Book Review: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
“Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”
In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation. Along the way, we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight.
“The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.”
We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.
“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”
At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.
“Champions don’t do extraordinary things. 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.”
All habits can be broken down into a 3 step process.
- Cue (a stimulus that triggers a routine).
- Routine (the habit).
- Reward (a satisfaction indicator that tells your body you should repeat the behavior).
That’s the composition of a habit. Control each step and you’ll control your life, basically.
I’m going to use one story of this book in order to explain my biggest takeaway.
Charles Whitman killed his mother and wife with a knife. After that, he went to the University of Texas and started shooting people indiscriminately. He was an extremely intelligent person, with an IQ of 139. In his suicide letter, he described his inability to control his actions, and let know he loved his mother with all his heart. After the autopsy, there was found a tumor in his brain that provoked the behavior.
I bring up this story to point out one fact. That by altering the biochemistry or physiology of our bodies, our whole behavior changes, for good or for bad. This is really thought-provoking. It might sound obvious, but we experience these examples every single moment and most of the time we don’t realize.
Was Charles Whitman guilty or just another victim? Considering that the tumor was the cause even for his own death. We can extrapolate this example to any decision we make. Either it is a tumor, our biochemistry, our genes, our environment; there’s always something taking the decisions we think we do. The illusion of being someone who has a body is where the whole project of our life is based. But we are not that someone, we are just the body. A body whose brain gives rise to thoughts “we” don’t produce, but just experience and attribute to “us”. And those thoughts will be produced in relation to the current state of the body, which again, we don’t choose.
That view might seem like it takes meaning from life, but it doesn’t take the joy of experiencing it. When we understand that’s the way it works, we’ll understand fundamentally how putting our body in the right conditions -good sleep, good food, good relationship, good environment, etc.- is the key to live a plentiful life, and habit formation is the first step to achieve it.
“If you believe you can change — if you make it a habit — the change becomes real.”
You can buy this book from here.
