue of habits.
  • Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.
  • Identifying keystone habits is tricky.
• Starbucks and the habit of success
  • Dozen of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.
  • Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say “thank you.”
  • 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.
  • Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.
  • This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an infection point arrives.
  • Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their job.
• The power of crisis
  • Sometimes, in the heat of a crisis, the right habits emerge.
  • Firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions.
  • These organizational habits – or “routines”, are enormously important, because without them, most companies would never get any work done.
  • For an organizational to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balance peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge.
  • Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.
  • A company with dysfunctional habits can’t turn around simply because a leader orders it. Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisis – or create the perception of crisis – and cultivate the sense that something must change, until everyone is finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with each day.
• How Target knows what you want before you do
  • A series of experiments convinced marketers that if they managed to understand a particular shopper’s habits, they could get them to buy almost anything.
  • People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event.
  • If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.
• Saddleback church and the Montgomery bus boycott
  • At the root of many movements is a three-part process:
    • A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong tie 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.
  • When the strong ties of friendship and the weak ties of peer pressure merge, they create incredible  momentum.
• The neurology of free will
  • 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?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
  • The water is habits, the unthinking choices and invisible decisions that surround us every day – and which, just by looking at them, become visible again.