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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.

Charles Duhigg

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Charles Duhigg
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: January 1
Journalist
Writer
New Mexico
United States
Power
Tired
Things
Skills
Like
Harder
Works
Willpower
Arms
Muscle
Gets
Skill
Less
Muscles
Left
Legs

More quotes by Charles Duhigg

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There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.
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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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There's a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.
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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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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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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.
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If you believe you can change - if you make it a habit - the change becomes real.
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When people have a willpower failure, it's because they haven't anticipated a situation that's going to come along.
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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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Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
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The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because when you think about it, all of your old routines sort of go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new kinds of things.
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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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Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.
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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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Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.
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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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Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.
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Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.
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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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For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.
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