The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Description:
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal • Financial Times
A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.  Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.  An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.  What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.  They succeeded by transforming habits.  In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.  Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.  At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.  Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.
Product Details:
Average Customer Rating:
based on 1044 reviews
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Review:
( 1044 customer reviews )
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
453 of 489 found the following review helpful:
Curing Your HabitsMar 19, 2012
By Ethan Jones In this wonderful book, Charles Duhigg, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, tackles an important reality head on. That is, people succeed when they identify patterns that shape their lives--and learn how to change them. This idea--that you can indeed change your habits--draws on recent research in experimental psychology, neurology, and applied psychology.
As you can see from the TOC below, Duhigg really goes after a broad range of topics. He looks at the habits of individuals, how habits operate in the brain, how companies use them, and how retailers use habits to manipulate buying habits. This provides some fascinating research and stories, such as the fact that grocery stores put fruits and vegetables at the front of the store because people who put these healthy items in their carts are more apt to buy junk food as well before they leave the store. The author's main contention is that "you have the freedom and responsibility" to remake your habits. He says "the most addicted alcoholics can become sober. The most dysfunctional companies can transform themselves. A high school dropout can become a successful manager." He makes a convincing case for all this. The only problem is that's all he does. He doesn't show you how to do it.
PART ONE: THE HABITS OF INDIVIDUALS
1. The Habit Loop - How Habits Work 2. The Craving Brain - How to Create New Habits 3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change - Why Transformation Occurs
PART TWO - THE HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATIONS
4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O'Neill - Which Habits Matter Most 5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success - When Willpower Becomes Automatic 6. The Power of a Crisis - How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and Design 7. How Target Knows What You Want Before You Do - When Companies Predict (and manipulate) Habits
PART THREE - THE HABITS OF SOCIETIES
8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott - How Movements Happen 9. The Neurology of Free Will - Are We Responsible for Our Habits?
My chief complaint is he doesn't really show you how to break bad habits. For this you should consider Emotional Intelligence 2.0. That book was great for my self-control.
374 of 412 found the following review helpful:
Change Your Habits, Change Your LifeJan 28, 2012
By Bradley Bevers
"the lucid blog"
This is a great book about the power of habit and what we can do to change our habits in business, life, and society. The book is divided into three sections, first focusing on the individual, then companies, and finally societies.
The first three chapters are my favorite, and really make up the heart of the book.
Chapter 1, "The Habit Loop" explains exactly what a habit is. Some estimate, according to the author, that habits make up 40% of our daily routine. Favorite quote from this chapter: "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 behavior to use. The there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is the reward . . ." (19)
Chapter 2, "The Craving Brain" includes the story of Pepsodent and lays out a simple formula for creating new habits in others. "First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the reward." (37) The rest of the chapter will fill you in on the missing part of this formula and you will learn how Febreze went from near bust to a product bringing in over a billion dollars a year.
Chapter 3, "The Golden Rule of Habit Change" is my favorite chapter. In this chapter you will learn what part of the habit loop to modify and how you should go about doing it. You will also learn how Tony Dungee reinvented the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts by instilling habits into his teams. Very good information, if you read one chapter in this book, make sure it is this one. Of interest to everyone, from smokers to businessmen to nail-biters to football coaches.
The remaining two sections of the book were not quite as strong as the first. They consist mainly of anecdotes and examples of how companies and societies (and a church) changed habits in others successfully. They are worth reading, but not as good as the first third of the book. The Starbucks story of instilling willpower in their employees and the story of Rosa Parks and Saddleback church were the most interesting.
All in all, this book is definitely worth picking up. I was a little disappointed by the last couple of sections of the book and thought that one of the anecdotes the author used in the first chapter was overused (same story, same person covered thoroughly in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything if you have read it). The core of the book that explains what habits are and how to change them make this book a valuable read. Recommended.
792 of 933 found the following review helpful:
One or two chapters of interest, the rest fillerMay 04, 2012
By J. McGuire The first two chapters weren't bad. They made me think that the succeeding chapters would be even more interesting. They weren't. The book fell off a cliff at that point. Chapters on companies that turned around -- I thought I was watching CNBC. The science, which is what I was interested in, apparently is only enough to fill one or two chapters. Then the author manufactured a bunch of filler to make it book-length, most of which only seemed to relate to the topic marginally. And if you're looking for a self-help book to help you break bad habits, go somewhere else. The advice is: find out what reward you get out of the habit, then do something else to get that same reward. There, you don't have to read the book.
If the book is intended as an advertisement for Febreze, it's fairly effective. I found myself actually wanting to buy a bottle, but then realized I was probably being manipulated. (Years ago, I read the label on a Febreze bottle. It said make sure the fabric you're spraying is clean first. If my couch was clean, I wouldn't be spraying it with something to remove odors! Give me a break.)
And woven throughout the book, you have to suffer through the author's admonitions about the habits that *he* thinks *you* ought to practice: the usual boring, politically correct, cultural-narrative-approved, scientifically unproven advice like eat more vegetables, cut down on fat consumption, and wear sunscreen just to go outside. What a hack. I see why he's won some "journalism" awards -- he pushes the cultural narrative of the news media.
It made me realize that one habit I could try to break is buying books on Amazon based on other people's reviews.
167 of 196 found the following review helpful:
The new best-sellerFeb 07, 2012
By David Field In a sentence - this book will be a big seller and you should read it.
Why? Because it's the latest in a series of books similar to Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point." In other words, "Things we didn't know about ourselves until new psychological research showed us."
Now a book on habit could just deal on how habits control our life, and how we rely on them to get by. If we had to be in control of everything we're doing, we couldn't do it. Driving a car has become so easy for us, we can sometimes make a journey and have no idea what happened during the drive.
But Charles Duhigg is interested in the dark side of habits. He looks at the habits we wish we could lose, and at the amazing stories of the people who actually changed their bad habits. All of these stories are amazing - the woman who gave up smoking, the U.S. major who realized that Kebab vendors were the key to Iraq violence, how Proctor and Gamble got people to buy Febreze, and how Target knows who you are and what you buy. All of these stories and plenty more go against conventional wisdom, but Duhigg makes you see how obvious they are.
He talks about the unlikely ways that people like Starbucks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rick Warren's Saddleback Church found success. Even something as basic as an NFL league team can be turned around. You'd think teams knew everything about the game, but Tony Dungy found a different way that propelled the Indianapolis Colts to success, and using habits worked for people as disparate as Paul O'Neil's changing Alcoa's corporate mentality and Michael Phelps's winning Olympic swimming medals.
I wish I could put down here what you needed to do to make these changes in your own life, and after reading the book you'll have a pretty good idea. Unfortunately, we reviewers get early versions of some books that are don't have items like an index. There's a missing appendix called "A reader's guide to using these ideas," which will be in the version you can buy at Amazon or in the bookstore.
I was astounded when I read this book - and I've read it twice - and I think Duhigg is really onto something, something very important. In fact, although having read over ninety percent of the finished book twice, I intend to buy it, to get those few nuggets of information that will only be in the final book. I suggest you buy the book for yourself, and you'll be as impressed as I was.
Don't miss this one.
42 of 47 found the following review helpful:
The Power of Classical Conditioning?Aug 19, 2012
By S. Mead I was absorbed by the premise and found "The Power of Habit" to be a primer for understanding the basal ganglia. What I found was something entirely different.
I read on and was struck by the author's phrase: "Habit loops." At first these seemed unique and new. As a counseling psychology graduate student, this was novel territory - exciting! Psychology, habitual behavior, marketing, and the whys were all present. Duhigg breaks down a few marketing successes from: Starbucks, McDonald's, Pepsodent, and Febreeze. All of these companies exploited (or used) psychological tactics to sell more product. I wasn't getting habits as much as case studies in marketing behavior, but that was okay - I assumed Duhigg would get back to individual habits.
To change behavior, Duhigg suggests that people look at old habits. For improvement, new routines have to be made. The habit loop includes the: cue, routine, and reward. If you're tired (cue), a cup of coffee can be your routine, followed by the reward of energy. But no matter how strong your changed routine is, Duhigg stresses that belief in one's possibility for change is key.
Further along, willpower becomes the focus. The strength to continue on amidst fear, pain, or anxious conditions is willpower. I found this to be the best part of the book - wished the whole book was about this.
Unfortunately, by chapter 7, the book disintegrates from its original premise. A case study about Target is featured, and it's identical to the one featured here (published a year before "The Power of Habit"): Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy. In fact, the similarities are so tremendous that the layout of stores becomes a focal point, which is exactly what Brandwashed talks about. Duhigg loosely relates these studies to habit, but it seemed weak and purposeless.
What sent me over the top was the claim that "sleep deactivates the prefrontal cortex and other high cognition areas." In all my years of psychology, this has never been shown. The brain doesn't "deactivate" upon sleep. Instead, the brain is constantly processing and organizing material. If the prefrontal cortex stopped working, it would likely mean a stroke or severe hemorrhage was occurring.
Not once - in all the learning and habit making dialogue - does Duhigg mention classical conditioning's role in learning new behaviors or aiding in habituation. This does a disservice to the reader and paints habit as its own field of study. A habit loop is merely a case of classical conditioning, repeated.
To conclude, the author claims, "You now know how to redirect the path." This is proceeded by, "...This book doesn't contain one prescription [for change]."
While I found it to be an interesting read, the power of our habits seemed to be muddled.
We are showing you the most current and relevant reviews. In total there are 1044 customer reviews for this item.
* Estimated shipping rate for US 48 states. Final rate calculated at checkout.
based on 1044 reviews
( 1044 customer reviews )
