The Power of Habit

I often thought that to be successful required a significant amount of will power to go after your goals no matter what. However, after doing thorough research and experiment, I realized will power is finite and you can only do so much with it. Habits, on the other hand, are long term and when you set the right habits, excellence will always be in our grasp. Will Durant was right when he said "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.". Below are the insights I got from the book.

Your cravings are key to good habits

The process in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine is known as chunking. The fundamental principal of forming a good habit is cue, routine, reward. 

Craving is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop. Figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easy.

In the book, we see Claude Hopkins used this to his advantage and used simple triggers to convince consumers to use his products everyday. He sold Quaker Oats for breakfast as something that would fuel you for hours on end but only if you ate a bowl every morning.

He did this by learning the right human psychology. It was grounded in two basic rules:

    1.)Find a simple and obvious cue

    2.)Clearly define the rewards

For example, a smoker who craves a smoke will go for cigarettes then it initiates the smoking routine and he is rewarded with puff of smoke.

Simple cue and reward aren't enough to make a habit last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward i.e craving the pleasure/satisfaction will it become automatic. For example, when I wake in the morning, I crave a surge of energy(cue). This leads to me making coffee (routine) in order to get the surge of energy(reward)

The cue is the trigger that tells your brain to go into auto mode which habit to use. Habits never really disappear. They are encoded into the structures of our brain. If we take control of the habit loop, we can force those bad tendencies into the background.

Keystone Habits

Some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. Some habits matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are called Keystone Habits.

Keystone Habits starts a process that , over time, transforms everything. The best businesses understand the importance of routines. The worst businesses are headed by people who never think about it and wonder why no one follows their orders.

Identifying keystone habits is tricky. To find them, you have to know where to look. Detecting keystone habits means searching out certain characteristics. Keystone habits offer small wins. They help other habits flourish by creating new structures and they establish cultures where change becomes contagious.

Once a small wins is set, forces are set in motion to favor another small wins. Haba na haba hujaza kibaba as the Kiswahili proverb says. Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach. Small wins compounded over time lead to massive changes in the long run. You can read more on small compounded efforts in my review of the book, The Compound Effect

Changing Habits

 If you have a bad habit, how do you go about changing it? Charles Duhigg, explains to us in four short steps on how to make the change.

Step 1: Identify the routine

The routine is the most obvious aspect. It is the behavior you want to change.

Step 2: Experiment with Rewards

Rewards satisfy cravings but we're often not conscious of the cravings that drive our behaviors

To figure out which cravings are driving particular habits, it is useful to experiment with different rewards.

Step 3: Isolate the cue

To find the cue amid the noise, we use the following 3 categories

• Location; Where are you when you get the cue to start the habit?
• Time; What time does the cue start?
• Emotional State; How do you feel when the cue is about to start?

Step 4: Have a plan

Practice what habit you want by initially making the choice to do so. Once you have the cue, routine and reward down, you have to execute the habit. It will be hard in the first few weeks but if you follow through, it will soon be a lifestyle.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. I hope you find this information useful.