WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO IN LIFE AND BUSINESS
I read the book, The Power of Habit, first by listening. I had borrowed the audiobook and there was too much richness in it to leave it there. So I borrowed the real thing, at first just to fill in the visuals that were missing, but as I started to reread, and place sticky markers, I realized I needed to process it a little more.
This year, the library has decided to join with others to do away with late fees. I think it will be mistake. I have never liked to owe the fees, but they were not painful in amount, and apparently they were more essential to my good behaviour than I thought. So I am one month overdue, which has never happened in my adult life before, and I am pretending like I have another month because those are the limits. Meanwhile, I received several email reminders and a personal phone call from Brigitte (which thankfully went to voicemail so that I didn’t have to explain myself), and today I have to end this cycle!
It is apropos, then, that this book is about new habits. The one reality the library has in its favour is that I suspect I cannot win a gift certificate for a local bookstore in the Summer Reads Bingo if I don’t give it back by tomorrow, so here are few thoughts I want to carry with me.
This is book of stories, and the skill of storyteller is evident. I had heard a few of these stories before. How the military stopped riot violence in Iraq by studying the pattern, and doing away with food vendors, basically dispersing an angry crowd before it moved to violence. How unfortunate brain accidents led to our understanding of how the brain was organized, identifying the basal ganglia as essential to habit, with anterograde memory is destroyed. How Michael Phelps swam to an Olympic record essentially blind when his goggles leaked. How Rosa Parks inspired the Montgomery bus boycott that was a turning point in the civil rights movement.
It explains the success of the Saddleback Church, how the law handles addiction, the success of Starbucks, online marketing algorithms, and a number of cautionary tales that vary from London Underground fires to inexcusable medical errors like amputating the wrong limb. It gives concrete steps to changing habits that could benefit us all.
This is the executive summary, kindly reviewed in the Appendix:
Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.
Cues and rewards are not enough. Only when you start craving the reward will the routine be automatic.
At the core of every habit exists a loop consisting of three parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward.
With every bad habit, you want to replace the routine with a better one. Simply put:
1. Identify the routine.
2. Experiment with rewards.
3. Isolate the cue.
4. Have a plan
We use our basal ganglia to maintain routines, so that we save our mental energy for more conscious tasks.
We share this organ with fish, reptiles, and other mammals. It is central to recalling patterns and acting on them. It stores habits as an automatic routine called « chunking », which gets more efficient over time, and conserves mental energy for other tasks. Once our brain recognizes a cue, it triggers automatic mode and which habit to use. The more rewards for a particular behaviour, the more automatic that routine becomes.
When a habit emerges, the brain stops decision making and follows the efficient routine. Bad habits are efficient, but they can be replaced with equally efficient good habits
We need to find our autopilots and change our behaviour from the unconscious cues that we make conscious for a time.
Experiments show that almost all habitual cues fit into one of the five categories:
Location (Where are you?)
Time (What time is it?)
Emotional State (How do you feel?)
Other people (Who else is around?)
Immediately preceding action (What action preceded the urge)
IN SUMMARY:
Our brain likes automatic behaviour. Bad habits can be changed to good habits by changing the habit loop. Make a new cue. Create a craving for something better. Reward the good behaviour. This is how transformation occurs.
Address an old habit by keeping the same cues and rewards and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.
AA 90 meetings in 90 days is arbitrary and Bill W was agnostic and hostile to religion for part of his life. However, AA works because it identifies the cues/triggers (AWARENESS TRAINING) with a « searching and fearless inventory of ourselves (consider Proust’s questionnaire) » and admitting them to others. Ulf Mueller showed that turning off neurological cravings was not enough to stop drinking habits. Alternate routines were necessary for dealing with stress. This is called a competing response. AA also practices faith, because to change a habit, you have to believe that it’s possible. A community helps change because you believe it others. Commitment to others and accountability helps.
Planning for failure, and recognizing negative ideas helps.
The power of changing a keystone habit is that that it can create a chain reaction.
Stories to read and tell:
How a major near Kufa, Iraq kept the peace by teaching habits to soldiers and studying past riots with a simple solution to prevent new ones.
How Henry Molaison (H. M) taught scientists and doctors at MIT how critical the hippocampus was to memory when he lost his in a neurosurgical operation in 1953 following his head injury intended to improve his life to stop him from multiple daily recurrent grand mal seizures
How Eugene Pauly (E. P.) taught researchers in San Diego about the subconscious brain after he suffered from memory loss following viral encephalitis
How Claude Hopkins sold toothpaste so successfully that he created our tooth brushing habit by harnessing a craving for clean teeth
How Procter and Gamble turned Febreze into a success by understanding that bad smells aren’t cues but a clean house is a reward
How coach Tony Dungy took the worst team in the NFL by creating new habits with players established on-field cues (The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Insert a new routine) or how The Bucs won the Super Bowl in 2002 (even if he wasn’t there)
How Bill Wilson fought alcohol addiction with a 12 step program (friends of Bill W) that attacks the habits at the core
How Paul O’Neill (who later became Treasury Secretary) remade an aluminum manufacturers by focussing on one « Keystone habit «
How Charles Schulz went from high school dropout to Starbucks top manager by using habit to strengthen willpower
How Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement changed the social habits of Montgomery, AL
How Rick Warren built the nation’s largest church in the US (while being an introvert!)
How ethics and law see addiction and sociopathy in the context of crime
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