The Power of Habit – Charles Duhigg – 2012

Backing your car out of the driveway: as soon as you pull out the car keys, our basal ganglia kicks in, identifying the habits we have stored in our brain related to backing an automobile into the street. Once the habit starts unfolding, our grey matter is free to chase other thoughts…

The loop Cue-routine-reward becomes more and more automatic. Cue and reward become intertwined, a sense of anticipation and craving emerges.

Your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits. If you have a bad one, it is always lurking there, waiting for the right cue and rewards.

Going for q jog or ignoring the doughnuts becomes automatic as any other habit.

Every Mc Donald’s looks the same and what employees say to customers is standardized, so everything is consistent cue to trigger eating routine.

By learning to observe cues and rewards, we can change the routines.

When a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the momentary distraction that reading a message provides. The craving grows until the phone is checked.

Only when your brain starts expecting the reward – craving the endorphins – will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.

A coach of American football team: he did think they had to memorize hundreds of formations. They just has to learn a few moves and get them right every time.

I knew I had to transform Alcoa, but you can’t order people to change. That is not how the brain’s work. So I decided I was going to focus on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread through the entire company.  Some habits matter more than others in remaking business and lives. These are keystone habits – for Alcoa it would be staff safety.

NASA mission control filled with applause every time something expensive blew up. It became an organizational habit, so that everyone would know that they had tried and failed, but at least they had tried (and would learn from it).

For many people exercise is a keystone habit that trigger widespread change. There is something about it that makes other good habits easier. Keystone habits help other habits to flourish and offer ‘small wins’.

Grit, defined as the capacity to work toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity and plateaus in progress.

Willpower is not just a skill. It is a muscle and it gets tired as it works harder, so there is less power left for other things. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything and spilled over into what people eat or how hard they work.

Chances are, the first things you see upon entering your grocery store are fruits and vegetables. This does not make sense as fruits and vegetable bruise easily at the bottom of a shopping cart. But as marketers figured out long ago, if we start our shopping sprees on healthy stuff, we’re much more likely to buy Doritos when we encounter them later.

There are data peddlers such as Infinitegraph that listen to shoppers’ online conversation on message boards and internet forums, and track which product people mention favorably.  Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’ political leanings, reading habits. Other companies analyse photos that consumer post online, cataloging if they are obese of skinny….and what kind of products they might want to buy.

Gym: people want to visit places that satisfy their social needs. Getting people to exercise in groups makes it more likely they will stick with a workout.

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 feeling of ownership.

Our weak-tie acquaintances are often as influential – if not more –  than our close-tie friends. The power of weak ties helps explain how a protest can expand from a group of friends into a broad social movement.

We are interested in looking at the brain systems involved in habits and addictions. Pathological gambler got more excited about winning (than non pathological gamblers). But what was interesting were the near misses. To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brain reacted the same way. But to a non pathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss.

‘Adding a near miss to a lottery is like pouring jet fuel on a fire’ says a state lottery consultant who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. Every other scratch off ticket is designed to make you feel that you almost won.

However to modify a habit, you must decide to change it.