The Power of Habit (Why we do what we do in life and business) by Charles Durigg: A Summary ~ AMELIAN MEMARIES.

I came across this book when I was buying the starter pack of self help books -- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck . Although this is not even that thick, I took a solid 3 months to complete it. You could blame it on the way the stories and ideas presented, it's not linear. For example, in the middle of one story, another case study is sandwiched in, before the original story is completed so it's not one which you can take long breaks and resume. Also the contents are highly technical so it's not something you can read through mental fatigue from a long day of work.

In fact, it took days to even make this summary in a post. Nonetheless, the insight from this was quite priceless.

So it's a hamster wheel implying it's a one time effort to ingrain, then it's about getting "on top of it" , before it becomes easily and soon you let the inertia of it guide you.

PART ONE: THE HABITS OF INDIVIDUALS

Chapter 1: The Habit Loop

Eugene Pauly was a man who had lost his memory as he was suffering from viral encephalitis , a disease caused by a virus (usually harmless) which brings about cold sores, fever blisters, and mild skin infections.
In rare cases, the virus can make its way to the delicate folds of tissue where our thoughts, dreams and souls live. (The brain). He slipped into a coma and for 10 days was close to death. Gradually as the drugs fought the virus, his fever resided and the virus disappeared.
When he awoke, he could not form sentences and would sometimes gasp as if he had momentarily forgotten how to breathe.
The virus destroyed an oval tissue close to where his cranium and spinal column met.
As a result he could not remember friends, he had trouble following conversations, and some mornings he would make his breakfast twice.
When tests were conducted, Eugene's intellect was still found to be sharp for a man who could not remember the last 3 decades. He had all the habits he formed since his youth . But when asked to memorise a string of numbers or describe the hallway outside the laboratory's door, the doctor found his patient couldn't retain information for more than a minute.
Doctors told his wife that it was important that he got exercise, and if he was inside for too long, he drove her crazy by asking the same questions repeatedly. The doctors told her that she would have to monitor him because if he got lost he would not know how to find his way home.
One morning, he slipped out of his house without his wife noticing. His wife franctically looked everywhere for him. When she eventually lodged a report and returned to her home, she saw him there , her tears confused him. He didn't remember leaving, did not know where he was. Then she spotted a pile of pinecones on the table like the ones she saw in a neighbours' yard.
That's when she found that he went on walks and then returned home with souvenirs.
When doctors heard this they suspected it had nothing to do with his conscious memory. The doctors asked him to draw a map of the block where he lived, where his house was located but he could not do it.
Then he was asked, what would he do if he was hungry. He stood up, walked to the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and took down a jar of nuts. In a seperate incident, sometime later on one of his strolls, a scientist joined him. They walked for 15 minutes through Southern California with the scent of flowers in the air. Eugene never said where he was going but he always seemed to know where he was going without asking for directions. Then he went round the corner nearing his house walked up the sidewalk, opened the front door , went to the living room, turned on the TV.
How could someoene find a jar of nuts when he could not say where his kitchen was located or find his way home when he could not say where his house was?

Lab Rat Experiment:

In surgery, each rat had what looked like a small joystick with dozens of tiny wires inserted into the skull/ Afterwards, the rats were placed in a T-Shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each rat was positioned behind a partition that opened when a loud click sounded. When they heard the click and saw the partition disappear, it would usually wander up and down the center isle sniffing in corners and scratching walls. It smelled chocolate but did not know how to find it. When it reached on top of the T, it turned right , away from the chocolate and wandered left , pausing for no obvious reasons.
Eventually, most animals discovered the reward. The probes in the rat heads revealed that when they were wandering through the maze, the brain worked furiously. Each time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, its brain exploded with activity. The rat was processing information. When the experiment was repeated again and again, they found a change in the rat's brain activity-- they stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns. They zapped through the maze faster. So the mental activity decreased. As the route became more and more automatic, the rat thought less and less. It showed that the basal ganglia responsible for habits , stored habits even while the rest of the brain went to sleep. This is known as chunking, and it is at the root at how habits form.
Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. The brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often.

There is a 3 step loop to habits:

First there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use.
Then there is the routine. which can be physical or mental or emotional.
Finally there is the reward which helps your brain figure out if this loop is worth remembering for the future.
Over time this loop becomes more and more automatic.
Habits aren't destiny, they can be changed, ignored or replaced. Learning how habits work makes them easier to control. Once a habit is broken up into components, the gears can be fiddled with.

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Was it possible that Eugene even with severe brain damage could still employ cue-routine reward loop? After a series of experiments it was proven , YES HE COULD ! If you do the same thing with consistency it is bound to become a habit. However if the cues are changed even in the slightest bit then his habits fell apart. Habits can emerge outside of our consciousness of deliberately designed.

Examples on our daily life:

When kids are starving and you're driving home after a long day to stop, and they are asking, just this once, to have it in MCDs or Burger King. The meals are inexpensive, they taste good. After all, one dose of processed meat, salty fries, and sugar soda poses a small health risk, right?
Families usually do not intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that once a month, a the pattern extends to a once a week, then twice a week, and as the cues and rewards create a habit, until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. The fastfood are engineered to deliver immediate rewards. Since we often don't recognise these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning how to observe cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.
By 2000, 7 years after Eugene's illness, his life achieved equilibrium. He went for a walk every morning. He ate what he wanted, sometimes 5-6 times a day. His wife knew that as long as the TV was turned into History Channel, Eugene would settle into his plush chair. As he got older, these habits negatively impacted his life. He spent hours in front of TV without being bored. The physicians worried about his heart.
His demise would end in heart attack but the thing is, he had lived with this disease for 15 years that he had grown accustomed to uncertainty.

Chapter 2: The Craving Brain

This chapter centers on cravings and how it is in fact a powerful neurological tool which can work in favour of advertising. It illustrates with case studies of Pepsodent, Febreeze, and a lab experiment with Julio the monkey which revealed that once a craving is created, and you abruptly wean one off of it , it turns the person into moody asshats AND people are willing to spend a lot to satisfy their neurological cravings.

Case Study of 'Pepsodent' in Advertising

One day, in early 1900s, a new business idea was conceived-- it was toothpaste. A minty, frothy concotion known as Pepsodent. Hopkins, a main man in advertising got on board.

He would find simple triggers to convince consumers to use his product. (He would later describe this as 'learning the right human psychology').

1. He convinced millions of women to purchase Schlitz Beer by boasting that the company cleaned their bottles with "live steam", neglecting to mention that's standard industry practice)

2. For Quaker Oats, he marketed it as a breakfast cereal which could provide energy for 24 hours but only if you ate a bowl every morning.

To sell Pepsodent, he needed a trigger that would justify daily use. His solution ?:

"Just run your tongue across your teeth, you'll feel a film, that's what makes your teeth look off colour and invites decay"

"Note how many pretty teeth are seen everywhere"

"Millions are using a new method of teeth cleansing. Why would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsodent removes the film!"

The cue: Tooth film (universal and impossible to ignore)

The routine: Brushing teeth with Pepsodent

The reward: Shiny Smile!

Before Pepsodent arrived, only 7% of Americans had a tube of toothpaste in their medicine cabinet- but after a decade, the campaign went nationwide and it became 65%.

What was done different this time, Pepsodent added citric acid, as well as a dose of oils and (vinegar) chemicals which caused gums to tingle , and this was the first of its kind at the time. These ingredients were added to make it taste fresh but it had another unplanned impact. The irritants created a cool, tingling sensation on the tongue and gums.

Pepsodent had now created a craving. Customers said that if they forgot to use Pepsodent, they realised their mistake because they missed that cool, tingling sensation in their mouth. They craved that slight irritation because if it were not there their mouths did not feel clean. Hopkins was not selling beautiful teeth, he was selling a sensation of cool tingling, one associated with cleanliness. Brushing became a habit.

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Studies from successful routines revealed that they are more likely to stick with a workout plan if they choose a specific cue, such as running as soon as they get home from work, and a clear reward such as beer or an evening of guilt-free television.
Research on dieting says that creating new food habits require a predetermined cue such as planning menus in advance, and simple rewards for dieters when they stick to their intentions.

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Proctor & Gamble's case study with Febreeze

At around 1996, P&G's most promising new product was on the brink of failure. The company spent millions on developing a spray to remove bad smells from almost any fabric! It was later called Febreeze.
Fun fact: The tech behind Febreeze was discovered when one of the chemists worked with hydoxypropyl beta cyclodextrin [HPBCD ]in a lab, and when he came home, his wife asked him, "Have you quit smoking?" to which he clearly had not-- but he found that the smoke smell was not on his clothing anymore.
The project had been a major gamble but P&G was now poised to earn billions, if only they came up with the right marketing campaign. It was a chance to launch an entirely new category of product. He just needed to figure out how to make it a habit. These were the test subjects:
They visited a park ranger in Phoenix in her late 20s who wanted a dating life. Her job was to trap wild animals who wandered in the desert, like coyotes, raccoons, mountain lion, skunks which often sprayed when they were caught. Everything in her life smelled like skunk. So using Febreeze changed her life to the point that she was in tears.
Their early TV ads which showed the elimination of cigarette smells and pet smells were not resulting in their big anticipated sales. Deeper research revealed that people could not detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you live with 9 cats, you become desensitised to their scents. If you smoke cigarettes, it damages your olfactory capacities so much that you do not smell it.
Bad scents were not enough to trigger a habit, because they were not noticed!
After studying several tapes of housewives cleaning their homes they found a similar pattern-- most people were doing something relaxing when finished with cleaning . One example is of someone doing stretches in workout attire after cleaning. Previously the product's advertising focused on eliminating bad smells.
Instead of eliminating scents on dirty fabrics, it became an air freshener used as the finishing touches, when things were already clean. Labels were reprinted to show open windows, and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added into the recipe so instead of neutralising odours, it had its own scent. In each ad, Febreeze was positioned as the reward: the nice smell at the end of a cleaning routine. Each change was designed to appeal to a specific daily cue like cleaning a room, making a bed, vacuuming a rug.
When researchers revisited the consumer's homes after the new ad aired, they found that housewives were craving the Febreeze scent. One woman said that when her bottle ran druy, she spilled diluted perfume on her clothes because if they do not smell something nice at the end, it does not feel clean.

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Conclusions from this Chapter:

Habits are so powerful because they create neurological cravings. However, we are not aware of their existence, so we are often blind to the influence. But as we associate cues with rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains which start a habit loop spinning.
Food and scent cravings can affect behaviour. This is why kiosks such as Cinnabon are located as far away from other food stalls because the drifting smell of cinnabons, uninterrupted, create a craving and a passerby would reach for their wallet immediately.
The good news is that cravings do not have complete authority over us. To overpower habits, we must recognise that craving is the driving behaviour. If we are not conscious of the anticipation, we would be like shoppers who wander, as if drawn by an unseen force, to the Cinnabon.
A study was conducted on the power of cravings in creating exercising habits. In one group, 92% of people said they habitually exercised because it made them 'feel good' . They grew to expect and crave endorphins and other neurochemicals a workout provided.
In another group, 67% said that working out provided a sense of accomplishment. They craved a regular sense of triumph from tracking their performance. The self reward was enough to convert the physical activity into a habit.
If you want to start running everyday, it is essential that you choose a simple cue (always lacing up before breakfast or leaving running clothes next to you) but cue and reward alone is not enough to maintain a habit. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward will the habit surface.

Chapter 3: The Golden Rule of Habit Change

This chapter talks about why transformation occurs. Basically you cannot extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.
This chapter starts off with the coaching methods of Tony Dungy with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who have not won a single game against the West Coast for 16 years.
Habits are a three-stop loop, the cue, the routine and the Reward but Dungy only wanted to attack the middle step, the routine. He knew from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behaviour if there was something familiar at the beginning and end.
To change a habit, you must keep the old cue and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.
That's the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behaviour can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.
This Golden rule influenced treatment for alcoholism, obesity, OCDs, and hundreds of other destructive behaviours and understanding it can help anyone change their own habits. (Attempts to give up snacking for instance, will often fail unless there is a new routine to satisfy old cues and reward urges)
Dungy's system, although he unsuccessfully pitched to several teams was not received but this formula would go on to turn the Bucs into one of the league's most wins, him being the only coach in NFL history to reach play-offs in 10 consecutive years.

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Alcoholics Anonymous:

Alcoholism, is more than just a habit. It's a physical addiction with psychological and genetic roots. What is interesting about AA is that the program doesn't attack many of the psychiatric or biochemical issues which researches say are at the core of why they drink. In fact, it attacks the habits that surround alcohol use. AA in essence, is a giant machine for changing habit loops. And although the habits associated with alcholism are extreme, the lessons prove that even the most obstinate habits can be changed.
*The line seperating habits and addictions is often difficult to measure. In general, say many researchers, while addiction is complicated and poorly understood, many of the behaviours we associate with it are often driven by habit*
Alcoholics can achieve sobriety by making a "decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand him". 7/12 steps mention God or spirituality which seem odd for a program founded by a onetime agnostic , who, throughout his life was openly hostile towards organised religion.
Researches say that AA works because the program forces people to identify the cues and rewards that encourage their alcoholic habits and then helps them find new behaviours. But to change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.
Take step 4 for instance: To make a fearless inventory of ourselves and Step 5- to admit to God and ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. It's not obvious from the way they are written but to complete these steps, someone has to create a list of all the triggers for their alcoholic urges.
Then, AA asks alcoholics to search for a reward they get from alcohol. What cravings, this program asks, are driving your habit loop? Alcoholics crave a drink because it offers an escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release. They might crave a cocktail to forget worries, but they do not crave feeling drunk.
Some pick a bottle up because it is how they deal with anxiety. However, once they learned alternate routines for dealing with stress, the drinking stopped for good.

Experiment time- An attempt at artifically changing neurons to stop habits/addiction:

A study from Mueller , the German neurologist and colleagues of University of Magdeburg implanted small electric devices into the brains (specifically basal ganglia) of alcoholics who repeatedly tried to give up booze. They spent at least 6 months in rehab without success. One of them detoxed more than 60 times !
The devices in their brains emitted an electric charge that interrupted neurological reward which triggers habitual cravings. It overrode each man's neurological cravings. They did not touch a drop as a result. However, 4 of them relapsed soon after the surgery, usually after a stressful event. They picked up a bottle because it was their innate way of dealing with anxiety.
Even when alcoholics brains were changed through surgery, it was not good enough The old cues and cravings for rewards were still waiting to pounce. The alcoholics only permanently changed once they learned new routines which drew on the old triggers and provided a familiar relief.
Asking patients to describe what triggers their habitual behaviours is called awareness training. Just like AA's insistence on forcing alcoholics to recognise cues, it is the first step in habit reversal training.

Habit reversal therapy:

Most people's habits have occured for so long that they don't pay attention to what causes it anymore. For example in the case of Mandy the nail-biter, she felt a brief sense of completeness, and this was the habit's reward, a physical stimulation she had come to crave.
At the end of her 1st therapy session her homework was to record each time she felt a cue. She returned with 28 checks. She was by then, acutely aware of the sensations which preceded the habit. Her following homework would be to take competing response and record each time that she successfully did that. The competing responses grew on to become automated, and one habit replaced another.
It seems ridiculously simple but once you're aware of how your habit works, once you recognise the cues and rewards, you're halfway to changing it. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.
Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the craving driving behaviours. Changing any habit requires determination. Nobody will quit smoking cigarettes simply because they sketch a habit loop. Understanding the cues and cravings driving your habits won't make them suddenly disappear but it will give you a way to plan how to change the pattern.

Belief in a higher power as an essential ingredient in creating habit change:

Sometimes, believing in a higher power and admitting your powerlessness is the key to making things work.
Academics have asked why, if habit replacement is so effective, it seemed to fail at the most critical moments. As they dug into this, they learned it must be coupled with something else.
It wasn't God that mattered, researches thought. It was the belief itself which made a difference. Once people learned how to believe in something, this skill spilled over to other parts of their life till they believed they could change. Belief was the key ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behaviour.
"Even if you give people better habits, it doesn't repair why they started drinking in the first place"
But by putting alcoholics in a meeting where belief is given, where it is an integral part of the 12 steps, it lets people practice believing that things will get better until they eventually do. A community creates belief.

PART TWO: THE HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL ORGANISATIONS

Chapter 4: Keystone Habits, or the Ballad of Paul O Neill

This chapter centers on which habits matter the most.

On October 1987, prominent Wall Street investors gathered to meet the CEO of Aluminium Company of America (ALCOA) , a corporation that, nearly for a century, manufactured everything from the foil which wrapped Hershey's Kisses and the metal in Coke cans to the bolts which hold satelites together.
The company was doing badly and Paul O' Neill had stepped in to make changes to increase its profits but he started with the most unexpected area-- SAFETY. His idea was that if you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to examine workplace safety figures. If the injury rates are brought down, it won't be because of cheerleading or nonsense from CEOs. It would be because the individuals at this company agreed to be a part of something important. Creating a habit of excellence. Safety would be an indicator that they are making progress in changing habits across the entire institution.
His goal was to go for 0 injuries. The audience was confused at the new CEOs speech because it did not follow the normal speech patterns, and people thought he was a lunatic but within the 1st year of this speech his profits hit a record high.
The growth also occured while Alcoa became the safest company in the world. Before his arrival there was one accident per week, and once his safety plan was implemented, some facilities go years without a single employee losing a workday due to accidents.
He did this by attacking one habit and watched the changes ripple through the organisation. If one habit was changed or disrupted, it would spread throughout the entire company. It was his belief that some habits had chain reaction , and mattered more than others. These are keystone habits.

Keystone habits influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend and communicate.

It relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers. The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.

O Neil's safety plan and its trickle down effect:

He identified a simple cue, an employee injury, and he instituted an automatic routine- any time someone was injured they had to report it to O'Neill within 24 hours and present a plan for making sure that it never repeats. The reward? The only people who were promoted were those whom embraced this system.
As the safety pattern shifted, other aspects changed with startling speed. Rules which unions spent decades opposing such as measuring productivity of individual workers were suddenly embraced because such measurements helped people identify when part of the manufacturing process was getting out of whack which posed a safety risk.
Policies which managers resisted such as giving workers autonomy to shut down production line when the pace was overwhelming were now welcomed because that was the best way to stop injuries before they occured.
The safety habits had spilled over to their personal lives as well !

Lessons from changing keystone habits:

Studies have documented that 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 everyday is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of wellbeing and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.
It's not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes better grades or less frivolous spending, it is just the initial shifts which start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold.

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Michael Phelps the Olympic Swimmer:

When a local swimming coach named Bob Bowman saw Michael Phelps' potential (he started swimming at the age of 7) it was because, apart from his build, growing up, he was emotional . He had troubles calming down before races . His parents were divorcing and had problems coping with stress.
Bowman believed the key to success was at a young age, he saw a trait of obsessiveness within Phelps which made him an ideal athlete.
What would set him apart would be habits which made him the strongest mental swimmer in the pool. All he needed to do was target a few specific habits which had nothing to do with swimming and everything to do with the right mindset.
He designed a series of behaviours to calm Phelps' down and focus before each race. When he was a teen, he was told to watch the video tapes of matches before he slept and as soon he woke up. The video tape wasn't real. Rather, it was a mental visualisation of "the perfect race". So this is what he did.
During practices, when Bowman ordered Phelps to swim at race speed, he would shout "Put in the videotape!" and Phelps would push himself as hard as he could. He did it so many times that it became second nature. It worked and he got faster & faster.

Just as Michael Phelps' routine had nothing to do with swimming and everything to do with his success, so O' Neill's efforts began snowballing into changes which were unrelated to safety but transformational nonetheless. The small wins which started with his focus on safety created a climate in which all kinds of new ideas bubbled up.

Chapter 5: Starbucks & the Habits of Success:

This chapter talks about when willpower becomes automatic.

Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.

Self-discipline has a larger impact on academic performance than intellectual talent.
And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit.
By making people use a little bit of their willpower to ignore cookies, they put them into a state where they were willing to quit much faster. There's been >200 studies on this since then and they all found the same. Willpower is more than a skill. It is a muscle like others on your arms and legs and it gets tired as it works harder, so there's less power left over for other things.
It has been suggested that it helps explain why successful people succumb to extra-marital affairs (which more likely occurs late night after a long day of exercising willpower at work) or why good physicians make dumb mistakes (which occurs when doctors finish a long complicated task that requires intense focus)
If you want to run after work, you need to conserve willpower muscle during the day. If you use it up too early on tedious tasks like emails or filling out forms all the strength will deplete by the time you're home.
It goes on to describe a case study of patients healing from leg injuries and wanting to walk; those who wrote down their weekly plans and factored in contingency plans if something goes wrong were more likely to heal a lot faster and they designed willpower habits to help them overcome painful inflection points.

Experiment time! Warm Cookies:

Mark Muravan , a professor in the University of Albany set up a new experiment. He placed undergraduates in a room that contained a plate of warm, fresh cookies and asked them to ignore the treats.
Half the participants were treated kindly. The researcher asked "We ask that you please don't eat the cookies, is that okay?". The purpose of the experiment was explained -- to measure their ability to resist temptations. She thanked them for contributing their time and asked for suggestions or thoughts on how the experiment could be improved.
The other half were not coddled the same way. They were simply given orders. "You must not eat the cookies", the researcher told them, and the purpose of the experiment was not explained. She did not compliment them, or show any interest in their feedback. She told them to follow instructions. "We'll start now." she said.
The students from both groups had to ignore the warm cookies for 5 minutes after the researcher left the room. None gave into the temptation.
Then the researcher returned, and she asked each student to look at a computer monitor. It was programmed to flash numbers on the screen one at a time, for 500 miliseconds a piece. The participants were asked to press space bar everytime they saw number 6 followed by number 4. This has become a standard way to measure willpower-- by paying attention to a boring sequence.
Students whom had been treated kindly did well on the computer test. They were able to maintain their ficus for the entire twelve minutes. Despite ignoring cookies they had willpower to spare. The students whom had been treated rudely on the other hand, did terribly. They kept forgetting to hit the spacebar. They were unable to focus and felt fatigued by brusque instructions.
The key difference when studied was the sense of control they had over the experience. When people are asked to do something which takes self control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons (if it feels like a choice) it's much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, i.e if they are following instructions, then their willpower muscles tire out faster.

Chapter 6: The Power of a Crisis

This chapter touches on how leaders create habit through accident and design. The two main stories it zooms into is the crisis of the London Underground Rail Fire which took place on Kings Cross station in an evening of 1987 (started out as a commuter stopped him and mentioned that there was a burning tissue at the bottom of the escalator.), and the bureaucracies within Rhode Island Hospital which costed many their lives.

Most economists are accustomed to treating companies as idyllic places where everyone is devoted to a common goal: making as much money as possible. Nelson & Winter pointed out that in the real world, that's not how things work at all. Companies aren't big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performance seem superior and their rivals seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that nobody can mount a coup.
Despite the workplace being a warzone, it rolls along peacefully because they have routines and habits which create truces which allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get work done.
Imagine what you would tell a new colleague who asked for advise about how to succeed at a firm. Your recommendations probably wouldn't contain anything you'd find in the company handbook. Instead, the tips you would pass along -- who is trustworthy which secretaries have more than clout than their bosses, how to manipulate the bureaucracy to get something done-- are the habits you rely on everyday to survive . If you could somehow diagram all your work habits and the informal power structures, relationships, alliances, and conflicts they represent -- and then overlay your diagrams prepared by your colleagues, it would create a map of your firm's secret hierachy , a guide to who knows how to make things happen and who never seems to get ahead of the ball.
Creating successful organisations isn't just a matter of balancing authority. For an organisation to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace, and paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who's in charge.

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Crisis of Rhode Island Hospital

4 months after the elderly man with the botched skull surgery died at Rhode Island Hospital,(preventable if the doctor had listened to his nurse) another surgeon made a similar error, operating on the wrong section of another patient's head.
The state's health department reprimanded the faculty and fined it $50,000.00
18 months later, a surgeon operated on the wrong part of a child's mouth during a cleft palate surgery.
5 months after that, a surgeon operated on a patient's wrong finger.
10 months after that, a drill bit was left inside a man's head.
Cumulatively this translated to a fine of $450,000.
A new adminstrator viewed the criticism as an opportunity to re-examine everything . They shut down all elective surgery units for an entire day (a huge expense) and put the staff through an intensive training program that emphasised teamwork and stressed the importance of empowering nurses & medical staff.
The chief of neurosurgery resigned and a new leader was selected. A Center for transforming healthcare was invited to help reinvent its surgical safeguards.
Once a sense of crisis gripped Rhode Island Hospital, everyone became more open to change.
Other hospitals have made similar shifts in the wake of mistakes and brought down error rates that just years earlier had seemed immune to improvement.
Like Rhode Hospital, these institutions found that reform is usually possible only once crisis takes hold.
Good leaders seize crises to remake organisational habits. NASA tried to improve their agency's safety habits but these efforts were unsuccessful until the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. In the wake of that tragedy, the organisation was able to overhaul how it enforced quality standards.

Lessons from crisis management of the Underground Rail Fire:

In the wake of the King's Cross train station fire, the British secretary of state appointed a special investigator to study the incident. They uncovered the flaws with the Underground' s leadership which was known for years and yet nothing changed. There were proposals to give station managers more power so that they could bridge departmental divides.
There was a 250 paged indictment of the Underground as an organisation crippled by bureaucratic ineptitude, Which was intended to be investigations centered on one night. Pages and pages of stinging criticism was printed.
The organisation's leadership was fired. A slew of new laws were passed and the culture of the Underground was overhauled. Today, every station has a manager whose primary responsibility is passenger safety, and every employee has an obligation to communicate at the smallest hint of risk. All trains still run on time, but the Underground's habits and truces have adjusted to clarify responsibility for fire prevention and everyone is empowered to act regardless of whose toes they might be stepping on.

Chapter 7: How Target Knows What you Want Before you Do

This is a chapter on how companies used the habits you have so voluntarily offered them the moment you purchase something and place it on the till, to predict and manipulate your spending habits.

It started with a question: "Can your computers figure out which customers are pregnant even if they don't want us to know?"
Andrew Pole was the statistician in charge of finding the answer to this, and he based it off data. For example, someone's buying new towels, sheets, silverware, pans and frozen dinners? They probably just bought a new house --or are getting a divorce. A cart loaded up with bug spray, kids' underwear, a flashlight, lots of batteries, Real Simple , and a box of Chardonnay ? Summer camp is around the corner and Mom can hardly wait.
One afternoon, a few of Pole's colleagues from marketing were pooling their minds to uncover who was pregnant based on their buying patterns. New parents are the holy grail of retail. There is no group more profitable, product hungry, and price insensitive . It's not just diapers and wipes. People with infants are so tired they would buy anything they need, juice and toilet paper, socks and magazines, wherever they purchase their bottles and formula. If a new parent starts shopping at Target, they will return for years.
Figuring out who was pregnant meant making Target millions of dollars. ($$$)
Once upon a time, a company like Target would never have hired a statistician because they did not carry out intense data-driven analysis.
Some of the data-driven analysis methods at work:
The first thing you see when entering your grocery store is fruits and vegetables arranged in attractive, bountiful piles. Positioning products at the front of the store doesn't make sense because they bruise easily at the bottom of the cart, so they would make more sense located near registers, but psychologist figured that if we start out shopping sprees by loading up on healthy stuff, we're much more likely to buy Doritos, Oreos and frozen pizzas when we encounter them later on. The burst squash makes it easier to put a pint of ice cream in the cart later.
As a result of this tendency, retailers fill the right side of the store with the most profitable products they hope you will buy right off the bat.
Consider cereal and soups: When they are shelved in alphabetical order and seemingly random, our instinct is to linger longer and look at a wider selection. So you will find Raisin Bran next to Rice Chex. Instead, you have to search shelves for the cereal you want, and will be tempted to grab an extra box of another brand.
Researchers found that in spite of lists, more than 50% of purchasing decisions occured the moment a customer saw a product on the shelf because their habits were stronger than their written intentions.
Target was building an intel that kept tabs on how each person shopped. When a customer used a Target issued credit card, handed over a frequent buyer tag at the register, redeemed a coupon that was mailed to their house, filled out a survey and mailed a refund, phoned a customer help line, opened an email from Target, visited Target.com, or purchased anything online, the company's computer took note. A record of each purchase was linked to shopper's Guest ID number along with information on everything else they'd ever bought. Also linked was demographic info.
If you used Target credit card to buy Popsicles once a week, usually around 6.30 pm on a weekday, and mega-sized trash bags every July & October, the statisticians and computer programs identify that you have kids, tend to stop for groceries on the way back, and have a lawn which needs mowing in the summer and trees that drop leaves in the fall.
It will look at your other shopping patterns and notice that you sometimes buy cereal but never milk, which means you must be buying it elsewhere so they will mail you coupons for 2% milk as well as for chocolate sprinkles , school supplies, lawn furniture , rakes and even beer.The company will guess what you habitually buy and convince you to get it from Target.
The company can personalise ads and coupons and send it to every customer, even though you do not realise your coupon differs from your neighbours.
People's buying habits are more likely to change when they undergo a major life event. (Marriage = new type of coffee// New house= different cereal // Divorced = different beer brand ) But there is no greater upheaval than having a baby. So for companies, pregnant women are gold mines. The average parent spends $6,800 by the 1st birthday.
Expectant mothers shop in predictable ways : Women on the baby registry bought unusually large quantities of lotion around the beginning of the 2nd trimester. Another observation was the purchase of vitamins.. When someone suddenly buys a lot of scent-free soap, cotton balls, hand sanitisers and lots of washcloths, all at once, (few months after buying lotion and vitamins), it signals that they are approaching their due date.
But someone within the company asked "how are women going to react when they find out how much Target knows?" If they sent someone a catalog and said "congratulations on your first child" but the customers never informed them about the pregnancy, that is going to make people uncomfortable! So their remedy = they put a coupon for lawnmowers next to diapers, that way it looks random. (pfft)
They found out that as long as they think that they have not been spied on, they are more likely to use the coupons.

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The song Hey Ya was fed to the public, before the public knew they liked it !

When Hey Ya was first launched, it was failing and the producers could not understand why because according to their charts and science, it was supposed to be a sure hit.
The problem that the song was not familiar. Radio listeners did not want to consciously choose if they liked or disliked a song because this would ursurp mental energy. Instead, people react to cues (This sounds like the other song I like!) and the rewards (it's fun to hum along !) and without thinking, we either start singing or reach over and change the station.
To make it a hit, they made it familiar and part of an established listening habit, by sandwiching the song between ones which were already popular. (textbook playlist theory).

Beyond radio stations and advertisements:

These insights can change the way we live. An example of YMCA-- Member retention was driven by emotional factors such as whether the employees knew their names.
People often go to a gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member makes a friend at the YMCA they were more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words they possess social habits and if YMCA satisfied them, they were happy.

PART THREE: THE HABITS OF SOCIETIES

Chapter 8: Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

This chapter centers on how movements happen. It examines the incident of Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat, explore why certain activists are so passionately drawn to their causes and also how to bring a community more closely to the church.

It was Thursday December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. She was not in the White Section she said, and besides, there was only one rider standing.
Rosa Parks was subsequently arrested for not giving up her seat and whether anyone knew at the time, the civil rights movement pivoted because that small refusal was the first in a series of actions that shifted the battle over race relations from a struggle fought by court activists and legislatures into a contest that would draw strength from entire communities.
Outside of a single act of defiance, it was caused also largely due to social patterns. The reason why social habits have the pull they do is because of the social habits of friendship and strong ties between acquaintances. And it endures, because a movement's leaders give participants new habits that create fresh sense of identities and a feeling of ownership.
Usually, when all three parts are fulfilled can a movement become self-propelling and reach a critical mass. There are other recipes for successful social change and hundreds of details that differ between eras and struggles. But understanding how social habits work explain why Montgomery and Rosa Parks became catalysts for a civil rights crusade.
In general, sociologists say most of us have friends who are like us. We might have a few close acquaintances who are richer, poorer and from different races, but on the whole, our deepest friendships tend to be with people whom look like us, earn about the same amount of money, and come from similar backgrounds.
Park's friends spanned social and economic hierachies. She had firsthand relationships with dozens of groups across Montgomery that did not usually come into contact with one another. This was the absolute key, because she transcended the social stratas of the black community and Montgomery as a whole.
The power of those friendships became apparent as soon as Parks landed in jail. Jo Ann Robinson was one of the key players. (president of a powerful group of schoolteachers)
Close to midnight, Robinson called an impromptu meeting to suggest that everyone boycott the cities' buses on Monday , four days hence when Parks was to appear in court. Flyers were made with messages like "Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down". Within 24 hours from her arrest word of the jailing and boycott spread to come of the most influential communities.
There is a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly. Studies show that people have no problem ignoring strangers' injuries but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the intertia that usually makes protests hard to organise.
The first mass movement of the modern civil rights era could have been sparked by any number of earlier arrests but it began with Rosa Parks because she had a large, diverse and connected group of friends who-- when she was arrested, reacted as friends naturally respond by following the social habits of friendship and agreeing to show their support.
People who hardly knew Rosa Parks participated out of social peer pressure , an influence known as the power of weak ties that made it difficult to avoid joining in.
As the bus boycott expanded into a week, and then a month, and then two months, the commitment of Montgomery's black community began to wane. The police commissioner cited an ordinance requiring cabs to charge a minimum fare and threatened to arrest those who drove black passengers at a discount.
The boycott leaders responded by signing up 200 volunteers to participate in a carpool. Drivers began dropping out because it became increasingly difficult to catch a ride.
Soon after there was a bombing of King's house and when he arrived on scene he was greeted by several hundred blacks as well as mayor and chief of police. Policemen started telling crowds to disperse. Someone shoved a cop, a bottle flew through the air, and a policemen swung a baton.
However it was what ensued after, the message of non-violence that he preached for weeks and which drew on the themes of Gandhi and Jesus' sermons which had not been framed in this context which struck at the hearts of activists.
King gave people a new lens. This wasn't war, he said, it was an embrace.
Equally important, he cast the boycott in a new and different light This was not just about equality on buses, it was part of God's plan-- the same destiny that ended British colonialism in India and slavery in the US AND the same one which caused Christ to die on the cross for our sins.
In essence, taking christian teachings and making them political was the recipe. A movement is a saga. For it to work, everyone's identity needs to change. On June 5th 1956, a panel of Federal Court judges ruled that Montgomery's bus segregation law violated the Constitution.

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How this ties in during a job hunt

In landing a job, weak ties give us access to social networks where we don't otherwise belong. Our weak tie acquaintances --the people we bump into every six months are the ones whom tell us about jobs we would otherwise never hear about.
Peer pressure - a form of persuasion that has been remarkably effective over hundreds of years. It's a sense of obligation that neighbourhoods or communities place upon themselves.
Habits of peer pressure often spread through weak ties, and they gain authority through communal expectations. If you ignore neighbourhood obligations, shrug off expected community patterns, you risk losing social standing. You endanger your access to many social benefits which come from a community.
In other words, if you do not give the caller looking for a job a helping hand, he might complain to his tennis partner who might mention these grumblings to someone in the locker room who you hoped to attract as a client, who is now less likely to return your call because you have a reputation for not being a team player.
On the playground, peer pressure is dangerous. In adult life, it's how businesses gets done and communities self organise.

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Post Rosa Parks- Freedom Summer Student Activism:

In 1964, students from around the country (whites from Harvard, Yale and other northern universities) applied for something known as the Missisippi Summer Project.
The project came to be known as Freedom Summer and many who applied were aware it would be dangerous. (Articles predicting violence!) The threat of harm prevented from participating because although>1000 accepted into Freedom Summer, when it came down to head south , 300 + backed out.
The students whom participated in Freedom Summer were enmeshed in the types of communities where both of their close friends and their casual acquaintances expected them to get on the bus. Those who stayed home were enmeshed in communities where societal pressures and habits did not compel them to go to Misissipi.
Applicants whom mentioned a religious orientation and belonged to an organisation did not back out because once their communities were aware, the participants cared about their social standing and the repercussions if they backed out.

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On building sustainable habits to move people to attend church

When Warren first arrived in Saddleback Valley, he spent 12 weeks going door to door introducing himself and asking strangers why they didn't go to church.
From the responses, his church tackled all the shortcomings. The sermons centered on practical topics such as "How to handle discouragement", "How to feel good about yourself", "How to raise healthy families", and "How to survive under stress". His lessons were easy to understand, focused on real daily problems, and were applicable as soon as parishioners left church.
His view was if you want to have Christ-like character, then you must develop Christ like habits. The goal was to help people replace bad habits with habits which made people grow into Christ's likeness.
Every Saddleback member is asked to sign a maturity covenant card' promising to adhere to habits like daily quiet time for reflection and prayer, tithing 10 percent of income and membership in a small group.
This is the 3rd aspect of how social habits drive movements-- for an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling. And the surest way to achieve that is to give people new habits which help them figure out where to go on their own.

Conclusion/Biggest takeaway:

Movements don't emerge because everyone suddenly decides to face the same direction at once, they rely on social patterns that begin as habits of friendship, grow through habits of communities and are sustained by habits that change participants sense of self.

Chapter 9: The Neurology of Free Will

This chapter asks the important question of, are we really responsible for our habits? The case study here is a serial gambler with an addiction problem and contrasts it with an example of a murderer husband who was discharged on the basis of automatism succeeding as a defence coupled with circumstancial evidence of them having a healthy marriage.

Angie Bachmann was a girl of average attractiveness who settled down and became a housewife. After that she had no clue what she would do next, and that began her visit to the casino when her kids were at school.
She improved at it. Within 6 months, she picked up enough tricks and adjusted her rules to allow for two-three hour shifts and she would still have cash in her pocket when she walked away. One afternoon she sat at a blackjack table with $80 in her purse and left with $530. This was enough to pay groceries, phone bill and put a bit into an emergency fund.
By then, the casino, Harrah's Entertainment were sending her coupons for the buffet for free~! She would treat the family dinner on Saturday nights.
Iowa had legalised gambling only a few years earlier. Prior to that, the lawmakers worried about temptation .
By 2000, Angie was worried about the deteriorating health of her parents coupled with the lack of attention from her spouse and feeling like her children did not need or appreciate her, so when she went to the casino, the tensions floated away.
One time, she returned from the Casino with $6000, enough for 2 months rent and to wipe out credit card bills. Another time she walked away with $2000 . Sometimes she lost but this did not matter. Smart gamblers knew you had to go down before you go up.
Her rules that she started out with when gambling laxed. One day she lost $800 in an hour and earned $1,200 in 40 minutes.then her luck turned around and she walked away down $4000. Another time, she lost $3500 in the morning , earned $5,000 by afternoon and lost $3,000 in the afternoon. Of course the casino recorded this.
One month she did not have enough for electricity bill, to which she asked for a loan from her parents. She borrowed 2k one month, 2.5k the next and it was no big deal because they had the money.
By 2001 she was going everyday, whenever she fought with her husband or felt unappreciated by her kids. At the table she was numb and excited at once and her anxieties grew faint that it could not be heard. The high of winning was immediate and the pain of losing passed fast.
It reached a point that Angie's debts to Bachmann hit $20,000.00 which she initially kept secret till it was too late to hide. Bankrupt attorneys got involved, credit cards were cut.
She had tried to argue before the state's highest court that her gambling stopped being out of choice but became habit and should not bear culpability for her losses.
Three years after declaring bankruptcy, her dad passed away . Two months later her mother passed away. They left her a mass fortune, almost 1 million. She used $275,000 to buy her family a new home in Tennessee but soon fell into her gambling habits. She started playing at a black jack table for 3 hours.
Harrah's Entertainment had sophisticated customer tracking systems and in spite of being aware that she declared banktuptcy, she began receiving phone calls with offers of free limos that would take her to casinos in Mississippi. The offered to fly her and her husband to Lake Tahoe and put them in a suite , and give them tickets to an Eagles Concert. They even made room for her daughter and friend. Everyone's airfare and room were free. At the concert, she sat in the front row, and Harrah gave her $10,000 to play with FOR FREE!
The offers kept coming every other week, and when she returned to the casinos the gambling habits took over . She would play for hours at a stretch. Even though there were huge losses this did not alter her lifestyle because her bank account was still so large that she did not have to think about money.
One time, over a span of 12 hours, she lost $250,000.00 and the scale of the loss did not register. Soon, the losses were too big to ignore. Depression seeped in. On March 18 2006, Angie Bachmann flew to a casino by invitation. By then, her bank account was almost empty. When she tried to calculate how much she lost over a lifetime, the figure added up to $900,000.00 She told Harrah's that she was almost broke but was urged to come anyway under the pretense of being granted credit. By that trip all her money would be gone.

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Automatism as a defence to MURDER

The setting begins with a 911 call from a desperate man saying he has murdered his wife. The previous night the couple was sleeping as per normal. The next moment he awoke to find a man in jeans and black fleece , lying on top of his wife. He screamed at the man, grabbed him by the throat and tried to pull him off. It was as if he was acting automatically.
The more the man struggled, the harder he squeezed. The man scratched at his arm and tried to fight back but he choked harder and harder till the man stopped breathing. Then , Thomas realised, it was not a man in his hands , but his wife.
For the course of his trial, it was revealed that as a child he was no stranger to sleepwalking sometimes multiple times each night till it became a family joke. When asked why he would wander across to the lawn he would answer that it was a matter of habit. As he grew older he would awake with cuts on his feet with no memory of how it got there.
Sleepwalking is a reminder that wake and sleep are not mutually exclusive. By law, the police had to prosecute him for murder but all evidence indicated that he had a happy marriage prior to that awful night. There was no history of abuse.
When observed by sleep specialists, it was found that Thomas Brian was asleep when he killed his wife- so he had not consciously committed a crime. It seemed like a fair outcome, after all , he was obviously devastated by his crime. He had no idea what he was doing when he acted because he was merely following a habit.
YET, many of these same arguments and excuses can be made for Angie Bachmann the gambler. She was also devastated by the consequences of her actions. She would also feel a deep sense of guilt. And as it turns out she was also following deeply ingrained habits that made it increasingly difficult for decision making to intervene.

But in the eyes of the law, Bachmann is responsible for her habits and Thomas Brian isn't . What does that reveal about the ethics of habit and choice?

Other cases of automatism
There are a long list of wrongdoers who rely on the defence of automatism and as our understanding of neurology increases, the defence appears more compelling.
How sleepwalking works: As our mind moves in and out of stages of rest, the brain stem paralyses our limbs and nervous system allowing our bodies to experience dreams without acting them out. However, some people's brain experience switching errors.
Scientists found a distinction between sleepwalking and sleep terrors. The latter implies the brain is in grip of terrible anxieties but are not dreaming per se. Every part except the most primitive neurological regions (central pattern generators) shuts down. The behaviours of those experiencing sleep terrors are habits.
However when these habits occur during sleep, and sleep deactivates the prefrontal cortex, and other high cognition areas, when a sleep terror habit is triggered, there is no possibility of conscious intervention. You cannot override it by logic or reason! People with sleep terrors have jumped off tall roofs because they believed they were fleeing from attackers.
In 2009, a British soldier admitted to raping a teenager but said he was asleep and unconscious while he undressed himself, pulled down her pants, and began having sex. When those experiencing sleep terrors feel threatened, or even aroused, they react by following the habit attached to that stimuli.

Experiment time! - Testing the mind of gamblers

To pathological gamblers, near misses look like wins. Their brains reacted the same way. But to a non pathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognising that a near miss still meant a loss.
Pathological gamblers got more excited about winning. When symbols lined up, even though they did not win money, the areas in their brain related to emotion and reward were much more active, than in non-pathological gamblers.
It's unclear if problem gamblers brains are different because they are born that way or sustained exposure to slot machines, online poker, and casinos can change how the brain functions.
Gamblers who keep betting after near wins are what makes casinos, racetracks, and state lotteries profitable. You wanna know why sales explode? Every other scratch off ticket is designed to make you feel like you almost won!

Takeaway from this chapter:

Habits are not as straightforward as they appear. We can choose them once we know how. Everything we know about habits from neurologists studying amnesiacs and organisation experts remaking companies, is that any of them can be changed if you know how they function.
To modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must accept the hardwork of identifying cues and rewards that drive the habit's routines and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it.
Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only remaining option is to get to work.

Over-all: 3.5/5

I guess the fact that it was this packed with case studies, experiments, theories, principles and the choppy and sandwiched layering of one story , paused by the interception of another, before it resumes to the original story again made this take a whole lot longer to finish. But the insights in here make for great conversation and makes me hopeful of first recognizing the habits, and as the book suggests, bearing the responsibility of changing the ones which seem to bring me down. It approaches habits and its illustrations from a much more technical stance, one which doesn't seem to be a problem when materials like these are the staple of your library but I would not recommend to someone just beginning their self help reading unless they are doing an assignment on habits.

AMELIAN MEMARIES.

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Tuesday, July 12, 2022

The Power of Habit (Why we do what we do in life and business) by Charles Durigg: A Summary