The Power of Habit

All our life,so far as it has definte form, is but a mass of habits.

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they're not. They're habits.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business Duhigg, Charles 2013年4月24日 PROLOGUE “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,” William James wrote in 1892.prl.2 Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. 2013年4月25日 How Habits Work Squire’s studies would show that even someone who can’t remember his own age or almost anything else can develop habits that seem inconceivably complex—until you realize that everyone relies on similar neurological processes every day. 2013年4月25日 How Habits Work The effects of H.M.’s surgery had been so debilitating that he was institutionalized for the remainder of his life. 2013年4月25日 1. THE HABIT LOOP Eugene, in contrast, had an amazing knack for guiding almost any discussion to a topic he was comfortable talking about at length, such as satellites—he had worked as a technician for an aerospace company—or the weather. 2013年4月25日 1. THE HABIT LOOP What’s more, Eugene still had all the habits he had formed in his youth, so whenever Squire gave him a cup of water or complimented him on a particularly detailed answer, Eugene would thank him and offer a compliment in return. 2013年4月25日 1. THE HABIT LOOP And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: As each rat learned how to navigate the maze, its mental activity decreased. As the route became more and more automatic, each rat started thinking less and less. 2013年4月25日 1. THE HABIT LOOP When you first learned to drive, the driveway required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: It involves opening the garage, unlocking the car door, adjusting the seat, inserting the key in the ignition, turning it clockwise, moving the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, mentally estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned and monitoring for oncoming traffic, calculating how reflected images in the mirrors translate into actual distances between the bumper, the garbage cans, and the hedges, all while applying slight pressure to the gas pedal and brake, and, most likely, telling your passenger to please stop fiddling with the radio. 2013年4月26日 How Habits Work This effort-saving instinct is a huge advantage. An efficient brain requires less room, which makes for a smaller head, which makes childbirth easier and therefore causes fewer infant and mother deaths. 2013年4月26日 How Habits Work Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears. 2013年4月26日 How Habits Work This explains why it’s so hard to create exercise habits, for instance, or change what we eat. Once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather than running, or snacking whenever we pass a doughnut box, those patterns always remain inside our heads. 2013年4月27日 How Habits Work Squire’s experiments with Eugene revolutionized the scientific community’s understanding of how the brain works by proving, once and for all, that it’s possible to learn and make unconscious choices without remembering anything about the lesson or decision making.1.22 Eugene showed that habits, as much as memory and reason, are at the root of how we behave. We might not remember the experiences that create our habits, but once they are lodged within our brains they influence how we act—often without our realization. 2013年4月27日 How Habits Work By 2000, seven years after Eugene’s illness, his life had achieved a kind of equilibrium. 2013年4月27日 How Habits Work “I know he would have been really proud to know how much he contributed to science,” Beverly told me. “He told me once, pretty soon after we got married, that he wanted to do something important with his life, something that mattered. And he did. He just never remembered any of it.” 2013年4月28日 How to Create New Habits The key, he said, was that he had “learned the right human psychology.” That psychology was grounded in two basic rules: First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards. 2013年4月29日 How to Create New Habits The spray had been created about three years earlier, when one of P&G’s chemists was working with a substance called hydroxypropyl beta cyclodextrin, or HPBCD, in a laboratory. 2013年4月29日 How to Create New Habits (“I’d rather my kids smoked weed than ate in McDonald’s,” he once told a colleague.) Before joining P&G, he had spent five years on Wall Street building mathematical models for choosing stocks. 2013年5月1日 How to Create New Habits This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that we’re not really aware they exist, so we’re often blind to their influence. 2013年5月2日 How to Create New Habits Scientists have studied the brains of alcoholics, smokers, and overeaters and have measured how their neurology—the structures of their brains and the flow of neurochemicals inside their skulls—changes as their cravings became ingrained. Particularly strong habits, wrote two researchers at the University of Michigan, produce addiction-like reactions so that “wanting evolves into obsessive craving” that can force our brains into autopilot, “even in the face of strong disincentives, including loss of reputation, job, home, and family.”2.27 2013年5月2日 How to Create New Habits As the next chapter explains, there are mechanisms that can help us ignore the temptations. But to overpower the habit, we must recognize which craving is driving the behavior. If we’re not conscious of the anticipation, then we’re like the shoppers who wander, as if drawn by an unseen force, into Cinnabon. 2013年5月2日 How to Create New Habits What they found was that many of them had started running or lifting weights almost on a whim, or because they suddenly had free time or wanted to deal with unexpected stresses in their lives. 2013年5月2日 How to Create New Habits It’s humiliating, but that’s how habits work. 2013年5月2日 How to Create New Habits “We were looking at it all wrong. No one craves scentlessness. On the other hand, lots of people crave a nice smell after they’ve spent thirty minutes cleaning.” 2013年5月2日 How to Create New Habits “Consumers need some kind of signal that a product is working,” Tracy Sinclair, who was a brand manager for Oral-B and Crest Kids Toothpaste, told me. “We can make toothpaste taste like anything—blueberries, green tea—and as long as it has a cool tingle, people feel like their mouth is clean. The tingling doesn’t make the toothpaste work any better. It just convinces people it’s doing the job.” 2013年5月2日 3. THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE The game clock at the far end of the field says there are eight minutes and nineteen seconds left when Tony Dungy, the new head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—one of the worst teams in the National Football League, not to mention the history of professional football—starts to feel a tiny glimmer of hope.3.1 2013年5月2日 3. THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE Tony Dungy had waited an eternity for this job. 2013年5月2日 3. THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE For seventeen years, he prowled the sidelines as an assistant coach, first at the University of Minnesota, then with the Pittsburgh Steelers, then the Kansas City Chiefs, and then back to Minnesota with the Vikings. 2013年5月2日 3. THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE If he could instill the right habits, his team would win. 2013年5月2日 3. THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE “Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.” 2013年5月2日 3. THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE His coaching strategy embodied an axiom, a Golden Rule of habit change that study after study has shown is among the most powerful tools for creating change. Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. 2013年5月2日 3. THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same. 2013年5月2日 3. THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE The Golden Rule has influenced treatments for alcoholism, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and hundreds of other destructive behaviors, and understanding it can help anyone change their own habits. 2013年5月6日 Why Transformation Occurs Researchers say that AA works because the program forces people to identify the cues and rewards that encourage their alcoholic habits, and then helps them find new behaviors. When Claude Hopkins was selling Pepsodent, he found a way to create a new habit by triggering a new craving. But to change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine. 2013年5月6日 Why Transformation Occurs Take steps four (to make “a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves”) and five (to admit “to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”). 2013年5月6日 Why Transformation Occurs And admitting to someone else all the bad things you’ve done is a pretty good way of figuring out the moments where everything spiraled out of control.” 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs Notice how closely this study hews to the Golden Rule of habit change: Even when alcoholics’ brains were changed through surgery, it wasn’t enough. The old cues and cravings for rewards were still there, waiting to pounce. The alcoholics only permanently changed once they learned new routines that drew on the old triggers and provided a familiar relief. “Some brains are so addicted to alcohol that only surgery can stop it,” said Mueller. “But those people also need new ways for dealing with life.” 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs She was so embarrassed around her friends that she kept her hands in her pockets and, on dates, would become preoccupied with balling her fingers into fists. 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs Asking patients to describe what triggers their habitual behavior is called awareness training, and like AA’s insistence on forcing alcoholics to recognize their cues, it’s the first step in habit reversal training. The tension that Mandy felt in her nails cued her nail biting habit. 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs When she had worked through all of the nails, she felt a brief sense of completeness, she said. 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs At the end of their first session, the therapist sent Mandy home with an assignment: Carry around an index card, and each time you feel the cue—a tension in your fingertips—make a check mark on the card. 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs Then the therapist taught Mandy what is known as a “competing response.” Whenever she felt that tension in her fingertips, he told her, she should immediately put her hands in her pockets or under her legs, or grip a pencil or something else that made it impossible to put her fingers in her mouth. 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs They practiced in the therapist’s office for about thirty minutes and Mandy was sent home with a new assignment: Continue with the index card, but make a check when you feel the tension in your fingertips and a hash mark when you successfully override the habit. 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs “It seems ridiculously simple, but once you’re aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you’re halfway to changing it,” Nathan Azrin, one of the developers of habit reversal training, told me.3.25 “It seems like it should be more complex. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.”2 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs If you want to stop smoking, ask yourself, do you do it because you love nicotine, or because it provides a burst of stimulation, a structure to your day, a way to socialize? If you smoke because you need stimulation, studies indicate that some caffeine in the afternoon can increase the odds you’ll quit. More than three dozen studies of former smokers have found that identifying the cues and rewards they associate with cigarettes, and then choosing new routines that provide similar payoffs—a piece of Nicorette, a quick series of push-ups, or simply taking a few minutes to stretch and relax—makes it more likely they will quit.3.28 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine. At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there’s one other ingredient that’s necessary: belief. 2013年5月7日 Why Transformation Occurs For some habits, however, there’s one other ingredient that’s necessary: belief. 2013年5月8日 Why Transformation Occurs Dungy’s strategy, he explained, was to shift the team’s behaviors until their performances were automatic. 2013年5月8日 Why Transformation Occurs “Most of the time, it’s not physical.3.29 It’s mental.” Players mess up when they start thinking too much or second-guessing their plays. What Dungy wanted was to take all that decision making out of their game. 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs The first cracks in the theory that Alcoholics Anonymous succeeded solely by reprogramming participants’ habits started appearing a little over a decade ago and were caused by stories from alcoholics like John. Researchers began finding that habit replacement worked pretty well for many people until the stresses of life—such as finding out your mom has cancer, or your marriage is coming apart—got too high, at which point alcoholics often fell off the wagon. Academics asked why, if habit replacement is so effective, it seemed to fail at such critical moments. And as they dug into alcoholics’ stories to answer that question, they learned that replacement habits only become durable new behaviors when they are accompanied by something else. 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs The secret, the alcoholics said, was God. 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs However, those alcoholics who believed, like John in Brooklyn, that some higher power had entered their lives were more likely to make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety intact. 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs It wasn’t God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a difference. Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior. 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs “I wouldn’t have said this a year ago—that’s how fast our understanding is changing,” said Tonigan, the University of New Mexico researcher, “but belief seems critical. You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better. 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs “Belief is the biggest part of success in professional football,” Dungy told me. “The team wanted to believe, but when things got really tense, they went back to their comfort zones and old habits.” 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs It is simplistic, even cavalier, to suggest that a young man’s death can have an impact on football games. 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs But we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible. 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs Sixty seconds is an eternity in football. 2013年5月9日 Why Transformation Occurs Two weeks later, they won the Super Bowl. There are dozens of reasons that might explain why the Colts finally became champions that year. Maybe they got lucky. Maybe it was just their time. But Dungy’s players say it’s because they believed, and because that belief made everything they had learned—all the routines they had practiced until they became automatic—stick, even at the most stressful moments. 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL “I knew I had to transform Alcoa,” O’Neill told me. “But 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.” 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL O’Neill believed that some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. 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. 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL Understanding keystone habits holds the answer to that question: The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns. 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL In college at Fresno State—where he finished his courses in a bit over three years, while also working thirty hours a week—O’Neill had drafted a list of everything he hoped to accomplish during his lifetime, including, near the top, “Make a Difference.” 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL He started as a middle manager at the Veterans Administration and was told to learn about computer systems. All the while, O’Neill kept writing his lists, recording why some projects were more successful than others, which contractors delivered on time and which didn’t. He was promoted each year. And as he rose through the VA’s ranks, he made a name for himself as someone whose lists always seemed to include a bullet point that got a problem solved. 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL “The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.” 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL “Exercise spills over,” said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. “There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.” 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence.4.11Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.4.12 It’s not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes better grades or less frivolous spending. 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL 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. 2013年5月10日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL Bowman purchased a book of relaxation exercises and asked Phelps’s mom to read them aloud every night. The book contained a script—“Tighten your right hand into a fist and release it. Imagine the tension melting away”—that tensed and relaxed each part of Phelps’s body before he fell asleep. 2013年5月11日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL It seemed like the gay community’s larger goals—ending discrimination and police harassment, convincing the American Psychiatric Association to stop defining homosexuality as a mental disease—were out of reach.4.16 2013年5月11日 4. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL We worked them into a routine. There’s a series of things we do before every race that are designed to give Michael a sense of building victory. 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic But he couldn’t get along with people, and he wasn’t strong enough to weather the steady drip of criticisms and indignities. 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic “Your apron is a shield,” he told her. “Nothing anyone says will ever hurt you. You will always be as strong as you want to be.” 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit: willpower. 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit: willpower. Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.5.1 In a 2005 study, for instance, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 164 eighth-grade students, measuring their IQs and other factors, including how much willpower the students demonstrated, as measured by tests of their self-discipline. 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic “Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”5.2 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit. 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic One snapped at the researcher when she came back in. 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic Some have suggested it helps clarify why otherwise successful people succumb to extramarital affairs (which are most likely to start late at night after a long day of using willpower at work) or why good physicians make dumb mistakes (which most often occur after a doctor has finished a long, complicated task that requires intense focus).5.5 “If you want to do something that requires willpower—like going for a run after work—you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day,” Muraven told me. “If you use it up too early on tedious tasks like writing emails or filling out complicated and boring expense forms, all the strength will be gone by the time you get home.”5.6 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic It was like the exercise study: As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything. 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic They learn how to distract themselves from temptations. And once you’ve gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is practiced at helping you focus on a goal.” 2013年5月13日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic Many of these schools have dramatically raised students’ test scores.5.12 “That’s why signing kids up for piano lessons or sports is so important. It has nothing to do with creating a good musician 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. A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.” 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic Recovering from a hip or knee surgery is incredibly arduous. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic The psychologist wanted to understand why. She examined the booklets, and discovered that most of the blank pages had been filled in with specific, detailed plans about the most mundane aspects of recovery. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic As the psychologist scrutinized the booklets, she saw that many of the plans had something in common: They focused on how patients would handle a specific moment of anticipated pain. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic The patient who met his wife at the bus stop dreaded the afternoons, because that stroll was the longest and most painful each day. So he detailed every obstacle he might confront, and came up with a solution ahead of time. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic But the patients who didn’t write out any plans were at a significant disadvantage, because they never thought ahead about how to deal with painful inflection points. They never deliberately designed willpower habits. Even if they intended to walk around the block, their resolve abandoned them when they confronted the agony of the first few steps. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic What employees really needed were clear instructions about how to deal with inflection points—something similar to the Scottish patients’ booklets: a routine for employees to follow when their willpower muscles went limp.5.18 So the company developed new training materials that spelled out routines for employees to use when they hit rough patches. The manuals taught workers how to respond to specific cues, such as a screaming customer or a long line at a cash register. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives. When the Scottish patients filled out their booklets, or Travis studied the LATTE method, they decided ahead of time how to react to a cue—a painful muscle or an angry customer. When the cue arrived, the routine occurred. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic They are taught to recognize inflection points such as an angry coworker or an overwhelmed customer, and habits, such as routines for calming shoppers or defusing a confrontation. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic It was programmed to flash numbers on the screen, one at a time, for five hundred milliseconds apiece. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic This has become a standard way to measure willpower—paying attention to a boring sequence of flashing numbers requires a focus akin to working on an impossible puzzle. 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic “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.” 2013年5月14日 When Willpower Becomes Automatic On the anniversary of his death, every year, Travis wakes up early, takes an extra-long shower, plans out his day in careful detail, and then drives to work. He always arrives on time. 2013年5月15日 and Design Rhode Island Hospital was a place filled with a corrosive culture. 2013年5月16日 and Design The book’s bland cover and daunting first sentence—“In this volume we develop an evolutionary theory of the capabilities and behavior of business firms operating in a market environment, and construct and analyze a number of models consistent with that theory”—almost seemed designed to ward off readers.6.12 The authors, Yale professors Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, were best known for a series of intensely analytic papers exploring Schumpeterian theory that even most PhD candidates didn’t pretend to understand.6.13 2013年5月16日 and Design The book’s bland cover and daunting first sentence—“In this volume we develop an evolutionary theory of the capabilities and behavior of business firms operating in a market environment, and construct and analyze a number of models consistent with that theory”—almost seemed designed to ward off readers.6.12 The authors, Yale professors Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, were best known for a series of intensely analytic papers exploring Schumpeterian theory that even most PhD candidates didn’t pretend to understand.6.13 2013年5月16日 and Design Nelson and Winter had spent more than a decade examining how companies work, trudging through swamps of data before arriving at their central conclusion: “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.”6.15 2013年5月16日 and Design All these small inputs, the result of uncoordinated patterns among executives gossiping about competitors and talking to their friends, got mixed into the company’s more formal research and development routines until a consensus emerged: Red will be popular this year. 2013年5月16日 and Design If you could somehow diagram all your work habits—and the informal power structures, relationships, alliances, and conflicts they represent—and then overlay your diagram with diagrams prepared by your colleagues, it would create a map of your firm’s secret hierarchy, a guide to who knows how to make things happen and who never seems to get ahead of the ball. 2013年5月16日 and Design Some might suggest that the solution is more equitable truces. 2013年5月16日 and Design That’s a good start. Unfortunately, it isn’t enough. Creating successful organizations isn’t just a matter of balancing authority. For an organization to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge. 2013年5月16日 and Design Philip Brickell, a forty-three-year-old employee of the London Underground, was inside the cavernous main hall of the King’s Cross subway station on a November evening in 1987 when a commuter stopped him as he was collecting tickets and said there was a burning tissue at the bottom of a nearby escalator.6.27, 6.28 2013年5月17日 and Design The answer lies in seizing the same advantage that Tony Dungy encountered when he took over the woeful Bucs and Paul O’Neill discovered when he became CEO of flailing Alcoa. It’s the same opportunity Howard Schultz exploited when he returned to a flagging Starbucks in 2007. All those leaders seized the possibilities created by a crisis. During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power. Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down. 2013年5月19日 and Design “It’s excruciating to admit a mistake publicly,” said Dr. Donald Moorman, until recently Beth Israel Deaconess’s associate surgeon in chief. “Twenty years ago, doctors wouldn’t do it. But a real sense of panic has spread through hospitals now, and even the best surgeons are willing to talk about how close they came to a big error. The culture of medicine is changing.” 2013年5月19日 and Design Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits. 2013年5月19日 and Design In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose. 2013年5月19日 and Design Some administrators had proposed new hierarchies that would have clarified responsibility for fire prevention. 2013年5月20日 7. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO By the time the project was done, Pole would learn some important lessons about the dangers of preying on people’s most intimate habits. He would learn, for example, that hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it, and that not all women are enthusiastic about a computer program scrutinizing their reproductive plans. 2013年5月21日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits What they discovered was that despite those lists, more than 50 percent of purchasing decisions occurred at the moment a customer saw a product on the shelf, because, despite shoppers’ best intentions, their habits were stronger than their written intentions. 2013年5月23日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits Jenny Ward, a twenty-three-year-old in Atlanta who bought cocoa butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc, magnesium, and a bright blue rug? 2013年5月23日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits When it was done, he had a list of hundreds of thousands of women who were likely to be pregnant that Target could inundate with advertisements for diapers, lotions, cribs, wipes, and maternity clothing at times when their shopping habits were particularly flexible. 2013年5月23日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Pole and his colleagues knew, was a potential public relations disaster. So how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying every detail of their lives? 2013年5月23日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits “People listen to Top 40 because they want to hear their favorite songs or songs that sound just like their favorite songs. When something different comes on, they’re offended. They don’t want anything unfamiliar.” 2013年5月23日 7. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO That question—how do you make a song into a hit?—has been puzzling the music industry ever since it began, but it’s only in the past few decades that people have tried to arrive at scientific answers. 2013年5月23日 7. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO Meyer had tracked hundreds of sticky songs over the years, trying to divine the principles that made them popular. 2013年5月24日 7. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO “Sometimes stations will do research by calling listeners on the phone, and play a snippet of a song, and listeners will say, ‘I’ve heard that a million times. I’m totally tired of it,’ ” Meyer told me. “But when it comes on the radio, your subconscious says, ‘I know this song! I’ve heard it a million times! I can sing along!’ Sticky songs are what you expect to hear on the radio. Your brain secretly wants that song, because it’s so familiar to everything else you’ve already heard and liked. It just sounds right.” 2013年5月24日 7. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO The areas that process music, in other words, are designed to seek out patterns and look for familiarity. This makes sense. Music, after all, is complicated. The numerous tones, pitches, overlapping melodies, and competing sounds inside almost any song—or anyone speaking on a busy street, for that matter—are so overwhelming that, without our brain’s ability to focus on some sounds and ignore others, everything would seem like a cacophony of noise.7.20 2013年5月24日 7. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO Just as the scientists at MIT discovered that behavioral habits prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by the endless decisions we would otherwise have to make each day, listening habits exist because, without them, it would be impossible to determine if we should concentrate on our child’s voice, the coach’s whistle, or the noise from a busy street during a Saturday soccer game. Listening habits allow us to unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored. 2013年5月24日 7. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO When Celine Dion releases a new song—and it sounds like every other song she’s sung, as well as most of the other songs on the radio—our brains unconsciously crave its recognizability and the song becomes sticky. 2013年5月24日 7. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO By dressing something new in old clothes, and making the unfamiliar seem familiar. 2013年5月24日 7. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO This “problem will loom larger and larger in the United States as the war goes on,” former president Herbert Hoover wrote to Americans in a government pamphlet in 1943. 2013年5月26日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it. 2013年5月26日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help. 2013年5月26日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. 2013年5月26日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits To market a new habit—be it groceries or aerobics—you must understand how to make the novel seem familiar. 2013年5月26日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits Recently, as my wife’s pregnancy had progressed, I’d been noticing a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers, lotions, and baby clothes arriving at our house. 2013年5月26日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits I was planning on using some of those coupons that very weekend, I told him. 2013年5月26日 When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits 1The reporting in this chapter is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former Target employees, many of them conducted on a not-for-attribution basis because sources feared dismissal from the company or other retribution. 2013年5月26日 How Movements Happen When a young Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Montgomery in 1954, for instance, a year before Parks’s arrest, he found a majority of the city’s blacks accepted segregation “without apparent protest. Not only did they seem resigned to segregation per se; they also accepted the abuses and indignities which came with it.” 2013年5月26日 How Movements Happen Board of Education, ruling that segregation was illegal within public schools; six months before Parks’s arrest, the Court had issued what came to be known as Brown II—a decision ordering that school integration must proceed with “all deliberate speed.” 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen “Racism was set in its ways there.” 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen “Rosa Parks was one of those rare people of whom everyone agreed that she gave more than she got,” Branch wrote in his history of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters. “Her character represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting a dozen or so sociopaths.” 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen She volunteered dressmaking services to poor families and provided last-minute gown alterations for wealthy white debutantes. 2013年5月27日 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. 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen She had been in Durr’s house and had helped his daughters prepare for cotillions. 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen Many of the people who received a flyer knew Rosa Parks personally—they had sat next to her in church or at a volunteer meeting and considered her a friend. There’s 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 organize. 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen Which is why the second aspect of the social habits of movements is so important. The Montgomery bus boycott became a society-wide action because the sense of obligation that held the black community together was activated soon after Parks’s friends started spreading the word. People who hardly knew Rosa Parks decided to participate because of a social peer pressure—an influence known as “the power of weak ties”—that made it difficult to avoid joining in. 1. Friendship 2. Peer pressure 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen Do you vouch for the caller when your boss asks if he’s worth an interview? 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen In fact, in landing a job, Granovetter discovered, weak-tie acquaintances were often more important than strong-tie friends because weak ties give us access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong. Many of the people Granovetter studied had learned about new job opportunities through weak ties, rather than from close friends, which makes sense because we talk to our closest friends all the time, or work alongside them or read the same blogs. By the time they have heard about a new opportunity, we probably know about it, as well. On the other hand, our weak-tie acquaintances—the people we bump into every six months—are the ones who tell us about jobs we would otherwise never hear about.8.14 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen Such peer pressure, on its own, isn’t enough to sustain a movement. But when the strong ties of friendship and the weak ties of peer pressure merge, they create incredible momentum. That’s when widespread social change can begin. 2013年5月27日 How Movements Happen King, like thousands of other movement leaders, would shift the struggle’s guidance from his hands onto the shoulders of his followers, in large part by handing them new habits. He would activate the third part of the movement formula, and the boycott would become a self-perpetuating force. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen “But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen Warren thought back to McGavran, the author. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen “All of us are simply a bundle of habits.… Our goal is to help you replace some bad habits with some good habits that will help you grow in Christ’s likeness.” 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen 8.29 Every Saddleback member is asked to sign a “maturity covenant card” promising to adhere to three habits: daily quiet time for reflection and prayer, tithing 10 percent of their income, and membership in a small group. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen 8.29 Every Saddleback member is asked to sign a “maturity covenant card” promising to adhere to three habits: daily quiet time for reflection and prayer, tithing 10 percent of their income, and membership in a small group. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen Warren’s insight was that he could expand his church the same way Martin Luther King grew the boycott: by relying on the combination of strong and weak ties. Transforming his church into a movement, however—scaling it across twenty thousand parishioners and thousands of other pastors—required something more, something that made it self-perpetuating. Warren needed to teach people habits that caused them to live faithfully not because of their ties, but because it’s who they are. This is the third aspect of how social habits drive movements: For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling. And the surest way to achieve that is to give people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen “Don’t get your weapons. He who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword.”8.32 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen “We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.’ ” 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen “We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us,” King said. “We must make them know that we love them. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen For years, the civil rights movement had been kept alive by couching itself in the language of battles and struggles. There were contests and setbacks, triumphs and defeats that required everyone to recommit to the fight. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen Equally important, King cast the boycott in a new and different light. This was not just about equality on buses, King said; it was part of God’s plan, the same destiny that had ended British colonialism in India and slavery in the United States, and that had caused Christ to die on the cross so that he could take away our sins. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen It needed participants to offer the other cheek. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen And as such, it required new responses, different strategies and behaviors. It needed participants to offer the other cheek. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen People could show their allegiance by adopting the new habits King was evangelizing about. 2013年5月31日 How Movements Happen “As we go back to the buses let us be loving enough to turn an enemy into a friend. We must now move from protest to reconciliation..… With this dedication we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.” 2013年5月31日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Gambling “is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity and the father of mischief,” George Washington wrote in 1783. 2013年5月31日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL 9.2 Protecting people from their bad habits—in fact, defining which habits should be considered “bad” in the first place—is a prerogative lawmakers have eagerly seized. 2013年5月31日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL 1 By then, she didn’t have to think about whether to take another card or double her bet—she acted automatically, just as Eugene Pauly, the amnesiac, had eventually learned to always choose the right cardboard rectangle. 2013年6月1日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL People in the midst of sleep terrors seem to be in the grip of terrible anxieties, but are not dreaming in the normal sense of the word. 2013年6月1日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL “There’s no complex plots like you and I remember from a nightmare. If they remember anything afterward, it’s just an image or emotions—impending doom, horrible fear, the need to defend themselves or someone else. “Those emotions are really powerful, though. They are some of the most basic cues for all kinds of behaviors we’ve learned throughout our lives. Responding to a threat by running away or defending ourselves is something everyone has practiced since they were babies. And when those emotions occur, and there’s no chance for the higher brain to put things in context, we react the way our deepest habits tell us to.9.9 We run or fight or follow whatever behavioral pattern is easiest for our brains to latch on to.” 2013年6月2日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL “At the time of the killing the defendant was asleep and his mind had no control over what his body was doing,” he said.9.17 “We have reached the conclusion that the public interest would no longer be served by continuing to seek a special verdict from you. 2013年6月2日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL In the eyes of the law you bear no responsibility.9.19 You are discharged.” 2013年6月2日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Thomas is the most sympathetic murderer conceivable, someone so close to being a victim himself that when the trial ended, the judge tried to console him. 2013年6月2日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Thomas is the most sympathetic murderer conceivable, someone so close to being a victim himself that when the trial ended, the judge tried to console him. 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI and watch a slot machine spin around and around.9.23 Half of the participants were “pathological gamblers”—people who had lied to their families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had bounced checks at a casino—while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t exhibit any problematic behaviors.9.24 Everyone was placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky 7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Thomas’s lawyer argued, in a manner that everyone believed, that his client had made a terrible mistake and would carry the guilt of it for life. However, isn’t it clear that Bachmann feels much the same way? “I feel so guilty, so ashamed of what I’ve done,” she told me. “I feel like I’ve let everyone down. I know that I’ll never be able to make up for this, no matter what I do.” That said, there is one critical distinction between the cases of Thomas and Bachmann: Thomas murdered an innocent person. He committed what has always been the gravest of crimes. Angie Bachmann lost money. The only victims were herself, her family, and a $27 billion company that loaned her $125,000. Thomas was set free by society. Bachmann was held accountable for her deeds. 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Why is it easier, though? Why does it seem the bereaved husband is a victim, while the bankrupt gambler got her just deserts? Why do some habits seem like they should be so easy to control, while others seem out of reach? 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Habits are not as simple as they appear. As I’ve tried to demonstrate throughout this book, habits—even once they are rooted in our minds—aren’t destiny. We can choose our habits, once we know how. 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. Hundreds of habits influence our days—they guide how we get dressed in the morning, talk to our kids, and fall asleep at night; they impact what we eat for lunch, how we do business, and whether we exercise or have a beer after work. Each of them has a different cue and offers a unique reward. Some are simple and others are complex, drawing upon emotional triggers and offering subtle neurochemical prizes. But every habit, no matter its complexity, is malleable. The most addicted alcoholics can become sober. The most dysfunctional companies can transform themselves. A high school dropout can become a successful manager. However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits’ routines, and find […] 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Perhaps a sleepwalking murderer can plausibly argue he wasn’t aware of his habit, and so he doesn’t bear responsibility for his crime. But almost all the other patterns that exist in most people’s lives—how we eat and sleep and talk to our kids, how we unthinkingly spend our time, attention, and money—those are habits that we know exist. And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom—and the responsibility—to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work. 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL “All our life,” William James told us in the prologue, “so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits—practical, emotional, and intellectual—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.” 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL James, who died in 1910, hailed from an accomplished family. 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL He began spending time with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, and Charles Sanders Peirce, a pioneer in the study of semiotics, in a discussion group they called the Metaphysical Club.9.30 Two years after writing his diary entry, James sent a letter to the philosopher Charles Renouvier, who had expounded at length on free will. 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL And that one of the most important methods for creating that belief was habits. 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.” Once we choose who we want to be, people grow “to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.” 2013年6月3日 9. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL The way we habitually think of our surroundings and ourselves create the worlds that each of us inhabit. “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ ” the writer David Foster Wallace told a class of graduating college students in 2005. “And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’ ” The water is habits, the unthinking choices and invisible decisions that surround us every day—and which, just by looking at them, become visible again. 2013年6月3日 A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas THE FRAMEWORK: • Identify the routine • Experiment with rewards • Isolate the cue • Have a plan 2013年6月3日 A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas STEP ONE: IDENTIFY THE ROUTINE 2013年6月3日 A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas STEP TWO: EXPERIMENT WITH REWARDS 2013年6月3日 A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas Once the psychologist decided to focus on only three categories of behavior, however, and eliminate the extraneous information, the patterns leapt out. 2013年6月3日 A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas Luckily, science offers some help in this regard. Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories: Location Time Emotional state Other people Immediately preceding action 2013年6月3日 A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas STEP THREE: ISOLATE THE CUE 2013年6月3日 A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas Once you’ve figured out your habit loop—you’ve identified the reward driving your behavior, the cue triggering it, and the routine itself—you can begin to shift the behavior. You can change to a better routine by planning for the cue and choosing a behavior that delivers the reward you are craving. What you need is a plan. 2013年6月3日 A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas STEP FOUR: HAVE A PLAN 2013年6月3日 A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas Obviously, changing some habits can be more difficult. But this framework is a place to start. Sometimes change 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. 所有摘录来自 Charles，Duhigg. “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.” Random House, Inc., 2012-02-27T16:00:00+00:00. iBooks. 此材料受版权保护。