The Power of Habit

适合kindle的6寸PDF下载地址 http://vdisk.weibo.com/s/l-ImW This is sort of a reading speed test. This is the first part of the digest. It is around 5000 words, which is about 10 minute's reading. According to Forbes, the average high level exec reads 575 words per minute, average college professor 675 wpm, speed readers 1,500 wpm. So read faster! Let me know how soon you could complete one part, so I would add or decrease the words according to your reading speed in the following parts. The book is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. It is about why we do what we do in life and business. Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work, no matter it's a habit of a person, a company or a society. It's not about just changing a habit, it's also about how to pull yourself together again after down side of life, how a company change by a keystone habit. This book is convincing and touching at the same time. One of the best books I have read this year. --------------------------------start here-------------------------------------------------------------- THE HABIT CUE She was the scientists' favorite participant. Lisa Allen, was thirty-four years old, had started smoking and drinking when she was sixteen, and had struggled with obesity for most of her life. An old resume listed her longest job as lasting less than a year. When his husband dumped her for another woman. She went to Cairo to recover. In the hotel room, she reached a cigar and lighted it up. She was so disoriented that she didn't realize it until she smelled burning plastic that she was trying to light a pen, not a Marlboro. She had spent the past four months crying, binge eating, unable to sleep, and feeling ashamed, helpless, depressed, and angry, all at once. Now she couldn't even smoke right. She went out and then she came up with a crazy idea that she would trek through the desert in Egypt. She gave herself one year to prepare. She was out of shape, overweight, with no money in the bank. And to survive such an expedition, she was certain she would have to make sacrifices.In particular, she would need to quit smoking. One small shift in Lisa’s perception that day in Cairo the conviction that she had to give up smoking to accomplish her goal had touched off a series of changes that would ultimately radiate out to every part of her life. Over the next six months, she would replace smoking with jogging, and that, in turn, changed how she ate, worked, slept, saved money, scheduled her workdays, planned for the future, and so on. She would start running half-marathons, and then a marathon, go back to school, buy a house, and get engaged. Eventually she was recruited into the scientists’ study, and when researchers began examining images of Lisa’s brain, they saw something remarkable: One set of neurological patterns showed that her old habits had been overridden by new patterns. They could still see the neural activity of her old behaviors, but those impulses were crowded out by new urges. As Lisa’s habits changed, so had her brain. It wasn’t the trip to Cairo that had caused the shift, scientists were convinced, or the divorce or desert trek. It was that Lisa had focused on changing just one habit like smoking at first. Everyone in the study had gone through a similar process. By focusing on one pattern what is known as a keystone habit Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well. It’s not just individuals who are capable of such shifts. When companies focus on changing habits, whole organizations can transform. Firms such as Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Alcoa, and Target have seized on this insight to influence how work gets done, how employees communicate, and without customers realizing it is the way people shop. “I want to show you one of your most recent scans” a researcher told Lisa near the end of her exam. He pulled up a picture on a computer screen that showed images from inside her head. “When you see food, these areas” he pointed to a place near the center of her brain “which are associated with craving and hunger, are still active. Your brain still produces the urges that made you overeat.” “However, there’s new activity in this area” he pointed to the region closest to her forehead “where we believe behavioral inhibition and self-discipline starts.” The woman in front of the researchers today, however, was lean and vibrant, with the toned legs of a runner. She looked a decade younger than the photos in her chart and like she could out-exercise anyone in the room. According to the most recent report in her file, Lisa had no outstanding debts, didn’t drink, and was in her thirty-ninth month at a graphic design firm. This book is divided into three parts. The first section focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives. It explores the neurology of habit formation, how to build new habits and change old ones, and the methods, for instance, that one ad man used to push tooth brushing from an obscure practice into a national obsession. It shows how Procter & Gamble turned a spray named Febreze into a billion-dollar business by taking advantage of consumers’ habitual urges, how Alcoholics Anonymous reforms lives by attacking habits at the core of addiction. Eugene suffered from brain damage and memory loss. “He might not be the person you remember”, one doctor warned Beverly. “You need to be ready if your husband is gone.” Eugene couldn’t remember which day of the week it was, for instance, or the names of his doctors and nurses, no matter how many times they introduced themselves. “Why do they keep asking me all these questions?” he asked Beverly one day after a physician left his room. When he finally returned home, things got even stranger. Eugene didn’t seem to remember their friends. He had trouble following conversations. Some mornings, he would get out of bed, walk into the kitchen, cook himself bacon and eggs, then climb back under the covers and turn on the radio. Forty minutes later, he would do the same thing: get up, cook bacon and eggs, climb back into bed, and fiddle with the radio. Then he would do it again. He could remember everything before the accident. But almost everything that came afterward all the memories, experiences, and struggles from most of the decade before his surgery had been erased. He couldn’t retain any new information for more than a minute or so. In the first few weeks after they moved into their new house, Beverly tried to take Eugene outside each day to exercise. So each morning and afternoon, she took him on a walk around the block, always together and always along the same route. The doctors had warned Beverly that she would need to monitor Eugene constantly. If he ever got lost, they said, he would never be able to find his way home. But one morning, while she was getting dressed, Eugene slipped out the front door. She had been outside for fifteen minutes already, looking everywhere. She ran home to call the police. When she burst through the door, she found Eugene in the living room, sitting in front of the television watching the History Channel. Her tears confused him. He didn’t remember leaving, he said, didn’t know where he’d been, and couldn’t understand why she was so upset. Since that day, Eugene took a walk all by himself everyday, no matter what Beverly said, and he could always get home. How could one find his way home when he had no idea which house was his? How, Squire wondered, were new patterns forming inside Eugene’s damaged brain? When you first learned to drive, the driveway required a major dose of concentration. It’s hard. Nowadays, however, you do all of that every time you pull onto the street with hardly any thought. The routine occurs by habit. Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often. 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. An efficient brain also allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic behaviors, such as walking. At the same time, however, the brain’s dependence on automatic routines can be dangerous. Habits are often as much a curse as a benefit. The brain spends a lot of effort at the beginning of a habit looking for something as “a cue” that offers a hint as to which pattern to use. 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 habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: THE HABIT LOOP Researchers have learned that cues can be almost anything, from a visual trigger such as a candy bar or a television commercial to a certain place, a time of day, an emotion, a sequence of thoughts, or the company of particular people. Routines can be incredibly complex or fantastically simple (some habits, such as those related to emotions, are measured in milliseconds). Rewards can range from food or drugs that cause physical sensations, to emotional payoffs, such as the feelings of pride that accompany praise or self-congratulation. Eugene had the ability to form new habits, even when they involved tasks or objects he couldn’t remember for more than a few seconds. This explained how Eugene managed to go for a walk every morning. The cues as “certain trees on corners or the placement of particular mailboxes” were consistent every time he went outside, so though he couldn’t recognize his house, his habits always guided him back to his front door. Eugene’s daughter, for instance, would often stop by his house to say hello. She would talk to her father in the living room for a bit, then go into the kitchen to visit with her mother, and then leave, waving good-bye on her way out the door. Eugene, who had forgotten their earlier conversation by the time she left, would get angry “why was she leaving without chatting?” A few weeks later, his daughter came to visit. "What's the plan?" Eugene asked when she arrived. She took him outside in a wheelchair, onto the hospital's lawn. "It's a beautiful day," Eugene said, "Pretty nice weather, huh?" She told him about her kids and they played with a dog. She thought he might be able to come home soon. The sun was going down. She started to get ready to take him inside. Eugene looked at her. "I am lucky to have a daughter like you," he said. She was caught off-guard. She couldn't remember the last time he had said something so sweet. "I am lucky that you are my dad," she told him. "Gosh, it's a beautiful day," he said. "What do you think about the weather?" That night, at one o'clock in the morning, Beverly's phone ring. The doctor said Eugene had suffered a massive heart attack and the staff had done everything possible, but hadn't been able to revive him. He was gone. After his death, he would be celebrated by researchers, the images of his brain studied in hundreds of labs and medical schools. "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." Eugene Pauly taught us about the habit loop, but it was Claude Hopkins that showed how new habits can be cultivated and grown. So what, exactly, did Hopkins do? Throughout his career, one of Claude Hopkins’s signature tactics was to find simple triggers to convince consumers to use his products every day. He sold Quaker Oats, for instance, as a breakfast cereal that could provide energy for twenty-four hours but only if you ate a bowl every morning. He hawked tonics that cured stomachaches, joint pain, bad skin, and womanly problems but only if you drank the medicine at symptoms’ first appearance. Soon, people were devouring oatmeal at daybreak and chugging from little brown bottles whenever they felt a hint of fatigue, which, as luck would have it, often happened at least once a day. Now he needed to sell Pepsodent, and he needed to ask people to brush their teeth. Dozens of other advertising men had used the same language as Pepsodent years before Hopkins jumped in the game. All of their ads had promised to remove tooth film and had offered the reward of beautiful, white teeth. None of them had worked. The brilliance of these appeals was that they relied upon a cue ”tooth film” that was universal and impossible to ignore. Telling someone to run their tongue across their teeth, it turned out, was likely to cause them to run their tongue across their teeth. And when they did, they were likely to feel a film. Hopkins had found a cue that was simple, had existed for ages, and was so easy to trigger that an advertisement could cause people to comply automatically. Moreover, the reward, as Hopkins envisioned it, was even more enticing. Who, after all, doesn’t want to be more beautiful? Who doesn’t want a prettier smile? Particularly when all it takes is a quick brush with Pepsodent? That psychology was grounded in two basic rules: First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards. Some researchers studied 266 individuals, most of who worked out at least three times a week. 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. However, the reason they continued -- ”why it became a habit” was because of a specific reward they started to crave. 92 percent of people said they habitually exercised because it made them “feel good” they grew to expect and crave the endorphins and other neurochemicals a workout provided. In another group, 67 percent of people said that working out gave them a sense of “accomplishment” they had come to crave a regular sense of triumph from tracking their performances, and that self-reward was enough to make the physical activity into a habit. Anyone can use this basic formula to create habits of her or his own. Want to exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up, and a reward, such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that smoothie, or about the endorphin rush you’ll feel. Allow yourself to anticipate the reward. Eventually, that craving will make it easier to push through the gym doors every day. Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier. I’s as true now as it was almost a century ago. Every night, millions of people scrub their teeth in order to get a tingling feeling; every morning millions put on their jogging shoes to capture an endorphin rush they’ve learned to crave. KEEP THE CUE, PROVIDE THE SAME REWARD, INSERT A NEW ROUTINE AA asks alcoholics to search for the rewards they get from alcohol. What cravings, the program asks, are driving your habit loop? Often, intoxication itself doesn’t make the list. Alcoholics crave a drink because it offers escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release. They might crave a cocktail to forget their worries. But they don’t necessarily crave feeling drunk. The physical effects of alcohol are often one of the least rewarding parts of drinking for addicts. “There is a hedonistic element to alcohol”, said Ulf Mueller, a German neurologist who has studied brain activity among alcoholics. “But people also use alcohol because they want to forget something or to satisfy other cravings, and these relief cravings occur in totally different parts of the brain than the craving for physical pleasure” “AA forces you to create new routines for what to do each night instead of drinking,” said Tonigan. “You can relax and talk through your anxieties at the meetings. The triggers and payoffs stay the same, it’s just the behavior that changes” Once they learned alternate routines for dealing with stress, the drinking stopped for good. One patient, for instance, attended AA meetings. Others went to therapy. And once they incorporated those new routines for coping with stress and anxiety into their lives, the successes were dramatic. The man who had gone to detox sixty times never had another drink. Two other patients had started drinking at twelve, were alcoholics by eighteen, drank every day, and now have been sober for four years. In the summer of 2006, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student named Mandy walked into the counseling center at Mississippi State University. For most of her life, she had bitten her nails, gnawing them until they bled. Mandy would often bite until her nails pulled away from the skin underneath. Her fingertips were covered with tiny scabs. The end other fingers become blunted without nails to protect them and sometimes they tingled or itched. The biting habit has damaged her social life. She was so embarrassed around her friends that she kept her hands in her pockets and, on dates, would become preoccupied with balling her nails with foul-tasting polishers or promising herself, starting right now, that she would muster the willpower to quit. But as soon as she began doing homework or watching television, her fingers ended up in her mouth. She was referred to a psychologist who was acquainted with the Golden Rule of habit change. He knew that changing her habit required inserting a new routine into her life. “What do you feel right before you bring your hand up to your mouth to bite your nails?”he asked her. “There’s a little bit of tension in my fingers,” Mandy said. “It hurts a little bit here, at the edge of the nail. Sometimes I’ll run my thumb along, looking for hangnails, and when I feel something catch, I’ll bring it up to my mouth. Then I’ll go finger by finger, biting all the rough edges. Once I start, it feels like I have to do all of them.” 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. Most people’s habits have occurred for so long they don’t pay attention to what causes it anymore. Next, the therapist asked Mandy to describe why she bit her nails. At first, she had trouble coming up with reasons. As they talked, though, it became clear that she bit when she was bored. The therapist put her in some typical situations, such as watching television and doing homework, and she started nibbling. When she had worked through all of the nails, she felt a brief sense of completeness, she said. That was the habit’s reward: a physical stimulation she had come to crave. MANDY’S HABIT LOOP 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. She came back a week later with twenty-eight checks. She was, by that point, acutely aware of the sensations that preceded her habit. She knew how many times it occurred during class or while watching television. 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. Then Mandy was to search for something that would provide a quick physical stimulation “such as rubbing her arm or rapping her knuckles on a desk” anything that would produce a physical response. Later she 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. A week later, Mandy had bitten her nails only three times and had used the competing response seven times. After one month, the nail-biting habit was gone. The competing routines had become automatic. The cues and rewards stayed the same. Only the routine changed. It seems ridiculously simple, but once you are aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you're halfway to changing it. It seems like it should be more complex. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it. If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine. There is one other ingredient that's necessary: belief. One research group interviewed a lot of people who quit drinking successfully. The secret, the alcoholics said, was God. Researchers hated that explanation. God and spirituality are not testable hypotheses. Churches are filled with drunks. Then they looked at the data to see if there was any correlation between religious belief and how long people stayed sober. A pattern emerged. The date indicated that they could stay sober until there was a stressful event in their lives-- at which point, a certain number started drinking again, no matter how many new routines they had embraced. However, those alcoholics who believed that some higher power had entered their lives were more likely to make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety intact. It wasn't Got that mattered. 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. KEYSTONE HABITS Paul O’Neill has just got on board in Alcoa. All the investors are waiting in the room, then he he opened his mouth. “I want to talk to you about worker safety,” he said. “Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work. Our safety record is better than the general American workforce, especially considering that our employees work with metals that are 1500 degrees and machines that can rip a man’s arm off. But it’s not good enough. I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries.” The audience was confused. O’Neill hadn’t said anything about profits. He didn’t mention taxes. There was no talk of “using alignment to achieve a win-win synergistic market advantage.” The investors in the room almost stampeded out the doors when the presentation ended. Within a year of O’Neill’s speech, Alcoa’s profits would hit a record high. By the time O’Neill retired in 2000, the company’s annual net income was five times larger than before he arrived, and its market capitalization had risen by $27 billion. What’s more, all that growth occurred while Alcoa became one of the safest companies in the world. Before O’Neill’s arrival, almost every Alcoa plant had at least one accident per week. Once his safety plan was implemented, some facilities would go years without a single employee losing a workday due to an accident. The company’s worker injury rate fell to one-twentieth the U.S. average. So how did he make one of the largest, stodgiest, and most potentially dangerous companies into a profit machine and a bastion of safety? 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. 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. This book’s first section explained how habits work, how they can be created and changed. However, where should a would-be habit master start? 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. Alcoa needed to become the best, most streamlined aluminum company on earth. O’Neil gave a reward: The only people who got promoted were those who embraced the system. Unit presidents were busy people. To contact O’Neill within twenty-four hours of an injury, they needed to hear about an accident from their vice presidents as soon as it happened. So vice presidents needed to be in constant communication with floor managers. And floor managers needed to get workers to raise warnings as soon as they saw a problem and keep a list of suggestions nearby, so that when the vice president asked for a plan, there was an idea box already full of possibilities. To make all of that happen, each unit had to build new communication systems that made it easier for the lowliest worker to get an idea to the loftiest executive, as fast as possible. Almost everything about the company’s rigid hierarchy had to change to accommodate O’Neill’s safety program. He was building new corporate habits. As Alcoa’s safety patterns shifted, other aspects of the company started changing with startling speed, as well. Rules that unions had spent decades opposing ”such as measuring the productivity of individual workers” were suddenly embraced, because such measurements helped everyone figure out when part of the manufacturing process was getting out of whack, posing a safety risk. Policies that managers had long resisted “such as giving workers autonomy to shut down a production line when the pace became overwhelming” were now welcomed, because that was the best way to stop injuries before they occurred. The company shifted so much that some employees found safety habits spilling into other parts of their lives. Because colleagues need to communicate fast, Alcoa also developed one of the first genuinely worldwide corporate email systems. When a high executive didn't report a problem and an accident, he got fired pretty easily. Neill never promised that his focus on worker safety would increase Alcoa’s profits. However, as his new routines moved through the organization, costs came down, quality went up, and productivity skyrocketed. Companies and organizations across America, in the meantime, have embraced the idea of using keystone habits to remake workplaces. At IBM, for instance, Lou Gerstner rebuilt the firm by initially concentrating on one keystone habit: IBM’s research and selling routines. At the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, a culture of continuous improvement is created through a keystone habit of wide-ranging internal critiques that are at the core of every assignment. Within Goldman Sachs, a keystone habit of risk assessment undergirds every decision. Researchers have found similar dynamics in dozens of other settings, including individuals’ lives. Studies exam the impact of exercise on daily routines. When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change. There is something about it that makes other good habits easier. Until about twenty years ago, conventional wisdom held that the best way for people to lose weight was to radically alter their lives. Doctors would give obese patients strict diets and tell them to join a gym, attend regular counseling sessions—sometimes as often as everyday – and shift their daily routines by walking up stairs, for instance, instead of taking the elevator. Only by completely shaking up one’s life, the thinking went, could their bad habits be reformed. But those methods were failures. Patients would use the stairs for a few weeks, but by the end of the month, it was too much hassle. They began diets and joined gyms, but after the initial burst of enthusiasm wore off, they slid back into their old eating and TV watching habits. Then some researches asked some obese people to write down everything they ate at least one day per week. It was hard at first. The subjects forgot to carry their food journals, or would snack and not note it. Slowly, however, people started recording their meals once a week and sometimes, more often. Many participants started keeping a daily food log. Eventually, it became a habit. Then, something unexpected happened. The participants started looking at their entries and finding patterns they didn’t know existed. Some noticed they always seemed to snack at about 10 A.M., so they began keeping an apple or banana on their desks for midmorning munchies. Others started using their journals to plan future menus, and when dinner rolled around, they ate the healthy meal they had written down, rather than junk food from the fridge. The researchers hadn’t suggested any of these behaviors. They had simply asked everyone to write down what they ate once a week. But this keystone habit “food journaling” created a structure that helped other habits to flourish. Six months into the study, people who kept daily food records had lost twice as much weight as everyone else.

Eugene的故事是那么有趣，到了最后居然那么感人... 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.

from "Prologue The Habit Cure" 最近正在试着改变糟糕的作息规律，尽量早睡早起，在工作时间集中精神，晚上少花点时间在肥皂剧和各种综艺节目上，争取吃完饭看一两集电视剧，然后戒掉上网无所事事的习惯，看一会儿书，扩充视野。 在小summer五月来之前，养成良好的习惯，多运动，做事情要集中精神啊集中精神。