Top 100 Charles Duhigg Quotes
#1. 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
#2. That's why they asked each other questions starting with "why." Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.
Charles Duhigg
#3. Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.
Charles Duhigg
#4. The waste from power plants is essentially what is left over when you burn coal. And as we all know, coal is a relatively dirty mineral.
Charles Duhigg
#5. 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
#7. Participants were more motivated to play simply because they believed they were in control.11 III.
Charles Duhigg
#8. A few decades ago, many people didn't drink water outside of a meal. Then beverage companies started bottling the production of far-off springs, and now office workers unthinkingly sip bottled water all day long.
Charles Duhigg
#9. However, 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.
Charles Duhigg
#10. You're much better off creating positive rewards, complimenting people for acting correctly, rather than punishing them when they act incorrectly.
Charles Duhigg
#11. 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
#12. But to change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.
Charles Duhigg
#13. Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.
Charles Duhigg
#14. Most people probably don't even know what toothpaste they buy; they just recognize the box on the shelf.
Charles Duhigg
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. For most of Wall Street's history, stock trading was fairly straightforward: buyers and sellers gathered on exchange floors and dickered until they struck a deal.
Charles Duhigg
#19. Your brain will eventually enjoy exercise for exercise sake, right; endorphins and endocannabinoids will create a sense of reward, but it doesn't know that at first.
Charles Duhigg
#20. Bromates are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, but officials are required to test for them only when water leaves a treatment plant.
Charles Duhigg
#21. There is no central government database that allows officials to monitor water tests by local systems.
Charles Duhigg
#22. Within a year of O'Neilrs speech, Alcoa's profits would hit a rec- ord high.
Charles Duhigg
#23. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.
Charles Duhigg
#24. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier.
Charles Duhigg
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. But only once they created a sense of craving - the desire to make everything smell as nice as it looked - did Febreze become a hit. That craving is an essential part of the formula for creating new habits that Claude Hopkins, the Pepsodent ad man, never recognized.
Charles Duhigg
#28. Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values that, in the heat of a difficult decision or a moment of uncertainty, we might otherwise forget.
Charles Duhigg
#29. Wouldn't have said this a year ago - that's how fast our understanding is changing," said Tonigan, the University of New Mexico researcher, "but belief seems critical. You don't have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.
Charles Duhigg
#30. Fulgham told the bureau's director that if they gave him the authority to distribute control, he would cut the number of people needed from more than four hundred to just thirty employees and deliver Sentinel for $20 million in a bit over a year.
Charles Duhigg
#31. The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.
Charles Duhigg
#32. 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
#33. Back when Detroit was the head of auto manufacturing, it was clear where profits were created. Right? A car was made in Detroit. There was little argument that you could make that some of the money from that should be sent overseas to Ireland.
Charles Duhigg
#34. As America becomes an older nation, it is also, by some measures, becoming sicker.
Charles Duhigg
#35. Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.
Charles Duhigg
#36. If Freddie Mac is unable to raise capital, it could spark a political and financial crisis.
Charles Duhigg
#37. Hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it ...
Charles Duhigg
#38. It's okay to be ambitious, but if you play too rough, your peers will unite against you.
Charles Duhigg
#39. Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say thank you.
Charles Duhigg
#40. Actually, attorneys say, copying a purchased CD for even one friend violates the federal copyright code most of the time.
Charles Duhigg
#41. Habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives. When
Charles Duhigg
#42. If you believe you can change - if you make it a habit - the change becomes real.
Charles Duhigg
#43. Candy bar companies, through commercials, have tied their products to low-energy cues, transforming what was once a dessert into a pick-me-up for cubicle dwellers.
Charles Duhigg
#44. This is the final way that keystone habits encourage widespread change: by creating cultures where new values become ingrained.
Charles Duhigg
#45. Many environmental advocates argue that agricultural pollution will be reduced only through stronger federal laws.
Charles Duhigg
#46. It's an open secret that if a debtor is willing to wait long enough, he can probably get away with paying almost nothing, as long as he doesn't mind hurting his credit score.
Charles Duhigg
#48. People who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering disasters. There are simply communities - sometimes of just one other person - who make change believable. One
Charles Duhigg
#49. 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
#50. Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.
Charles Duhigg
#51. 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:
Charles Duhigg
#52. Keystone habits offer what is known within academic literature as "small wins." They help other habits to flourish by creating new structures, and they establish cultures where change becomes contagious.
Charles Duhigg
#53. awareness training, and like AA's insistence on forcing alcoholics
Charles Duhigg
#55. Like solo sailors venturing into the Southern Ocean, climbers are seduced by risk. The desire to push to a summit or scale a rock face is so strong that they consciously or subconsciously minimize safety precautions drilled into their brains.
Charles Duhigg
#56. People who start habitually exercising tend on average to eat better. They also tend to use their credit cards less and procrastinate less.
Charles Duhigg
#57. Forty percent of all electronics sold are assembled by Foxconn.
Charles Duhigg
#58. There are systems called zero discharge emission systems that would prevent any pollution from making it into the water or the air.
Charles Duhigg
#59. A habit cannot be eradicated - it must, instead, be replaced.
Charles Duhigg
#60. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that no one can mount a coup.
Charles Duhigg
#61. Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren't actual decisions, but habits.prl.3
Charles Duhigg
#62. Companies aren't families. They're battlefields in a civil war.
Charles Duhigg
#63. Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.
Charles Duhigg
#64. If someone has trouble with self-discipline at work, they're probably also going to have trouble attending a program designed to strengthen their self-discipline after work," Muraven said. But
Charles Duhigg
#65. Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.
Charles Duhigg
#66. 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. Belief
Charles Duhigg
#67. We love to receive praise, but usually we're not certain what message, precisely, we should take from it. On the other hand, when someone points out our flaws, we realize immediately that something needs to change.
Charles Duhigg
#68. 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.
Charles Duhigg
#69. As the United States has become an older nation, reverse mortgages have grown into a $20-billion-a-year industry, with elderly homeowners taking out more than 132,000 such loans in 2007, an increase of more than 270 percent from two years earlier.
Charles Duhigg
#70. A huge amount of success in life comes from learning as a child how to make good habits. It's good to help kids understand that when they do certain things habitually, they're reinforcing patterns.
Charles Duhigg
#71. 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
#72. 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
#74. In a sense, habits never really disappear. Once formed, they always remain in our neurology.
Charles Duhigg
#75. 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
#76. And once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it.
Charles Duhigg
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. The physical effects of alcohol are often one of the least rewarding parts of drinking for addicts.
Charles Duhigg
#82. 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
#83. Companies are very, very good - better than consumers themselves - at knowing what consumers are actually craving.
Charles Duhigg
#84. Massachusetts has prohibited most financial advisers from using titles like 'certified senior adviser,' and some of the largest insurers, including MetLife and Genworth Financial, have similar rules.
Charles Duhigg
#85. 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
#86. Because the fees associated with a reverse mortgage are high, such loans make sense only for borrowers who expect to live in their home for a number of years.
Charles Duhigg
#87. One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation's sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste.
Charles Duhigg
#88. Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago persuasively argue that one of the biggest reasons for the nation's current obesity epidemic is that food is now so much cheaper and easier to prepare.
Charles Duhigg
#89. 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
#90. In 1940, Germany toppled France in 20 days, and the panzerdivizion symbolized war's shift from drawn-out conflicts using massive fortifications to rapid-fire engagements built around manned, motorized armor.
Charles Duhigg
#91. Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.
Charles Duhigg
#92. 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.
Charles Duhigg
#93. 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.
Charles Duhigg
#94. In general, insurers say criticisms of claims-handling are unfair because most policyholders are paid promptly, and some denials are necessary to root out fraud.
Charles Duhigg
#95. Some financial advisers say anyone who may move in less than seven years should not take out a reverse mortgage.
Charles Duhigg
#96. All our life," William James told us in the prologue, "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."9.29
Charles Duhigg
#97. Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.
Charles Duhigg
#98. Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
Charles Duhigg
#99. By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what's going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These
Charles Duhigg
#100. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people."36
Charles Duhigg
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