•“The brains dependence on automatic routines can be dangerous. Habits are often as much a curse as a benefit.”
•“Cravings are what drive habits.”
•“It seems ridiculously simple, but once you’re aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you’re halfway to changing it.”
•“When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real.”
•“A habit cannot be eradicated – it must, instead, be replaced.”
•“Habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted.”
•“The habits that matter the most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.”
•“Routines are the organisational analogue of habits.”
•“When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. 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. It’s not completely clear why But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.”
•“Families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence.”
•“Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.”
•“Keystone habits offer what is known within academic literature as ‘small wins.’ They help other habits to flourish by creating new structures, and they establish cultures where change becomes contagious.”
•“Willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.”
•“Among the most important benefits of routines [(organisational habits)] is that they create truces between potentially warring groups or individuals within an organisation” [Is the same true for potentially warring parts within us?]
•“Good leaders seize crises to remake organisational habits [and] crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.”
•“People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event [and] there’s almost no greater upheaval for customers than the arrival of a new child.”
•“People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill.”
•“To sell a new habit… wrap it in something that people already know and like.”
•“A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances.
It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighbourhoods and clans together.
And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.”
•“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.”
•“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?'”
•“Water hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself before.”
•“Some habits yield easily to analysis and influence. Others are more complex and obstinate, and require prolonged study. And for others, change is a process that never fully concludes.”
