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

by Charles Duhigg

“Just wait till the baby comes,” Pole said. “We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”

I am typing these notes as I sit near my children, who are now 8 and 5. We’re on vacation in Costa Rica, and they are so far from diapers and Bob the Builder toys that it’s hard to remember the period when I had to buy bottles and assemble cribs. I still shop at Target, though. I just asked my boys if they had anything they wanted to me type in these notes: “My favorite habit is probably to be able to get to sleep really fast - wait, no, that’s not really a habit. Or maybe it is.”

It was Thursday, December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, and she had just finished a long day at Montgomery Fair, the department store where she worked as a seamstress. The bus was crowded and, by law, the first four rows were reserved for white passengers. The area where blacks were allowed to sit, in the back, was already full and so the woman—Rosa Parks—sat in a center row, right behind the white section, where either race could claim a seat.

For a short time, I thought I would spend my career studying and writing about the Civil Rights movement. Instead, I’m writing about kind of the same thing, but in a different way. At the core of this book is a central question: how does change happen? Why do some people change themselves and their communities and the world, while others never shift how they behave? (That said, I still love learning about and writing about civil rights, hence this chapter.)

“Once we do that, the responsibility for spiritual growth is no longer with me, it’s with you. We’ve given you a recipe,” Warren told me. “We don’t have to guide you, because you’re guiding yourself. These habits become a new self-identity, and, at that point, we just need to support you and get out of your way.”

One of the nicest - and most unexpected - outcomes of writing this book is that I’ve gotten a chance to spend time with a number of pastors who have drawn on the text in their ministry. Andrew Stanley in Atlanta and a handful of other pastors have reached out to me - and getting to spend time with those folks, and their communities, has been so meaningful.

The way we habitually think of our surroundings and ourselves create the worlds that each of us inhabit. “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ ” the writer David Foster Wallace told a class of graduating college students in 2005. “And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’

This entire commencement speech by David Foster Wallace is amazing. You can find it here: http://www.metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf

You now know how to redirect that path. You now have the power to swim.

That’s the final word of the book! (Well, except for all the endnotes and citations, which took forever to write and copyedit back when I was working on The Power of Habit.) Thank you so much for reading this with me - I had a lot of fun putting these notes in. If there were any questions I didn’t answer, or if you have any thoughts to share, I would love to hear from you. I’m at charles@charlesduhigg.com. Thanks again, -Charles, Dec. 2016