The Power of Habit Book Review
Our choices made every single day are not the result of well-considered decision making process. They’re habits. Habits that we have acquired consciously or unconsciously.
In The Power of Habit, business reporter Charles Duhigg translates current behavioural science into practical self-improvement action. According to the author, 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.
The aim of the book in the author’s words.
This book doesn’t contain one prescription. Rather, I hoped to deliver something else: a framework for understanding how habits work and a guide to experimenting with how they might change.
This book is divided into three parts.
1. The first section focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives.
2. The second part examines the habits of successful companies and organizations.
3. The third part looks at the habits of societies.
I read this book after Atomic Habits by James Clear. This sequence of reading did impact my engagement with the book as I found some aspects were already covered in Atomic Habits. Both this book and Atomic Habits are good and worth of a read. But I enjoyed Atomic Habits more.
But both focus on different aspects. If you need to chose, my recommendation would be:
Atomic Habits focuses on an individual and all the science, tips and tricks required to form good habits or break bad ones. If you are on a self-improvement journey, this is the guide to pick up.
The Power of Habit focuses habits seen in action at individual, organizational and societal levels. As a result the reader gets a broad overview of topic peppered with umpteen examples. If you want a broad overview of the topic of habits, then this is the book to pick up.
The Power of Habit Book Summary
Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.
The Habits of Individuals
The Habit Loop: How Habits work
Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
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.
The basal ganglia stores habits.
An efficient brain requires less room, which makes for a smaller head, which makes childbirth easier and therefore causes fewer infant and mother deaths.
This process within our brains is a three-step Habit 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.
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.
Habits never really disappear. 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.
Habits emerge without our permission.
Without our basal ganglia, we lose access to the hundreds of habits we rely on every day.
Habits, as much as memory and reason, are at the root of how we behave.
Habits aren’t destiny.
The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits
Eugene Pauly taught us about the habit loop, but it was Claude Hopkins that showed how new habits can be cultivated and grown.
Craving is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.
Psychology was grounded in two basic rules: First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards.
Habits are powerful because they create neurological cravings. These cravings emerge so gradually that we’re not really aware they exist.
New habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.
When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the momentary distraction that opening an email provides. If you disable the buzzing—and remove the cue—you can work for hours without thinking to check their in-boxes.
If you want to start running each morning, it’s essential that you choose a simple cue (like always lacing up your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (such as a midday treat). 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. Figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.
The Golden Rule of Habits Change: Why Transformation Occurs
“Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “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.”
You can never truly extinguish bad habits.
THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE – You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.
How it works: Use the same cue. Provide the same reward. Change the Routine.
The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.
Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior. Belief is the biggest part of success. For habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible.
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.
For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.
If you want to quit smoking, figure out a different routine that will satisfy the cravings filled by cigarettes. Then, find a support group, a collection of other former smokers, or a community that will help you believe you can stay away from nicotine, and use that group when you feel you might stumble.
Belief is essential, and it grows out of a communal experience, even if that community is only as large as two people.
The line separating habits and addictions is often difficult to measure. It is difficult to determine why spending fifty dollars a week on cocaine is bad, but fifty dollars a week on coffee is okay.
While addiction is complicated and still poorly understood, many of the behaviors that we associate with it are often driven by habit.
The Habits of Successful Organizations
Keystone Habits, Or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most
“You can’t order people to change. That’s not how the brain works. So I decided I was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company.” – Paul O’Neill
Some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization.
Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.
Keystone habits say that 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.
The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.
Government’s efforts, which should have been guided by logical rules and deliberate priorities, were instead driven by bizarre institutional processes that, in many ways, operated like habits.
Individuals have habits; groups have routines. Routines are the organizational analogue of habits.
For many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change. Families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.
Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage. Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win. Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.
Cultures grow out of the keystone habits in every organization, whether leaders are aware of them or not.
Starbucks and The Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic
Willpower is a learnable skill.
The four-year-olds who could delay gratification the longest ended up with the best grades and with SAT scores 210 points higher, on average, than everyone else.
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.
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. 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 inflection point arrives.
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.
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.
Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs.
The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and Design
There are no organizations without institutional habits.
Firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions.
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.
If you follow the established patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won’t destroy the company, the profits will roll in, and, eventually, everyone will get rich.
Routines create truces that allow work to get done.
Truces are only durable when they create real justice. If a truce is unbalanced—if the peace isn’t real—then the routines often fail when they are needed most.
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.
Leaders seized the possibilities created by a crisis. During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power.
Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.
Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.
Crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.
How Target Knows What You Want Before You Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits
People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event.
Preference for things that sound “familiar” is a product of our neurology.
The areas that process music, in other words, are designed to seek out patterns and look for familiarity.
Listening habits allow us to unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored. That’s why songs that sound “familiar”—even if you’ve never heard them before—are sticky. Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard.
To change people’s diets, the exotic must be made familiar. And to do that, you must camouflage it in everyday garb.
The Habits of Societies
Saddleback Church and the Mongomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen
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 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.
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.
No one has enough friends to change the world.
People who hardly knew Rosa Parks decided to participate because of a social peer pressure—an influence known as “the power of weak ties”—that made it difficult to avoid joining in.
Weak-tie acquaintances were often more important than strong-tie friends because weak ties give us access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong. The habits of peer pressure often spread through weak ties. And they gain their authority through communal expectations.
Sense of obligation among the community—the social habits of weak ties. The community was pressured to stand together for fear that anyone who didn’t participate wasn’t someone you wanted to be friends with in the first place.
The only way you get people to take responsibility for their spiritual maturity is to teach them habits of faith.
People follow Christ not because you’ve led them there, but because it’s who they are.
For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling. And the surest way to achieve that is to give people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own.
A movement is a saga. For it to work, everyone’s identity has to change.
Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decides to face the same direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants’ sense of self.
The Neurology of Free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?
To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss.
Every habit, no matter its complexity, is malleable.
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.
The will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change.
Habits, he noted, 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.”
If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change becomes real.
This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.
Read More Like This
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
Recent Articles