Top 100 Charles Duhigg Quotes
#1. And which new designers are most likely to have the right habits? The ones who have formed the right truces and found the right alliances. Truces are so important that new fashion labels usually succeed only if they are headed by people who left other fashion companies on good terms.
Charles Duhigg
#2. Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not. ... Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.5.2
Charles Duhigg
#3. When marketers influence habits, they influence peoples' self-identity. And so when a group or company does something that doesn't correspond to our core values, it feels like a betrayal.
Charles Duhigg
#4. Because reverse mortgages do not require borrowers to make immediate repayments, the interest charges are added to the debt every day, and the total amount owed grows over time.
Charles Duhigg
#5. Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.
Charles Duhigg
#6. Companies aren't families. They're battlefields in a civil war.
Charles Duhigg
#8. Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
Charles Duhigg
#9. One survey conducted in 2010 estimated that the average parent spends $6,800 on baby items before a child's first birthday.7.9
Charles Duhigg
#10. 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.
Charles Duhigg
#11. It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.
Charles Duhigg
#12. The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things.
Charles Duhigg
#13. When most individuals or most companies are talking about trying to create healthy habits, the key is to identify which habit or habits seem most important.
Charles Duhigg
#14. 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.
Charles Duhigg
#15. Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say thank you.
Charles Duhigg
#16. Typically, when there are corporate habits that undermine individuals, it has emerged without any sort of central planning. Nobody sits down and says, 'I'm going to create an evil habit for this corporation.'
Charles Duhigg
#18. And I really, genuinely believe that if you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they'll prove you right.
Charles Duhigg
#19. Older Americans are perfect telemarketing customers, analysts say, because they are often at home, rely on delivery services, and are lonely for the companionship that telephone callers provide.
Charles Duhigg
#20. 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.
Charles Duhigg
#21. Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.
Charles Duhigg
#22. Barium, which is commonly found in power plant waste and scrubber wastewater, has been linked to heart problems and diseases in other organs.
Charles Duhigg
#23. You're much better off creating positive rewards, complimenting people for acting correctly, rather than punishing them when they act incorrectly.
Charles Duhigg
#24. Participants were more motivated to play simply because they believed they were in control.11 III.
Charles Duhigg
#25. By focusing on one pattern - what is known as a "keystone habit" - Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well. It's not
Charles Duhigg
#26. Most people probably don't even know what toothpaste they buy; they just recognize the box on the shelf.
Charles Duhigg
#27. Some officials overseeing local water systems have tried to go above and beyond what is legally required. But they have encountered resistance, sometimes from the very residents they are trying to protect, who say that if their water is legal, it must be safe.
Charles Duhigg
#29. Many environmental advocates argue that agricultural pollution will be reduced only through stronger federal laws.
Charles Duhigg
#30. If you believe you can change - if you make it a habit - the change becomes real.
Charles Duhigg
#31. In the 1970s, New York City defaulted on its debt, and yes, the consequences were painful. Enrollment plummeted at City University campuses, which until then had offered free education. Seven thousand police officers were laid off. Crime skyrocketed. Services for the poor disappeared.
Charles Duhigg
#32. As America becomes an older nation, it is also, by some measures, becoming sicker.
Charles Duhigg
#33. Government and other scientists have identified hundreds of chemicals that are linked to diseases in small concentrations and that are unregulated in drinking water or policed at limits that still pose serious risks.
Charles Duhigg
#34. Travis's siblings had seen an overdose before and knew the drill. His brother rolled him onto his side. His sister opened his mouth to make sure he wouldn't choke on his tongue, and told Travis to run next door, ask to use the neighbor's phone, and dial 911.
Charles Duhigg
#35. In 2005, attorneys general of 35 states urged the Federal Reserve to end the unsigned check system.
Charles Duhigg
#36. When people have a willpower failure, it's because they haven't anticipated a situation that's going to come along.
Charles Duhigg
#37. Bureaucrats and politicians, rather than making decisions, were responding to cues with automatic routines in order to get rewards such as promotions or reelection.
Charles Duhigg
#38. Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are "keystone habits," and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate.
Charles Duhigg
#39. Older consumers don't want to be treated like teenagers; what's more, they don't want to believe they fall into any niche at all.
Charles Duhigg
#40. You have to actually believe in your capacity to change for habits to permanently change.
Charles Duhigg
#41. Union leaders argue that pension shortfalls account for a proportionally tiny portion of governments' financial problems, and by all accounts, there are plenty of parties to blame for the growth in payrolls and obligations.
Charles Duhigg
#42. Everyone dies, and before that, most people eventually lose some of their faculties. So some people worry that as marketers get better at targeting the elderly, the line between advertising and unscrupulous manipulation will be harder to discern.
Charles Duhigg
#43. Students in school cheat not to get the 'A,' but to avoid the 'C.'
Charles Duhigg
#44. Accommodate the quickly expanding population. Intrigued, Warren contacted religious leaders in Southern California who told him that many locals self-identified as Christian but didn't attend services. In the dusty, dimly lit basement of that university
Charles Duhigg
#45. Bank of America is the story of some of the most ambitious, aggressive bank builders on the face of the planet.
Charles Duhigg
#46. Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.
Charles Duhigg
#47. First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards. If you
Charles Duhigg
#48. Alcoholism, of course, is more than a habit. It's a physical addiction with psychological and perhaps genetic roots.
Charles Duhigg
#49. Asking patients to describe what triggers their habitual behavior is called awareness training, and like AA's insistence on forcing alcoholics to recognize their cues, it's the first step in habit reversal training. The tension that Mandy felt in her nails cued her nail biting habit.
Charles Duhigg
#50. A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.
Charles Duhigg
#51. Fannie Mae has traditionally only bought and sold mortgages. But when a loan held by the company goes into foreclosure, Fannie Mae gains ownership of the underlying property until it is resold to new investors.
Charles Duhigg
#52. By the same rule, though, if we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviors - if we take control of the habit loop - we can force those bad tendencies into the background,
Charles Duhigg
#53. I think there's a lot of people who right now are worried that people are going down frivolous paths, like inventing new social networks or new games, instead of inventing the cures for cancer or fundamental technologies that will change the world.
Charles Duhigg
#54. There's something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. 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.
Charles Duhigg
#55. Everything was a reaction - and eventually a habit - rather than a choice.
Charles Duhigg
#56. Every habit is made of three parts ... a cue, a routine and a habit. Most people focus on the routine and behavior, but these cues and rewards are really the way you make something into a habit.
Charles Duhigg
#57. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.
Charles Duhigg
#58. As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives - in the gym, or a money management program - that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.
Charles Duhigg
#59. Individuals have habits; groups have routines," wrote the academic Geoffrey Hodgson, who spent a career examining organizational patterns. "Routines are the organizational analogue of habits.
Charles Duhigg
#60. The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation's housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer.
Charles Duhigg
#61. Millions of people with respiratory diseases have relied on oxygen equipment, delivered to their homes, to help them breathe.
Charles Duhigg
#62. In 1688, Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse on London's seafront popular among underwriters, men in powdered wigs with mathematical minds and steely constitutions who offered to compensate owners if their boats were lost at sea.
Charles Duhigg
#63. Charles Wyly was born Oct 13, 1933, in Lake Providence, La., and for a period lived with his family in a shack without electricity or plumbing.
Charles Duhigg
#64. Way back in 2000, the EPA was poised, and, in fact, had drafted a rule, to specially regulate pollution - water pollution and other types of pollution - from power plants, but the energy industry pushed back pretty significantly.
Charles Duhigg
#65. For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures.
Charles Duhigg
#66. I love Paul O'Neill, but you could not pay me enough to work for him again" one official told me. "the man has never encountered an answer he can't turn into another twenty hours of work.
Charles Duhigg
#67. Or consider "Here Without You" by 3 Doors Down, or almost any song by the group Maroon 5. Those bands are so featureless that critics and listeners created a new music category - "bath rock" - to describe their tepid sounds. Yet whenever they came on the radio, almost no one changed the station.
Charles Duhigg
#68. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.
Charles Duhigg
#69. If you look hard enough, you'll find that many of the products we use every day - chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins - are results of manufactured habits.
Charles Duhigg
#70. This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings.
Charles Duhigg
#71. What studies say the number one best way to start an exercise habit is to give yourself a reward that you genuinely enjoy.
Charles Duhigg
#72. Hank Paulson, the happy capitalist warrior who spent his life pursuing and defending free markets, is now the biggest interventionist Treasury secretary we've had since the Great Depression.
Charles Duhigg
#73. If we bring our injury rates down, it won't be because of cheerleading or the nonsense you sometimes hear from other CEOs.
Charles Duhigg
#74. For decades, activist shareholders were an entertaining, but largely ignored, Wall Street sideshow. Disgruntled investors would attend annual meetings to harangue executives, criticize strategies - and protest that their complaints were being ignored.
Charles Duhigg
#76. Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it's easier for the public to accept it.
Charles Duhigg
#77. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits - practical, emotional, and intellectual - systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. - William James
Charles Duhigg
#78. It is almost always a bad idea to use a reverse mortgage to pay for a vacation or to buy a risky investment, like stocks or deferred annuities.
Charles Duhigg
#79. It is often difficult to definitively link a specific instance of disease to one particular cause, like water pollution. Even when tests show that drinking water is polluted, it can be hard to pinpoint the source of the contamination.
Charles Duhigg
#80. And as workers were empowered to make more choices, their motivation skyrocketed. Just as Mauricio Delgado and the U.S. Marine Corps had found in other settings, when workers felt a greater sense of control, their drive expanded. Word
Charles Duhigg
#81. Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.
Charles Duhigg
#82. Your brain secretly wants that song, because it's so familiar to everything else you've already heard and liked. It just sounds right." There is evidence that a preference for things that sound "familiar" is a product of our neurology.
Charles Duhigg
#83. Entrepreneurs do not try and create new types of smartphone technologies now because they know it's pointless: They're going to get sued almost immediately.
Charles Duhigg
#84. Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.
Charles Duhigg
#85. He got fired because he didn't report the incident, and so no one else had the opportunity to learn from it. Not sharing an opportunity to learn is a cardinal sin." Cultures
Charles Duhigg
#86. Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.
Charles Duhigg
#87. Drinking water that does not meet a federal health guideline will not necessarily make someone ill. Many contaminants are hazardous only if consumed for years. And some researchers argue that even toxic chemicals, when consumed at extremely low doses over long periods, pose few risks.
Charles Duhigg
#88. Why does my brain decide that one memory is more important than another?
Charles Duhigg
#89. There is significant evidence, however, that Bonin was in the grip of what's known as "cognitive tunneling" - a mental glitch that sometimes occurs when our brains are forced to transition abruptly from relaxed automation to panicked attention.
Charles Duhigg
#90. Lawsuits against reverse mortgage companies, including the nation's largest, Financial Freedom Senior Funding, contend that those firms helped pressure older Americans into bad investments.
Charles Duhigg
#92. In his final years of life, Hopkins took to the lecture circuit. His talks on the "Laws of Scientific Advertising" attracted thousands of people.
Charles Duhigg
#93. Firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees' independent decisions.6.16
Charles Duhigg
#94. One paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren't actual decisions, but habits.
Charles Duhigg
#95. Someone once described Ken Lewis to me as the most competitive person in the history of the United States, including the Union Army.
Charles Duhigg
#96. But one week later, when the researchers measured typing speeds again, they found that the workers, on average, were completing 103 lines per hour. Another week later: 112 lines. Most of the typists had blown past the goals they had set.
Charles Duhigg
#97. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.2
Charles Duhigg
#98. Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.
Charles Duhigg
#99. Martyrs - those killed because of their Catholic faith - can be beatified even if they don't perform a miracle. However, all beatified individuals must stage a certifiable miracle before being made a saint.
Charles Duhigg
#100. 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,
Charles Duhigg
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