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

A youthful female enters a laboratory. She's changed almost every part of her life in the last two years. She completed a marathon, gave up smoking, and received a promotion at work. Neurologists find that her brain's processes have radically altered.

Procter & Gamble marketers watch films of individuals making beds. They are frantically attempting to find out how to market a new product called Febreze, which is expected to be among the worst failures in the history of the corporation. One of them notices a practically invisible trend all of a sudden, and with a little change in advertising, Febreze goes on to make $1 billion annually.

One of the biggest firms in America is taken over by an unproven CEO. Attacking a specific employee behaviour pattern—the way they handle worker safety—is his first order of business, and soon Alcoa, the company, tops the Dow Jones.

What connects these individuals together? They were successful because they concentrated on the patterns that influence every facet of our existence.

Their strategy of changing behaviours worked.

Charles Duhigg, an award-winning business writer for the New York Times, takes readers to the cutting edge of scientific research in his book The Power of Habit to explain why habits form and how to break them. Duhigg brings to life a whole new view of human nature and its capacity for change with his perceptive intellect and ability to condense enormous volumes of knowledge into captivating tales.

Along the way, we discover why some individuals and businesses find it difficult to change even after years of trying, while others seem to transform suddenly. We go to labs where neuroscientists investigate the workings of habits and the precise locations of habits in our brains. Learn how the correct habits contributed to the success of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. We explore the locker rooms of the NFL, Procter & Gamble, Target megastores, Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, and the biggest hospitals in the country to discover how putting into practise so-called keystone behaviours can make billions of dollars and make the difference between success and failure, life and death.

The main thesis of The Power of Habit is an exciting one: knowing how habits function is essential to regular exercise, weight loss, raising outstanding kids, increasing productivity, creating ground-breaking businesses and social movements, and succeeding in life.

It's not fate to be a habit. Charles Duhigg demonstrates how we may use this new knowledge to change our lives, companies, and communities.