“Once you read
this book, you’ll never look at yourself, your organization, or your world
quite the same way.” – Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A While New
Mind.
A young woman walks
into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every
aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at
work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally
changed.
Marketers at Procter
& Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately
trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be
one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a
nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze
goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.
An untested CEO takes
over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is
attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker
safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.
What do all these
people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that
shape every aspect of our lives.
They succeeded by
transforming habits.
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. 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.
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.
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