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The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

Charles Duhigg

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Charles Duhigg
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: January 1
Journalist
Writer
New Mexico
United States
Always
Difference
Differences
Brain
Waiting
Cues
Tell
Lurking
Problem
Habits
Right
Rewards
Good
Habit

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Simply giving employees a sense of agency- a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority - can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.
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Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.
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At some point, if you're changing a really deep-seated behavior, you're going to have a moment of weakness.
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This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.
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Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work.
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Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.
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Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.
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Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It's not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.
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It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.
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Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.
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Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.
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For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.
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If you believe you can change - if you make it a habit - the change becomes real.
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Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
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Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.
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Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the orther team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.
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The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
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If you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they'll prove you right
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Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.
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Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.
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