The Power of Habit

Highlighted Quotes

• Location 825: This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings.
• Location 932: That craving is an essential part of the formula for creating new habits
• Location 1037: You Can’t Extinguish a Bad Habit, You Can Only Change It.
• Location 1349: It wasn’t God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a difference.
• Location 1351: Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.
• Location 1353: You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.
• Location 1411: For most 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.
• Location 1418: But we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible.
• Location 1461: a habit cannot be eradicated—it must, instead, be replaced.
• Location 1551: you can’t order people to change. That’s not how the brain works. So I decided I was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company.”
• Location 1555: Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.
• Location 1595: “Routines are the organizational analogue of habits.”
• Location 1596: “We were basically ceding decision making to a process that occurred without actually thinking,”
• Location 1649: He was building new corporate habits.
• Location 1747: “More common is the circumstance where small wins are scattered … like miniature experiments that test implicit theories about resistance and opportunity and uncover both resources and barriers that were invisible before the situation was stirred up.”
• Location 1748: Personal Note: Forks !!
• Location 1790: “We killed this man,” a grim-faced O’Neill told the group. “It’s my failure of leadership. I caused his death. And it’s the failure of all of you in the chain of command.”
• Location 1812: The small wins that started with O’Neill’s focus on safety created a climate in which all kinds of new ideas bubbled up.
• Location 1824: “The man has never encountered an answer he can’t turn into another twenty hours of work.”)
• Location 1900: This is the final way that keystone habits encourage widespread change: by creating cultures where new values become ingrained.
• Location 2127: or a five-year-old soccer star,” said Heatherton. “When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength.
• Location 2261: if you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you right.”
• Location 2294: 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.
• Location 2299: Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs.
• Location 2303: “We’ve started asking partners to use their intellect and creativity, rather than telling them ‘take the coffee out of the box, put the cup here, follow this rule,’ ” said Kris Engskov, a vice president at Starbucks. “People want to be in control of their lives.”
• Location 2433: “Much of firm behavior,” they wrote, is best “understood as a reflection of general habits and strategic orientations coming from the firm’s past,” rather than “the result of a detailed survey of the remote twigs of the decision tree.”
• Location 2436: it may seem like most organizations make rational choices based on deliberate decision making, but that’s not really how companies operate at all. Instead, firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions.6.16 And these habits have more profound impacts than anyone previously understood.
• Location 2448: Routines provide the hundreds of unwritten rules that companies need to operate.
• Location 2456: the most important benefits of routines is that they create truces between potentially warring groups or individuals within an organization.
• Location 2460: most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals’ seem worse.
• Location 2463: Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.
• Location 2483: Sometimes, as Rhode Island Hospital discovered, an unstable peace can be as destructive as any civil war.
• Location 2507: truces are only durable when they create real justice. If a truce is unbalanced—if the peace isn’t real—then the routines often fail when they are needed most.
• Location 2686: reform is usually possible only once a sense of crisis takes hold.
• Location 2695: Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.
• Location 3191: you must understand how to make the novel seem familiar.
• Location 3246: Social habits are what fill streets with protesters who may not know one another, who might be marching for different reasons, but who are all moving in the same direction.
• Location 3464: The community’s weak ties were drawing everyone together.
• Location 3546: “You focus on building people,”
• Location 3588: For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling.
• Location 3641: a set of new behaviors that converted participants from followers into self-directing leaders.
• Location 3664: Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decides to face the same direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants’ sense of self.
• Location 4038: habits—even once they are rooted in our minds—aren’t destiny.
• Location 4039: Everything we know about habits, from neurologists studying amnesiacs and organizational experts remaking companies, is that any of them can be changed, if you understand how they function.
• Location 4043: But every habit, no matter its complexity, is malleable.
• Location 4045: to modify a habit, you must decide to change it.
• Location 4074: My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”
• Location 4082: the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change.
• Location 4083: Habits, he noted, are what allow us to “do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all.”
• Location 4207: The reason why it is so hard to identify the cues that trigger our habits is because there is too much information bombarding us as our behaviors unfold.
• Location 4215: all habitual cues fit into one of five categories: Location Time Emotional state Other people Immediately preceding action