The Power Of Habit (book)

🔗Connect

🔼Topic:: Habits (MOC)

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. “The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.”
2. “The key to changing a habit is to understand the cues and rewards that drive the behavior.”
3. “Successful habits are, by definition, ones we believe are worth the effort. We can't make ourselves stick to something unless we believe it's worth it.”

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen?

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... compared to Atomic Habits (book), this is much less focused on tips for self improvement, but rather the basis of the phenomenon of habit formation and how it characterized in different situations. At the bottom line this is not as good as atomic habits. In summary, habits are something that humans as individuals and as part of social communities learn to develop to seek for simplicity and reduce cognitive effort. But like any computer, reprogramming is possible. With adapting our cues and rewards we can change our habits.

📒 Notes

Introduction

Habits are the way for our brain to save energy and clear resources for other things Effort Storing. The more our behavior is based on a patter, it will encourage us to repeat it automatically (no matter whether its a "good" or a "bad" habit).

The habit loop is made up of:

1. A Cue (external signal)
2. Routine (the behavior)
3. Reward

THE HABIT LOOP How Habits Work

• This process—in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine—is known as “chunking,” and it’s at the root of how habits form.
• Once that habit starts unfolding, our gray matter is free to quiet itself or chase other thoughts,
• Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
• 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:
• Over time, this loop—cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward—becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges.
• When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically.
• 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.”
• Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life.
• 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.
• 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.

Main section

To change a habit, the easiest way is to keep the same reward and cue, but just change the behavior. Change will be easier if you feel committed to the change, and even better if you join a group of people dedicated to make this change. peer support Developing self discipline is best done through a through plan of what you're going to do in those situations where will power is going to be needed. For example: when to workout, what will I eat for lunch. Clarity.

Most of the book is about habits on the organizational or state level. On the organization, habits are a set of rules that determine the formal and informal behavior between teams, things like hierarchy and methods of interactions. In his opinion, a good organization is an organization will habits of cooperation but also clear hierarchy.

as an organization, the best way to implement new habits is to use the "sandwich method", which is to insert the habit between two familiar ones. For example you can encourage listening to a new artist if its in between two familiar ones, same goes for products on the shelf. That makes it feel more similar. Familiarity bias

On the societal level, social movements are built on social habits, which usually start from family and friends, then to a larger audience through Weak Ties, and eventually develop to a national movement though habits that leaders make.

THE CRAVING BRAIN How to Create New Habits

• He created a craving. And that craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.
• First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards.
• This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings.
• This is how new habits are Created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.
• The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come.
• Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.

THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE Why Transformation Occurs

• Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.
• “It seems like it should be more complex. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.”
• Often, we don’t really understand the cravings driving our behaviors until we look for them.
• Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.
• When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real.
• for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible.
• Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
• If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group. Belief is essential, and it grows out of a communal experience, even if that community is only as large as two people.

KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL Which Habits Matter Most

• 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.
• The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.
• exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.
• families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better
• Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being,
• Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.
• small wins are scattered…like miniature experiments that test implicit theories about resistance and opportunity and uncover both resources and barriers that were invisible before the situation was stirred up.”
• the second way that keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other habits to flourish.
• 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.

STARBUCKS AND THE HABIT OF SUCCESS When Willpower Becomes Automatic

• “Sometimes it looks like people with great self-control aren’t working hard—but that’s because they’ve made it automatic,”
• Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”
• Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.
• 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 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.

THE POWER OF A CRISIS How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and Design

• Just as choosing the right keystone habits can create amazing change, the wrong ones can create disasters.
• leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge.
• During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power.
• crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.

HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

• Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard.
• If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.

SADDLEBACK CHURCH AND THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT How Movements Happen

• social habits—the behaviors that occur, unthinkingly, across dozens or hundreds or thousands of people which are often hard to see as they emerge, but which contain a power that can change the world.
• A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.
• 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.
• The habits of peer pressure, however, have something in common. They often spread through weak ties. And they gain their authority through communal expectations.
• Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decides to face the same direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants’ sense of self.

THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

• habits—even once they are rooted in our minds—aren’t destiny. We can choose our habits, once we know how.
• 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 alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it—and
• 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.
• If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs—and becomes automatic—it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable,