Book Summary - The Power of Habit
The Power of Habit (Summary)
PROLOGUE:
-Keystone habit.
-Keystone habit.
Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are "keystone habits" and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything. Keystone habits say that success doesn't depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.
Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skill, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a great sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget. It's not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes better grades or less frivolous spending. But somehow those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold.
If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause widespread shifts. However, identifying keystone habits is tricky. To find them, you have to know where to look. Detecting keystone habits means searching out certain characteristics. 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.
Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes. A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enough power, and influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. Small wins are steady application of a small advantage, once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favour another small win. Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.
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.
Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skill, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a great sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget. It's not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes better grades or less frivolous spending. But somehow those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold.
If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause widespread shifts. However, identifying keystone habits is tricky. To find them, you have to know where to look. Detecting keystone habits means searching out certain characteristics. 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.
Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes. A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enough power, and influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. Small wins are steady application of a small advantage, once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favour another small win. Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.
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.
-All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
-Most of the choice we make each day may feel like the products of well considered decision making, but they're not. They are habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to our kids each night, whether we save our spend, how often we exercise, and the way we organize our thoughts and work routines have enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security, and happiness.
PART-1:THE HABIT OF INDIVIDUALS:
1)THE HABIT LOOP(HOW HABIT WORK) :
Habits = Cue ➡ Routine ➡ Reward
-Habits never really disappear. There encoded into the structures of our brain, and that's a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits. And so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.
2)THE CRAVING BRAIN(HOW TO CREATE NEW HABIT) :
-Craving is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.
- There is nothing programmed into our brains that makes us see a box of doughnut and automatically want a sugary treat. But once our brain learns that a doughnut box contains yummy sugar and other carbohydrates, it will start anticipating the sugar high. Our brains will push us toward the box. Then if we don't eat the doughnut, we'll feel disappointed.
-Cravings are what drives habit. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.
-Craving is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.
- There is nothing programmed into our brains that makes us see a box of doughnut and automatically want a sugary treat. But once our brain learns that a doughnut box contains yummy sugar and other carbohydrates, it will start anticipating the sugar high. Our brains will push us toward the box. Then if we don't eat the doughnut, we'll feel disappointed.
-Cravings are what drives habit. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.
3)THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE (WHY TRANSFORMATION OCCURS)
- The golden rule of habit change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. Rather, to change habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.
- Alcoholic crave a drink because it offers escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release.
PART-2:THE HABIT OF SUCCESSFUL ORGANISATIONS:
1)KEYSTONE HABITS:
- Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are "keystone habits" and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.
- Keystone habits say that success doesn't depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.
- 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.
2)WHEN WILLPOWER BECOMES AUTOMATIC:
- Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say "thank you".
- "By making people use a little bit of their willpower to ignore cookies, we had put them into a state where they were willing to quit much faster", Muraven told me. "There's been more than two hundred studies on this idea since then, and they've all found the same thing. Willpower isn't just a skill. It's a muscle, like the muscle in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there's less power left over for other things."
- When Muraven started exploring why students who had been treated kindly had more willpower he found that the key difference was the sense of control they had over their experience." We've found this again and again," Muraven told me. "When people are asked to do something that takes self control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons - if they feel like it's a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else - it's much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they're just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster. In both cases, people ignored the cookies. But when the students were treated like cogs, rather than people, it took a lot more willpower."
3)THE POWER OF A CRISIS:
- Destructive organisational habits can be found within hundreds of industries and at thousands of firms. And almost always, they are the the products of thoughtlessness, of leaders who avoid thinking about the culture and so let it develop without guidance. There are no organisations without institutional habits. There are only places where they are deliberately designed, and places where they are created without forethought, so they often grow from rivalries or fear. But sometimes, even destructive habits can be transformed by leaders who know how to seize the right opportunities. Sometimes, in the heat of a crisis, the right habits emerge.
4)WHEN COMPANIES PREDICT (AND MANIPULATE) HABITS:
- Consumers sometimes act like creature of habit, automatically repeating past behaviour with little regard to current goals.
- "It used to be that companies who only knew what their customers wanted them to know", said Tom Davenport, one of the leading researchers on how businesses use data and analytics. "That world is far behind us". You'd be shocked how much information is out there - and every company buys it, because it's the only way to survive"
PART-3:THE HABITS OF SOCIETY:
1)HOW MOVEMENTS HAPPEN:
- In general, sociologists say, most of us have friends who are like us. We might have a few close acquaintances who are richer, a few who are poorer, and a few of different races - but, on the whole, our deepest relationships tend to be with people who look like us, earn about the same amount of money, and come from similar backgrounds.
- There is a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly. Studies show that people have no problem ignoring strangers' injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organise.
- The power of weak ties.
2)ARE WE RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR HABITS?:
-The problem is that there is nothing guiding the brain except for basic patterns, your most basic habits.You follow what exists in your head, because you're not capable of making a choice.
- Some thinkers", Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics, " hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction."
A READER'S GUIDE TO USING THESE IDEAS:
- Change might not be fast and it is not always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.
The Framework:
▪️Identify the routine
▪️Experiment with rewards
▪️Isolate the cue
▪️Have a plan
-Isolate the cue:
▪️Location
▪️Time
▪️Emotional state
▪️Other people
▪️Immediately preceding action
Once you have figured out your habit loop - you have identified the reward driving your behaviour, the cue triggering it, and the routine itself - you can begin to shift the behaviour. You can change to a better routine by planning for the cue and choosing a behaviour that delivers the reward you are craving. What you need is a plan.
In the prologue, we learned that habit is a choice that we deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing, often every day. Put another way, a habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: when I see a CUE I will do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD. To engineer that formula, we need to begin making choices again. And the easiest way to do this, according to study after study, is to have a plan. Within psychology, this plans are known as "implementation intentions".
Obviously, changing some habits can be more difficult. But this framework is a place to start. Sometimes changes takes a long time. Sometimes it requires repeated experiments and failures. But once you understand how a habit operates - once you diagnose the cue, the routine and the reward - you gain power over it.
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