328 Quotes by Charles Duhigg

So at most companies, an unspoken compact emerges: It’s okay to be ambitious, but if you play too rough, your peers will unite against you. On the other hand, if you focus on boosting your own department, rather than undermining your rival, you’ll probably get taken care of over time.

If you choose pressure-release moments ahead of time – if, in other words, you plan for failure, and then plan for recovery – you’re more likely to snap back faster.

These are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.

This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.

You can’t delegate thinking,” de Crespigny told me. “Computers fail, checklists fail, everything can fail. But people can’t. We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. As long as you’re thinking, you’re halfway home.

Your brain secretly wants that song, because it’s so familiar to everything else you’ve already heard and liked. It just sounds right.” There is evidence that a preference for things that sound “familiar” is a product of our neurology.

The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things.

The cooperation of NASCAR – or any other system, it turns out – persists only when everyone believes he has the opportunity to win.

The company will guess what you habitually buy, and then try to convince you to get it at Target. The firm has the capacity to personalize the ads and coupons it sends to every customer, even though you’ll probably never realize you’ve received a different flyer in the mail than your neighbors.