Switch Quotes

“new habits can clear the Path.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“By preloading a decision, they created an instant habit.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“what action triggers do is create an “instant habit.” Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s exactly what action triggers are setting up.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Action triggers simply have to be specific enough and visible enough to interrupt people’s normal stream of consciousness. A trigger to “praise your employees when they do something great” is too vague to be useful.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“action triggers have unexpected value. Gollwitzer says that when people predecide, they “pass the control of their behavior on to the environment.” Gollwitzer says that action triggers “protect goals from tempting distractions, bad habits, or competing goals.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“forming a habit isn’t all environmental—it’s also mental.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“The first thing to realize is that even small environmental tweaks can make a difference”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“To change yourself or other people, you’ve got to change habits,”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“In this chapter, we’ve seen that what looks like a “character problem” is often correctible when you change the environment.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“but this experiment made me think about how I’m impacting others.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Tweaking the environment is about making the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. And no matter what your role is, you’ve got some control over the situation.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“We are frequently blind to the power of situations.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“to make changes stick, we’ve got to think about shaping the Path.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“In times of change, we need to remind ourselves and others, again and again, of certain basic truths: Our brains and our abilities are like muscles. They can be strengthened with practice.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Pain now for a payoff later.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“They are creating the expectation of failure. They are telling team members not to trust that initial flush of good feeling at the beginning of the project, because what comes next is hardship and toil and frustration. Yet, strangely enough, when they deliver this warning, it comes across as optimistic.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“The project often feels like a failure in the middle. But if the team persists through this valley of angst and doubt, it eventually emerges with a growing sense of momentum. Team members begin to test out their new designs, and they realize the improvements they’ve made, and they keep tweaking the design to make it better. And they come to realize, we’ve cracked this problem. That’s when the team reaches the peak of confidence.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“At this “insight” stage, it’s easy to get depressed, because insight doesn’t always strike immediately.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“to create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“the growth mindset can be taught and that it can change lives.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Everything is hard before it is easy,”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“growth mindset compliment praises effort rather than natural skill:”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“The answer may sound strange: You need to create the expectation of failure—not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“How do you keep the Elephant motivated when it faces a long, treacherous road?”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“the failure will trigger the “flight” instinct,”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Top management challenged employees to be on the lookout for potential innovations—”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Identity is going to play a role in nearly every change situation.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone’s identity is likely doomed to failure. (That’s why it’s so clumsy when people instinctively reach for “incentives” to change other people’s behavior.)”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard