The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

How much thinking is involved when you get into your car and drive back out of your driveway? Unless it is one of your first few times performing this activity then you are not likely to be pulling up memories of other times you have backed out of your driveway nor are you consciously making various decisions such as opening the car door, turning the key, pressing on the break and so on. Instead our brains are running on auto-pilot because these activities have become habits. This is one of the most important concepts regarding habits that readers will come across in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, which is the highly acclaimed, bestselling book by Charles Duhigg.


Duhigg starts the book by teasing us with a couple of seemingly miraculous stories, the first about how a woman named Lisa has been able to replace several negative bad habits with positive ones and how the US military was able to eliminate riots in one Iraq town by carefully observing crowd behaviors. The author has poured through the results of over 100 studies including one by Duke University which found that 40% of our daily activities are controlled by habit.

The book is divided into three parts:
Part One – The Habits of Individuals
Part Two – The Habits of Successful Organizations
Part Three – The Habits of Societies

Part One – The Habits of Individuals
In this first part, Duhigg introduces the habit loop to explain how habits work and then delves into how new habits can be created and existing habits can be changed. Included in this section is a detailed but easy to follow, for us non-brain surgeons, explanation of how the brain stores and initiatives habit behavior. Basically habits are stored in the basal ganglia portion of the brain which is separate from where our memories are stored and decisions are made.

Our brains chunk these habitual activities, which can be simple or complicated and stores them in the basal ganglia. Once a decision is made and a habit is selected the basal ganglia takes over and performs the activity. Think of it as our computer allowing us to work on a document or spreadsheet while in the background our e-mail program is performing a file search. Our brains like our computers can perform these routine tasks in the background while we actively focus on other tasks or make non-routine decisions. This is one way in which the brain is able to run more efficiently.

Duhigg then explains how we better understanding of how habits form by providing a detailed case study of Eugene. Eugene had the unfortunately experience of not being able to remember anything that happened to him over the last few decades. He could not create a map of his house and would ask the same questions over and over, even to the point of eating multiple breakfasts since he never remembered having eaten the previous one or two. The extraordinary learning from Eugene’s case is that while his short term memory did not work his brain was still able to store habits and then perform these activities based on the appropriate queues. For example, Eugene could not tell you where the kitchen was in his house but when hungry for a snack he went directly to the snack cabinet in the without needing to think about it.

The process controlling these habits is the Habit Loop, which consists of three steps – a queue, the habit and finally the reward. The key is the reward; it is the repeated activities that produce a reward which become habits. Understanding this loop is the key to both creating new habits and transforming existing ones.

The final chapter of this first section is dedicated to reviewing how to transform existing habits. Duhigg tell us that we cannot entirely eradicate a habit, but instead we have to work with existing queues and rewards by inserting a new activity as a way to rid ourselves of bad habits. Of course we know this is much easier in theory than in practice since it may be difficult to identify the specific queues that trigger our bad behaviors.

Two case studies (Alcoholics Anonymous and Tony Dungy) are provided as examples of transforming habits. Both of these case studies also reveal that for difficult changes we need a higher power to help keep us from slipping back to perform bad habits when difficult situations arise. One solution against these slippages is to admit belief in a change which is sometimes best handled in a group situation – such as the very successful Alcoholics Anonymous group settings.

The one shortcoming of this first part of the book that I found is that it is not clear how the need for admitting to the belief in a change and group participation to make a change relates to brain function. I am curious to know what is happening within the brain when this slippage to an old habit occurs, does this ultimately mean that the old habits are not really replaced but are still lurking in some sub-region of the basal ganglia ready to be activated in certain situations? Along those lines it would be interesting to know how particular circumstances trigger the activation of the older habits as opposed to the newer ones. It may be that the research has not progresses this far but I was left wondering about these connections.

Part Two – The Habits of Successful Organizations
In the second part of the book, we see how habits work across organizations and begin to understand keystone habits. Keystone habits are those that when changed have ripple effects on other habits. For example it has been shown that people who begin exercise routines will also tend to develop healthier eating habits and even eliminate negative habits such as smoking.

We are introduced to Paul O'Neill the former CEO at Alcoa. We watch as O’Neill takes over control at a struggling Alcoa and instead of focusing on revenue and profits, his first crusade is improving worker safety. As we see the new habits which are created to improve workers safety also have ripple effects which result in new positive habits around the broader area of communication. This seems to be the ultimate and most powerful example of a keystone habit.

Another key concept that we learn from O’Neill is the need to keep digging and identify the root cause of a problem in order to address it successfully. The example used to convey this concept is O’Neill’s work to decrease the infant mortality rate in the United States. We see how his digging led him to the root of the problem and a solution which contributed to dramatically increasing the survival rates of infants. Anyone who is attempting to solve a problem will benefit from this case study.

Next Duhigg turns to using the power of a crisis to change bad organizational habits. For this topic, he focuses on two case studies including the deadly 1987 King’s Cross fire and a hospital which had the bad reputation of performing surgeries on the wrong sides and body parts. In both cases, management used these unfortunate situations to successful change habits that likely would not have been changed without the preceding crisis. This is a common management and behavioral change approach which has been discussed in numerous other works, but I found Duhigg’s case examples to be fresh and well written.

Finally this part concludes with an in-depth look at how Target can predict what we will need to buy even before we do, by continually analyzing our buying patterns. Let’s not pick on Target too much since this is a common practice in many major retailers and grocery stores. The Target case study is a scary reminder about how much marketers know about us and can deduce from our buying habits. Of particular interest to retailers is to identify not only your habits but if you have experienced a major life change (marriage, divorce, or new child). Much like a crisis can make an organization more open to establishing better habits, these major life changes make all of us vulnerable to changes in personal habits.

Part Three – The Habits of Societies
Duhhig pulls all of our learning from the first two parts of the book into a powerful ending. This last part starts innocently enough by examining how the Saddleback Church became so popular and why Rosa Parks appears to have been one of the few, if only person, in Montgomery who could have accelerated the Civil Rights discussion by simply refusing to stand up. The major concept introduced here is that we will stand up not only when a close acquaintance has been wronged, but also when a ‘weak tie’ of ours has been wronged; a ‘weak tie’ being a friend of a friend.

The book concludes dramatically with a discussion of the neurology of free will. Here we are introduced to shocking stories of Brian and Angie, both of whom have suffered due to their seemingly uncontrollable habits. We learn that Brian killed his wife in her sleep but is acquitted based on a defense of sleep terrors and is set free. On the other hand Angie loses all of her family’s money and house due to a gambling addition but is not excused for her behavior and is punished by society.

Duhhig then provides his answer as to why we set the murderer free while punishing the addicted gambler. The bottom line is that the gambler was conscious of her habits but did not take all the steps to change the habit while the murderer had no indication that he had the ability to kill. Controversial stuff indeed, and makes for great reading and analysis!

The author leaves us with the final take away that since we know how to alter our habits we have the reasonability and freedom to do so. Although I agree this is the case it would seem much more difficult to alter our habits at the time we are performing them as opposed to analyzing cases once they have been completed.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in learning how habits work within the brain, how to change their own habits or how to change habits with their organization.