More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The same lessons hold true at...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In comparison to McDonald's, the original franchise, but they are both wildly successful
“People want to be in control of their lives.”
There are no organizations without institutional habits. There are only places where they are deliberately designed, and places where they are created without forethought, so they often grow from rivalries or fear. But sometimes, even destructive
habits can be transformed by leaders who know how to seize the right opportunities. Sometimes, in the heat of a crisis, the right habits emerge.
Instead, firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions.
This is the common perception, but I have never witnessed it.
None of these routines, in other words, were arbitrary. Each was designed for a reason. The Underground was so vast and complicated that it could operate smoothly only if truces smoothed over potential obstacles.
No one person, department, or baron had ultimate responsibility for passengers’ safety.
During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power.
Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisis—or create the perception of crisis—and cultivate the sense that something must change,
The company will guess what you habitually buy, and then try to convince you to get it at Target. The firm has the capacity to personalize the ads and coupons it sends to every customer, even though you’ll probably never realize you’ve received a different flyer in the mail than your neighbors.
question: Why do some people suddenly change their shopping routines?
theory: People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event.
habits. If exhausted moms and sleep-deprived dads start purchasing baby formula and diapers at Target, they’ll start buying their groceries, cleaning supplies, towels, underwear, and—well, the sky’s the limit—from Target as well. Because it’s easy. To a new parent, easy matters most of all.
Disney estimates the North American new baby market is worth $36.3 billion a year.7.10
Target’s goal was to start marketing to parents before the baby arrived—which is why Andrew Pole’s colleagues approached him that day to ask about building a pregnancy-prediction algorithm.
Just as the scientists at MIT discovered that behavioral habits prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by the endless decisions we would otherwise have to make each day, listening habits exist because,
without them, it would be impossible to determine if we should concentrate on our child’s voice, the coach’s whistle, or the noise from a busy street during a Saturday soccer game.
ignored. That’s why songs that sound “familiar”—even if you’ve never heard them before—are sticky. Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard.
“Her character represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting a dozen or so sociopaths.”8.9
Lo fuckin l
Parks’s friends, in contrast, spanned Montgomery’s social and economic hierarchies. She had what sociologists call “strong ties”—firsthand relationships—with dozens of groups throughout Montgomery that didn’t usually come into contact with one another. “This was absolutely key,” Branch said. “Rosa Parks transcended the social stratifications of the black community and Montgomery as a whole.
While members of one or two cliques may be efficiently recruited, the problem is that, without weak ties, any momentum generated in this way does not spread beyond the clique.
Warren’s sermons, from the start, focused on practical topics, with titles such as “How to Handle Discouragement,” “How to Feel Good About Yourself,” “How to Raise Healthy Families,” and “How to Survive Under Stress.”8.27 His lessons were easy to understand, focused on real, daily problems, and could be applied as soon as parishioners left church.
Warren’s goal, however, wasn’t just to help people make new friends. It was to build a community of the faithful, to encourage people to accept the lessons of Christ, and to make faith a focus of their lives. His
small groups had created tight bonds, but without leadership, they weren’t much more than a coffee circle. They weren’t fulfilling his religious expectations.
parishioners new habits. “If you want to have Christ-like character, then you just develop the habits that Christ had,”
promising to adhere to three habits:
Power of 3
movements: 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.
“People went to see how other people were handling it,”
converted participants from followers into self-directing leaders.
“This desperation starts once you realize how much you’ve lost, and then you feel like you can’t stop because you’ve got to win it back,”
Gamblers fallacy
casino. Gaming companies are well aware of this tendency, of course, which is why in the past decades, slot machines have been reprogrammed to deliver a more constant supply of near wins.3
Habits are not as simple as they appear. As I’ve tried to demonstrate throughout this book, habits—even once they are rooted in our minds—aren’t destiny. We can choose our habits, once we know how.
Hundreds of habits influence our days—they guide how we get dressed in the morning, talk to our kids, and fall asleep at night; they impact what we eat for lunch, how we do business, and whether we exercise or have a beer after work. Each of them has a different cue and offers a unique reward. Some are simple and others are complex, drawing upon emotional triggers and offering subtle neurochemical prizes. But every habit, no matter its complexity, is malleable.
it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits’ routines, and find alternatives.
If you believe you can change—if
you make it a habit—the change becomes real.
The Principles of Psychology
convenient excuse?
The reason why it’s important to write down three things—even if they are meaningless words—is twofold. First, it forces a momentary awareness of what you are thinking or feeling.
And why the fifteen-minute alarm? Because the point of these tests is to determine the reward you’re craving. If, fifteen minutes after eating a donut, you still feel an urge to get up and go to the cafeteria, then your habit isn’t motivated by a sugar craving. If, after gossiping at a colleague’s desk, you still want a cookie, then the need for human contact isn’t what’s driving your behavior.
Location Time Emotional state Other people Immediately preceding action
Put another way, a habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD.
