My Review 4/5

The only thing that barred this from a 5/5 for me was the authors approach to scattered story telling and feeling like a ‘pop-psychology’ book. At times it felt as if it was a string of his articles strung together into a book form. Not all the anecdotes were needed to tell this story. That being said, I did enjoy them but they seemed to end abruptly and pick up again later.

Based on the reviews of this book I’ve added The Willpower Instinct to my list of books to read.

The first chapters and appendix deal with the best parts of habit formation. There is some medical descriptions of the basal ganglia which is apparently part of the brain that stores the habits. But this book is not a scientific inquiry and only covers the most basic of information needed.

The appendix and scattered through the book are a series of stories that detail how the brain tries to offload as much active thinking into habits. These are “routines” that are “cued”/”triggered” by a stimulus and when completed deliver a “reward” of dopamine. Science has discovered that there are 5 trigger types: location, emotion, time, immediately preceding event, people. The trick to undoing habits is not to overwhelm them with overt self control, but to identify cues and rewards and replace them with the same routine.

The author covers personal habits and organizational habits. One of the hardest things for leaders to change is company culture. But as stated above too many leaders try to force the change instead of guiding the old routines to new rewards. Alcoa and a drive to safety was a great example of how targeting one outcome changed an entire organization.

Finally finding a keystone habit can be a key to unlocking many other changes. For example in studies of weight loss just having participants keep a food journal and no other changes they’ve found people would start changing other aspects of their life.

Date Read

2017/05/05

Date Added

2017/04/25

Goodreads book information

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

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12609431

Bookshelves: psychology

Author’s Note

Initial md Generated using https://github.com/jsr6720/goodreads-csv-to-md

Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Mike Chamberlain Random House Audio 2012 (Audio CD)1

Significant revisions

tags: 2017, book, review, Duhigg, psychology

  • Apr 22nd, 2024 Converted to jekyll markdown format and copied to personal site
  • May 5th, 2017 Originally published on goodreads

EOF/Footnotes

  1. ISBN: =”030796664X” ↩