The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future:

Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain,

Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

“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.”

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.

Water, he said, is the most apt analogy for how a habit works. Water “hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes,

when it flows again, the path traced by itself before.” You now know how to redirect that path. You now have the power to swim.

“Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”

a habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD.