328 Quotes by Charles Duhigg

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. In both cases, people ignored the cookies. But when the students were treated like cogs, rather than people, it took a lot more willpower.

There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world, we’re not blinded by its glare.

Why does my brain decide that one memory is more important than another?

Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain.

By lunchtime, everyone inside the factory had heard the story. The next day, andon cords were pulled more than a dozen times. The next week, more than two dozen times. A month later, the plant was averaging nearly a hundred pulls a day. The.

We’re not in the coffee business serving people,” Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks, told me. “We’re in the people business serving coffee.

Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.

Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decision-making authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored, that their mistakes won’t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back. The.