Focus first on a keystone habit (one pattern) to
reprogram the other routines in life.
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a
mass of habits—William James, 1892
40 percent of the actions people performed each
day weren’t actually decisions, but habits.
Habits can be changed, if we understand how
they work.
A community was a giant collection o habits
occurring among thousands of people that,
depending on how they’re influenced, could
result in violence or peace.
The basal ganglia, in other words, stored habits
even while the rest of the brain went to sleep.
Chunking – the brain converts a sequence of
actions into an automatic routine.
Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain
is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
Habit: cue → routine → reward
When a habit emerges, the brain stops full
participating in decision making.
Habits never really disappear.
Your brain can’t tell the difference between good
and bad habits.
Without habit loops, our brains would shut
down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life.
Habits are often as much as a curse as a benefit.
Habits are surprisingly delicate.
Habits, as much as memory and reason, are at
the root of how we behave.
Cues can almost be anything. Routines can be
incredibly complex or fantastically simple.
Rewards can range from food or drugs that
cause physical sensations to emotional payoffs.
Habits are powerful, but delicate.
Habits emerge without are permission.
Even small shifts can end the pattern.
By learning to observe the cues and rewards,
though, we can change the routines.
The brain has this amazing ability to find
happiness even when the memories of it are
gone.
We could short circuit some of our worst
patterns by inserting new cues.
Craving is what makes cues and rewards work
and at powers the habit loop.
First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second,
clearly define the rewards.
Habits create neurological cravings.
This is how new habits are created: by putting
together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and
then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.
Cravings don’t have complete authority over us.
Only when your brain starts expecting the
reward, will it become automatic. The cue, in
addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger
a craving for the reward to come.
Cravings are what drive habits.
“Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They
do ordinary things, but they do them without
thinking, too fast for the other team to react.
They follow the habits they’ve learned.”
Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can never
extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit,
you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old
reward, but insert a new routine. (You Can’t
Extinguish a Bad Habit, You Can Only Change It.)
Habit reversal training → competing response
Awareness training – asking patients to describe
what triggers their habitual behavior.
The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You
just have to be deliberate about it.
Often, we don’t really understand the cravings
driving our behaviors until we look for them.
Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked
habit loop into a permanent behavior.
If it worked for that guy, I guess it can work for
me.
A community creates a belief.
“It felt good to do something that wasn’t all
about me.”
When people join groups where change seems
possible, the potential for that change to occur
becomes more real.
There are simply communities—sometimes of
just one other person—who make change
believable.
Change occurs among other people. It seems real
when we can see it in other people’s eyes.
Belief is easier when it occurs within a
community.
A habit cannot be eradicated—it must, instead,
be replaced. Habits are most malleable when the
Golden Rule of habit is applied: if we keep the
same cue and the same reward, a new routine
can be inserted. For a habit to stay changed,
people must believe change is possible. And most
often, that belief only emerges with the help of a
group.
Attacking the behaviors we think of as addictions
by modifying the habits surrounding them has
been shown, in clinical studies, to be one of the
most effective modes of treatment.
Genuine change requires work and self-
understanding of the cravings driving behaviors.
Changing any habit requires determination.
By attacking one habit and then watching the
changes ripple through the organization.
You can’t order people to change. That’s not how
the brain works. Start by focusing on one thing. If
I could start disrupting the habits around one
thing, it would spread throughout the entire
company.
Some habits have the power to start a chain
reaction.
Keystone habits can influence how people work,
eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. It starts
a process that, over time, transforms everything.
Keystone habits: success doesn’t depend on
getting every single thing right, but instead relies
on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning
them into powerful levers.
The habits that matter the most are the ones
that, when they start to shift, dislodge and
remake other patterns.
Lists are how he organized his life.
Individuals have habits; groups have routines.
Routines are the organizational analogue of
habits.
We were basically ceding decision making to a
process that occurred without actually thinking.
But to other agencies, where change was in the
air, good organizational habits were creating
success.
Typically, people who exercise start eating better
and becoming more productive at work. For
many people, exercise is a keystone habit that
triggers wide spread change.
Identifying keystone habits is tricky.
Keystone habits offer what is known within
academic literature as “small wins.”
All elite performers are obsessives.
Small wins are a steady application of a small
advantage. Once a small win has been
accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor
another small win.
Small wins do not combine in a neat, linear,
serial form, with each step being a demonstrable
step closer to some predetermined goal. More
common is the circumstance where small wins
are scattered…like miniature experiments that
test implicit theories about resistance and
opportunity and uncover both resources and
barriers that were invisible before the situation
was stirred up.
Keystone habits encourage change by creating
structures that help other habits to flourish.
Piling on so much change at once made it
impossible for any of it to stick.
The final way that keystone habits encourage
widespread change: by creating cultures where
new values become ingrained.
Not sharing an opportunity to learn is a cardinal
sin.
Cultures grow out of the keystone habits in every
organization, whether leaders are aware of them
or not.
“grit” – the tendency to work “strenuously
toward challenges, maintaining effort and
interest over the years despite failure, adversity,
and plateaus in progress.
Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures
that make clear the values that, in the heat of a
difficult decision or a moment of uncertainty, we
might otherwise forget.
Willpower – the all-important habit. It is the
single most important keystone habit for
individual success.
Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed
their impulsive peers on every academic-
performance variable.
Sometimes, it looks like people with great self-
control aren’t working hard—but that’s because
they’ve made it automatic. Their willpower
occurs without them having to think about it.
Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can
be taught the same way kids learn to so math
and say “thank you.”
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.
Once willpower became stronger, it touched
everything.
And once you’ve gotten into that willpower
groove, your brain is practiced at helping you
focus on a goal.
If someone has trouble with self-discipline at
work, they’re probably also going to have trouble
attending a program designed to strengthen
their self-discipline after work.
Turn discipline into an organizational habit.
Inflection points – when they knew their pain—
and thus the temptation to quit—would be the
strongest.
How willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a
certain behavior ahead of time, and then
following that routine when an inflection point
arrives.
“And I genuinely believe that if you tell people
that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll
prove you right.”
When people are asked to do something that
takes self-control, if they think they are doing it
for personal reasons—if they feel like it’s a choice
or something they enjoy because it helps
someone else—it’s much less taxing. If they feel
like they have no autonomy, if they’re just
following orders, their willpower muscles get
tired much faster.
Sense of agency – a feeling that they are in
control, that they have genuine decision-making
authority.
People want to be in control of their lives.
Just as choosing the right keystone habits can
create amazing change, the wrong ones can
create disasters.
Much of firm behavior is best understood as a
reflection of general habits and strategic
orientations coming from the firm’s past.
Firms are guided by long-held organizational
habits, patterns that often emerge from
thousands of employees’ independent decisions.
Routines provide the hundreds of unwritten rules
that companies need to operate. But among the
most important benefits of routines is that they
create truces between potentially warring groups
or individuals within an organization.
Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in
a civil war.
Routines—habits—that create truces that allow
everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough
to get a day’s work done.
Truces are only durable when they create real
justice. If a truce is unbalanced—if the peace
isn’t real—then the routines often fail when they
are needed the most.
For an organization to work, leaders must
cultivate habits that both create a real and
balanced peace and, paradoxically, make it
absolutely clear who’s in charge.
Sometimes, a truce can create dangers that
outweigh any peace.
Crises, are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes
it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming
catastrophe rather than letting it die down.
Good leaders seize crises to remake
organizational habits.
Most of us turn to the right after entering a
store.
Consumers sometimes act like creatures of habit,
automatically repeating past behavior with little
regard to current goals.
The habits are unique to each person.
People’s buying habits are likely to change when
they go through a major life event.
Our brains crave familiarity in music because
familiarity is how we manage to hear without
becoming distracted by all the sound. Listening
habits allow us to unconsciously separate
important noises from those that can be ignored.
By dressing something new in old clothes, and
making the unfamiliar seem familiar.
To market a new habit, you must understand
how to make the novel seem familiar.
Social habits are why some initiatives become
world changing movements, while others fail to
ignite.
A social movement starts because of the social
habits of friendship and the strong ties between
close acquaintances. It rows because of the
habits of a community, and the weak ties that
hold neighborhoods and cans together and it
endures because a movement’s leaders give
participants new habits that create a fresh sense
of identity and a feeling of ownership.
Most of us have friends that are like us. Our
deepest relationships tend to be with people who
look like us, earn about the same amount of
money, and come from similar backgrounds.
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.
Social habits of friendship – the natural
inclination to help someone we respect.
The power of weak ties – social peer pressure.
Weak ties – links that connect people who have
acquaintances in common, who share
membership in social networks, but aren’t
directly connected by the strong ties of friendship
themselves.
Weak-tie acquaintances were often more
important than strong-tie friends because weak
ties give us access to social networks where we
don’t otherwise belong.
Peer pressure – social habits that encourage
people to conform to group expectations.
On a playground, peer pressure is dangerous. In
adult life, it’s how business gets done and
communities self-organize.
For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must
become self-propelling. And the surest way to
achieve that is to give people new habits that
help them figure out where to go on their own.
He who lives by the sword shall perish by the
sword.
You follow what exists in your head, because
you’re not capable of making a choice.
In general, sleepwalkers will not do things that
are dangerous to themselves or others. Even
asleep, there’s an instinct to avoid peril.
A brain experiencing a brain terror look very
similar to a brain following a habit.
Automatic behaviors so ingrained in our
neurology that can almost occur with the almost
no input from the higher regions of the brain.
People with gambling problems got a mental
high from the near misses—which is probably
why they gamble for so much longer than
everyone else; because the near miss triggers
those habits that prompt them to put down
another bet.
Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that
people become good, others that it is by habit,
and others that it is by instruction. (Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics)
The behaviors that occur unthinkingly are the
evidence of our truest selves. So just as a piece of
land has to be prepared beforehand if it is to
nourish the seed, so the mind of the pupil has to
be prepared in its habits if it is to enjoy and
dislike the right things.
We can choose our habits, once we know how.
Every habit, no matter its complexity, is
malleable.
To modify a habit, you must first decide to
change it.
Once you know a habit exists, you have the
responsibility to change it.
…believing that he had control over himself and
his destiny, that he could become better, that he
had the free will to change.
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free A habit is a formula our brain automatically
will. follows: when I see a cue, I will do a routine to
get a reward.
The will to believe is the most important
ingredient in creating belief in change. One of
the most important methods for creating belief
was habits. Habits, are what allows us to do a
thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it
more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient
practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly
any consciousness at all.

If you believe you can change—if you make it a

habit—the change becomes real.

The real power of habit: the insight that your

habits are what you choose them to be.

The water is habits, the unthinking choices and

invisible decisions that surround us every day—
and which, just by looking at them, become
visible again.

You now know how to redirect the path. You now

have the power to swim.

The problem is that there isn’t one formula for

changing habits. There are thousands.

The framework: identify the routine; experiment

with rewards; isolate the cue; and have a plan.

Routine – the behavior you want to change.

Rewards – satisfy cravings.

Most cravings are obvious in retrospect, but

incredibly hard to see when we are under they
sway.

Test different hypotheses to determine which

craving is driving your routine.

Writing – forces a momentary awareness of

what you are thinking or feeling. Your scribbled
words will trigger a wave of recollection.

Make a list of a few elements you would focus

on.

Friendship cues triggered a habit to please the

questioner.

Identify categories of behaviors ahead of time to

scrutinize on order to see patterns.

Location; time; emotional state; other people;

and immediate preceding action