I’ve heard a lot of good things about Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. Duhigg is a New York Times reporter who got interested in how habits are formed and how they are changed. His research resulted in this 2012 publication. Here is my review.
The book is divided into three parts:
- The Habits of individuals.
- The Habits of Successful Organizations.
- The Habits of Societies.
In my view, the first section, dealing with The Habits of Individuals is the strongest. The author explains the Habit Loop of three parts:
We all know this intuitively but reading it is very helpful: When a habit is formed, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. When something becomes a habit, we can perform the task while thinking about other things.
Of course, good habits are great but we usually focus on our bad habits since we want to change those. And this is the most interesting part of the book: How to change our bad habits and just how difficult it is.
Duhigg is a journalist and a terrific storyteller but not a scientist. The examples provided are always interesting but not always on point. Some of these examples include how consumer products companies create insecurities in us, a cue, so they can sell us something we didn’t know we needed. Think of the film on our teeth (the cue), brushing with toothpaste (the routine), to produce a bright smile (the reward). The ‘minty freshness’ is part of the product to provide reinforcement of the habit; it is not part of the teeth-cleaning process.
The second part of the book on The Habits of Successful organizations talks about routines within large organizations as the analogue of habits of individuals. That doesn’t seem valid to me. The author goes so far as to say that routines in a company provide a truce amongst constantly warring factions that allow some real work to get done. That has never been something I’ve experienced in business.
The stories of success at Alcoa and Starbucks are great business case studies, good reads and very interesting. But I don’t buy that these are examples of Habits. While not a great fit into the overall premise of the book, the Alcoa and Starbucks stories are very instructive to anyone in business.
The third section of the book about The Habits of Societies is even less convincing. Again, the examples are really engaging and I loved the stories, but it seemed a stretch to call these Habits.
There is an Appendix which builds on the best part of the book: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas. This gets back to Habits of individuals and provides helpful advice on identifying a routine (typically a bad habit), experimenting with rewards, isolating the cue and then making a plan to change the routine. In other words, it provides a template for breaking a bad habit.
I won’t tell you what bad habit I’m trying to break but I haven’t figured out how to do it yet. But the book gives me understanding of how Habits are formed and a start towards changing this bad habit. It’s not the only bad habit I have but it’s a start.
Overall, this is a book I recommend.
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