Top 160 Charles Duhigg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”

— Charles Duhigg

2. “This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.”

— Charles Duhigg

3. “The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.”

— Charles Duhigg

4. “If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real.”

— Charles Duhigg

5. “The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.”

— Charles Duhigg

6. “An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.”

— Charles Duhigg

7. “Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom – and the responsibility – to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work.”

— Charles Duhigg

8. “For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.”

— Charles Duhigg

9. “Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the orther team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”

— Charles Duhigg

10. “Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.”

— Charles Duhigg

11. “Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

— Charles Duhigg

12. “Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.”

— Charles Duhigg

13. “Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.”

— Charles Duhigg

14. “Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.”

— Charles Duhigg

15. “Keystone habits offer what is known within academic literature as “small wins.” They help other habits to flourish by creating new structures, and they establish cultures where change becomes contagious.”

— Charles Duhigg

16. “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.”

— Charles Duhigg

17. “The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.”

— Charles Duhigg

18. “If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause widespread shifts.”

— Charles Duhigg

19. “Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.”

— Charles Duhigg

20. “When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit – unless you find new routines – the pattern will unfold automatically.”

— Charles Duhigg

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

— Charles Duhigg

22. “If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.”

— Charles Duhigg

23. “Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.”

— Charles Duhigg

24. “Simply giving employees a sense of agency- a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority – can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.”

— Charles Duhigg

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

— Charles Duhigg

26. “Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.”

— Charles Duhigg

27. “There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.”

— Charles Duhigg

28. “We’re not in the coffee business serving people,” Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks, told me. “We’re in the people business serving coffee.”

— Charles Duhigg

29. “If you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you right.”

— Charles Duhigg

30. “Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.”

— Charles Duhigg

31. “Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.”

— Charles Duhigg

32. “Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.”

— Charles Duhigg

33. “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. Everything we know about habits, from neurologists studying amnesiacs and organizational experts remaking companies, is that any of them can be changed, if you understand how they function. Hundreds of habits influence our days –.”

— Charles Duhigg

34. “Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “creating mental models.”26 Understanding how people build mental models has become one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology.27 All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not. But.”

— Charles Duhigg

35. “There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.”

— Charles Duhigg

36. “Changing any habit requires determination.”

— Charles Duhigg

37. “If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs – and becomes automatic – it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable.”

— Charles Duhigg

38. “Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.”

— Charles Duhigg

39. “This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.”

— Charles Duhigg

40. “When other companies discovered what Hopkins was really selling, they started imitating him. Within a few decades, almost every toothpaste contained oils and chemicals that caused gums to tingle. Soon, Pepsodent started getting outsold. Even today, almost all toothpastes contain additives with the sole job of making your mouth tingle after you brush.”

— Charles Duhigg

41. “The same process that makes AA so effective – the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe – happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.”

— Charles Duhigg

42. “When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more. They are, on average, more confident and overcome setbacks faster.”

— Charles Duhigg

43. “Reform is usually possible only once a sense of crisis takes hold... In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.”

— Charles Duhigg

44. “Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.”

— Charles Duhigg

45. “When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit – unless you find new routines – the pattern will unfold automatically. However, simply understanding how habits work – learning the structure of the habit loop – makes them easier to control. Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.”

— Charles Duhigg

46. “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.”

— Charles Duhigg

47. “To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge.”

— Charles Duhigg

48. “Destructive organizational habits can be found within hundreds of industries and at thousands of firms. And almost always, they are the products of thoughtlessness, of leaders who avoid thinking about the culture and so let it develop without guidance. 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.”

— Charles Duhigg

49. “Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals. That.”

— Charles Duhigg

50. “Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world, we’re not blinded by its glare.”

— Charles Duhigg