CDCharles Duhigg

31 collected words

Charles Duhigg

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Grit, which they defined as the tendency to work strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.

Charles Duhigg / quote

02Undated

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.

Charles Duhigg / quote

03Undated

When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves "why.

Charles Duhigg / quote

04Undated

The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

Charles Duhigg / quote

05Undated

Reform is usually possible only once a sense of crisis takes hold.... In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.

Charles Duhigg / quote

06Undated

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.

Charles Duhigg / quote

07Undated

Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.

Charles Duhigg / quote

08Undated

All our life, 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." - William James

Charles Duhigg / quote

09Undated

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.

Charles Duhigg / quote

10Undated

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.One group of researchers at the Alcohol Research Group in California, for instance, noticed a pattern in interviews. Over and over again, alcoholics said the same thing: Identifying cues and choosing new routines is important, but without another ingredient, the new habits never fully took hold.The secret, the alcoholics said, was God.

Charles Duhigg / quote

11Undated

Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.

Charles Duhigg / quote

12Undated

A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.

Charles Duhigg / quote

13Undated

I think I'm smart, and I know I was a good mom. But there wasn't a lot I could point to and say, that's why I'm special.

Charles Duhigg / quote

14Undated

Habits aren’t destiny. Habits can be ignored, changed, or replaced. But the reason the discovery of the habit loop is so important is that it reveals a basic truth: 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.

Charles Duhigg / quote

15Undated

When people have a willpower failure, it's because they haven't anticipated a situation that's going to come along.

Charles Duhigg / quote

16Undated

Unlike other sports, which are largely determined by individual athletic ability or team strength, NASCAR requires its competitors to cooperate in order to win.

Charles Duhigg / quote

17Undated

Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.

Charles Duhigg / quote

18Undated

Prosecutors say it would be next to impossible to get one teen to testify in court that another had slipped him or her a copied disc at lunchtime. And besides, isn't sharing music a time-honored part of teen friendship?

Charles Duhigg / quote

19Undated

A huge amount of success in life comes from learning as a child how to make good habits. It's good to help kids understand that when they do certain things habitually, they're reinforcing patterns.

Charles Duhigg / quote

20Undated

We know there are certain chemicals that are designed to give us a rush of pleasure. But, one of the most amazing things about being human is our capacity to override that pleasure. To either say, 'I don't need that pleasure right now. I'm going to ignore the craving.' Or to find something else that we find a deeper sense of reward from.

Charles Duhigg / quote

21Undated

The specific steps for changing a specific habit differ from person to person and habit to habit, but the steps - the formula - is essentially the same, and once you learn it, you can do amazing things.

Charles Duhigg / quote

22Undated

Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.

Charles Duhigg / quote

23Undated

Fraudulent and improper payments have long bedeviled Medicare, a $466 billion program. In particular, payments for durable medical equipment, like power wheelchairs and diabetic test kits, are ripe for fraud.

Charles Duhigg / quote

24Undated

In 1980, a woman promised her dying sister to change how Americans thought about breast cancer. Thirty years later, the result - the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation - is one of the nation's largest non-profits, and one of the most successful triumphs in public health marketing and changing health habits.

Charles Duhigg / quote