Top 160 Charles Duhigg Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a team of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012.”

— Charles Duhigg

52. “No one can predict tomorrow with absolute confidence. But the mistake some people make is trying to avoid making any predictions because their thirst for certainty is so strong and their fear of doubt too overwhelming. If.”

— Charles Duhigg

53. “Exercise spills over,” said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. “There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.”

— Charles Duhigg

54. “The basal ganglia, in other words, stored habits even while the rest of the brain went to sleep.”

— Charles Duhigg

55. “This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that we’re not really aware they exist, so we’re often blind to their influence. But as we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning.”

— Charles Duhigg

56. “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,” William James wrote in 1892.2.”

— Charles Duhigg

57. “Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.”

— Charles Duhigg

58. “Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. It’s a process of learning how to succeed with less stress and struggle. It.”

— Charles Duhigg

59. “You can’t delegate thinking,” de Crespigny told me. “Computers fail, checklists fail, everything can fail. But people can’t. We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. As long as you’re thinking, you’re halfway home.”

— Charles Duhigg

60. “There’s a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.”

— Charles Duhigg

61. “A company with dysfunctional habits can’t turn around simply because a leader orders it. Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisis – or create the perception of crisis – and cultivate the sense that something must change, until everyone is finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with each day.”

— Charles Duhigg

62. “Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often.”

— Charles Duhigg

63. “The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.”

— Charles Duhigg

64. “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:.”

— Charles Duhigg

65. “Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier. It’s as true now as it was almost a century ago. Every night, millions of people scrub their teeth in order to get a tingling feeling; every morning, millions put on their jogging shoes to capture an endorphin rush they’ve learned to crave.”

— Charles Duhigg

66. “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

67. “The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.”

— Charles Duhigg

68. “I think I’m smart, and I know I was a good mom. But there wasn’t a lot I could point to and say, that’s why I’m special.”

— Charles Duhigg

69. “As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives – in the gym, or a money management program – that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.”

— Charles Duhigg

70. “The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things.”

— Charles Duhigg

71. “The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.”2.”

— Charles Duhigg

72. “The paradox of learning how to make better decisions is that it requires developing a comfort with doubt. There.”

— Charles Duhigg

73. “Want to exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up, and a reward, such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that smoothie, or about the endorphin rush you’ll feel. Allow yourself to anticipate the reward. Eventually, that craving will make it easier to push through the gym doors every day.”

— Charles Duhigg

74. “If you choose pressure-release moments ahead of time – if, in other words, you plan for failure, and then plan for recovery – you’re more likely to snap back faster.”

— Charles Duhigg

75. “But every habit, no matter its complexity, is malleable. The most addicted alcoholics can become sober. The most dysfunctional companies can transform themselves. A high school dropout can become a successful manager. However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits’ routines, and find alternatives.”

— Charles Duhigg

76. “Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decides to face the same direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants’ sense of self.”

— Charles Duhigg

77. “That’s why signing kids up for piano lessons or sports is so important. It has nothing to do with creating a good musician or a five-year-old soccer star,” said Heatherton. “When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength. A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.”

— Charles Duhigg

78. “America is the Saudi Arabia of coal.”

— Charles Duhigg

79. “At some point, if you’re changing a really deep-seated behavior, you’re going to have a moment of weakness.”

— Charles Duhigg

80. “Sometimes, one priority – or one department or one person or one goal – needs to overshadow everything else, though it might be unpopular or threaten the balance of power that keeps trains running on time. Sometimes, a truce can create dangers that outweigh any peace.”

— Charles Duhigg

81. “A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances.”

— Charles Duhigg

82. “You don’t need to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.”

— Charles Duhigg

83. “He had spoken to me before he went onstage. “There’s a myth we all carry inside our head,” Bock said. “We think we need superstars. But that’s not what our research found. You can take a team of average performers, and if you teach them to interact the right way, they’ll do things no superstar could ever accomplish.”

— Charles Duhigg

84. “The problem with many to-do lists is that when we write down a series of short-term objectives, we are, in effect, allowing our brains to seize on the sense of satisfaction that each task will deliver. We are encouraging our need for closure and our tendency to freeze on a goal without asking if it’s the right aim.”

— Charles Duhigg

85. “Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To.”

— Charles Duhigg

86. “We’re cracking the code on how to keep people at the gym,” Lazarus told me. “People want to visit places that satisfy their social needs. Getting people to exercise in groups makes it more likely they’ll stick with a workout. You can change the health of the nation this way.”

— Charles Duhigg

87. “At the core of why those habits were so effective, why they acted as keystone habits, was something known within academic literature as a “small win.” Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes. A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence.”

— Charles Duhigg

88. “But to change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.”

— Charles Duhigg

89. “Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decision-making authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored, that their mistakes won’t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back. The.”

— Charles Duhigg

90. “These are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.”

— Charles Duhigg

91. “No matter how strong our willpower, we’re guaranteed to fall back into our old ways once in a while. But if we plan for those relapses – if we take steps to make sure those slips don’t become a habit – it’s easier to get back on track.”

— Charles Duhigg

92. “Asking patients to describe what triggers their habitual behavior is called awareness training, and like AA’s insistence on forcing alcoholics to recognize their cues, it’s the first step in habit reversal training. The tension that Mandy felt in her nails cued her nail biting habit.”

— Charles Duhigg

93. “One particularly dramatic demonstration of how alcoholics’ cues and rewards can be transferred to new routines occurred in 2007, when Mueller, the German neurologist, and his colleagues at the University of Magdeburg implanted small electrical devices inside the brains of five alcoholics who had repeatedly tried to give up booze.3.21 The alcoholics in the study had each spent at least six months in rehab without success. One of them had been through detox more than sixty times.”

— Charles Duhigg

94. “He got fired because he didn’t report the incident, and so no one else had the opportunity to learn from it. Not sharing an opportunity to learn is a cardinal sin.” Cultures.”

— Charles Duhigg

95. “Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University, told me. “But when people say things like ‘I sometimes write down easy items I can cross off right away, because it makes me feel good,’ that’s exactly the wrong way to create a to-do list. That signals you’re using it for mood repair, rather than to become productive.” The.”

— Charles Duhigg

96. “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.”

— Charles Duhigg

97. “Sleepwalking is an odd outgrowth of a normal aspect of how our brains work while we slumber. Most of the time, as our bodies move in and out of different phases of rest, our most primitive neurological structure – the brain stem – paralyzes.”

— Charles Duhigg

98. “No one was pulling andon cords or making suggestions because no one was eager to cost the factory $15,000 a minute. No one was sure it wouldn’t cost them their job. A.”

— Charles Duhigg

99. “People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades.”

— Charles Duhigg

100. “But we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible.”

— Charles Duhigg