Charles Duhigg

Early on while listening to this audiobook, I was ready to eject the disc and forget the whole thing. The content was shaping up to be just another business book on how to maximize profits. Take the story of Claude C. Hopkins for example. He was an American businessman and advertising pioneer who applied the science of habits towards helping clients sell products. Active in the early 20th century, Mr. Hopkins is credited with promoting daily teeth brushing by showing that doing so would show more remove a film that forms naturally on the teeth. Never mind that brushing was overkill (swishing water in your mouth will do the job), people nevertheless bought into the new habit, and millions of dollars were made. Ahh, advertising.

In spite of celebrating the likes of Claude C. Hopkins, I kept listening. After a while I got the impression of a Jekyll and Hyde thing going on. For the most part, this book wants to be a statistical how-to manual for reforming individuals and businesses, but underneath all the rationality lurks a dark side. It's one thing to bite your nails and wish you could stop, but it's another thing entirely to wield the power of habit to manipulate others. More on this in a moment.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg breaks down the structure of a habit into three parts: cue, action and reward. He goes on to show how it's overwhelmingly easier to alter a habit rather than cease doing it entirely. For the bad habits, one need only change the destructive part of the habit, the action, and keep the other parts intact. This works provided an appropriate substitute is found.

The most influential parts for me were the sections on small winds and weak ties. Small winds are like a controlled butterfly effect—small changes leveraged in the present so that bigger changes can be enacted later on. Weak ties relate to the relational bonds between people. There are family and friends and there are complete strangers, and somewhere in between are the weak ties. A surprisingly strong connection, these are the people you may know of, but not very well. Or you may not know them at all even though they belong to your community, church, etc. Movements are born and political campaigns are won using these weak ties.

The section on corporate retailers (Target being the given example) takes us to more uncomfortable territory. Here they mine consumer buying data to predict a customer's future buying needs. Hardly innocuous coupon advertising; this is big brother stuff, and to the book's credit, it admits the same thing. Profits are up! But so are intrusions of privacy! (Jekyll and Hyde.) We all know this is going on, but to what extent?

The last section ventures into the territory of habit versus free will with biting examples of gambling addiction and committing involuntary manslaughter... while asleep! This isn't your feel good biz org manual anymore. It's this dichotomy that seals the deal for The Power of Habit being one of the most important reads this year. show less

The stated purpose of The Power of Habit is to explain how habits work and, hopefully when armed with this information, the reader will be able to devise methods to go about changing their habits for good. Along the way New York Times investigative reporter Charles Duhigg takes the reader on an informative, lively tour of personal, organizational and societal habits.

Clearly based on extensive research and interviews (check the 60 pages of Notes for confirmation), Duhigg has taken a small show more idea from a Major fighting in Iraq who quelled rioting in the city of Kufa by simply keeping food vendors away from growing mobs and turned it into an extensive narrative on how habits work, how we create new ones and how we can change them.

In this regard Duhigg shines. In the habits of individuals section we learn about the three-step “habit loop” and how our brain looks for ways to save effort by first looking for “cues” or triggers, followed by a “routine” to follow that is physical, mental or emotional and finally a “reward” that determines if the loop is memorable enough to become a habit. Duhigg does a fine job of explaining habits, how they work and indeed how to change them.

Like many bestsellers based on social science research (Willpower by Baumeister and Tierney, Redirect by Tim Wilson and Change Anything by Kerry Patterson for example) Duhigg tells great stories, many with a surprising twist that engages the reader and seem to further his argument. However, at times he seems to overreach in estimating the power of habits and gives them credit for everything from Super Bowl victories, the amazing turnaround of Fortune 500 companies and the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

While Tony Dungy as coach of the Indianapolis Colts, Paul O’Neill at Alcoa and Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott make for amazing stories in Duhigg’s capable hands, to attribute their successes to habits and habits alone seems to make the error that Phil Rosenzweig highlights in his seminal work The Halo Effect.

Could having a Hall of Fame quarterback at the most important position in sports have helped Dungy’s team as much, if not more than, simple habit change? Did rising aluminum prices in the late 1980’s and 1990’s account for some, if not most, of Alcoa’s financial success beyond O’Neill’s focus on worker safety? And after years and years of struggle before 1955 did the Civil Rights Movement finally reach its tipping point in Montgomery?

Make no mistake, Duhigg is very persuasive with these and many more stories, but beyond his explanation of habit formation and change and especially his own habit change process found in the Appendix (which I found very helpful), I feel he used his habit model as a hammer and every story he tells was a nail.

I still highly recommend this book, but beyond studies that were independently verified and research based more on causation than correlation, I would take some of Duhigg’s stories with a grain of salt. For the reader looking to change personal habits however I can think of no better place to start. show less

Duhigg is a thorough and very readable writer who tells useful stories and organizes ideas well. I enjoyed his book on developing habits, so I picked up Smarter Faster Better when it came out. At first, I was less interested in it, because unlike The Power of Habit it seemed less content-driven and more narrative, a conventional self-help book. I even gave up on it for a while. But then, when I finished it finally and went back to skim it for main ideas, I realized it had a nicely coherent show more and well-researched set of ideas for making effective decisions.

Anyone who has read many of this kind of books will be familiar with the assertions in it, of course. Successful people have a strong locus of control, remind themselves of why they are doing things rather than being too task-focused, encourage psychological safety in their teams, avoid cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking by visualizing what things should look like, and create mental models. They set both stretch and SMART goals, create commitment cultures, think probabilistically and see the future as a collection of potential possibilities. They take ideas from other settings, pay attention to how things make them feel and think, and reframe situations to create tension and dissonance. They make data disfluent and process it actively rather than absorbing it passively, and they break problems into smaller pieces to make it easier to process. What makes the book worth reading is the combination of well-analyzed narrative and good research, which allow the reader to envision putting the ideas into action.

That is: A readable and worthwhile book, more conventional and focusing closer to the ground than The Power of Habit. show less

I'd heard about The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business by Charles Duhigg from several different sources, always as a recommended book. I finally broke down and bought a copy and then put it in my to-read pile to get to eventually. I wish now I'd put it on the top of my to-read pile. It was that interesting and informative. As I read about cues and routines and rewards, I felt my usual resistance rise up. I suppose I'm a skeptic at heart because I often feel the need to show more be convinced. Duhigg breaks down the studies he references with an ease that makes them read as easy as reading a novel making The Power of Habit a very approachable read. As I read, I began to think about my own habits. I examined which habits are productive for me and which ones aren't. I realized it really isn't always that easy to see one's own cues, routines, or even the rewards without some deep examination. The Power of Habit pushed me to think about the role of habit in everything around me and with everyone around me. show less