Top 160 Charles Duhigg Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “People who believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers. This instinct for control is so central to how our brains develop that infants, once they learn to feed themselves, will resist adults’ attempts at control even if submission is more likely to get food into their mouths.”

— Charles Duhigg

102. “Individuals have habits; groups have routines,” wrote the academic Geoffrey Hodgson, who spent a career examining organizational patterns. “Routines are the organizational analogue of habits.”

— Charles Duhigg

103. “Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.”

— Charles Duhigg

104. “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.”

— Charles Duhigg

105. “And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit.”

— Charles Duhigg

106. “O’Neill believed that some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. 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

107. “The reason why we need both stretch goals and SMART goals is that audaciousness, on its own, can be terrifying. It’s often not clear how to start on a stretch goal. And so, for a stretch goal to become more than just an aspiration, we need a disciplined mindset to show us how to turn a far-off objective into a series of realistic short-term aims.”

— Charles Duhigg

108. “Cadets who are successful at West Point arrive at the school armed with habits of mental and physical discipline. Those assets, however, only carry you so far. To succeed, they need a keystone habit that creates a culture – such as a daily gathering of like-minded friends – to help find the strength to overcome obstacles. Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values that, in the heat of a difficult decision or a moment of uncertainty, we might otherwise forget.”

— Charles Duhigg

109. “That’s why they asked each other questions starting with “why.” Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.”

— Charles Duhigg

110. “Habits, he noted, are what allow us to “do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all.” Once we choose who we want to be, people grow “to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.”

— Charles Duhigg

111. “When you learn to force yourself to go to the gym or start your homework or eat a salad instead of a hamburger, part of what’s happening is that you’re changing how you think,” said Todd Heatherton, a researcher at Dartmouth who has worked on willpower studies.5.11 “People get better at regulating their impulses. They learn how to distract themselves from temptations. And once you’ve gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is.”

— Charles Duhigg

112. “By lunchtime, everyone inside the factory had heard the story. The next day, andon cords were pulled more than a dozen times. The next week, more than two dozen times. A month later, the plant was averaging nearly a hundred pulls a day. The.”

— Charles Duhigg

113. “In an interview, the nurse manager explains that a ‘certain level of error will occur’ so a ‘nonpunitive environment’ is essential to deal with this error productively,” Edmondson wrote. “There is an unspoken rule here to help each other and check each other,” a nurse told Edmondson’s assistant. “People feel more willing to admit to errors here, because the nurse manager goes to bat for you.”

— Charles Duhigg

114. “This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.”

— Charles Duhigg

115. “When people have a willpower failure, it’s because they haven’t anticipated a situation that’s going to come along.”

— Charles Duhigg

116. “When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons – if they feel like it’s a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else – it’s much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster. In both cases, people ignored the cookies. But when the students were treated like cogs, rather than people, it took a lot more willpower.”

— Charles Duhigg

117. “That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.”

— Charles Duhigg

118. “The main problem with Sentinel, Fulgham believed, was that the bureau – like many big organizations – had tried to plan everything in advance. But creating great software requires flexibility. Problems pop up unexpectedly and breakthroughs are unpredictable.”

— Charles Duhigg

119. “What studies say the number one best way to start an exercise habit is to give yourself a reward that you genuinely enjoy.”

— Charles Duhigg

120. “The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.”

— Charles Duhigg

121. “Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react.”

— Charles Duhigg

122. “By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These.”

— Charles Duhigg

123. “When filmmakers get stuck at Disney, it’s referred to as spinning. “Spinning occurs because you’re in a rut and can’t see your project from different perspectives anymore,” said Ed Catmull.”

— Charles Duhigg

124. “Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.”

— Charles Duhigg

125. “Determined and focused people tend to work harder and get tasks done more promptly. They stay married longer and have deeper networks of friends. They often have higher-paying jobs. But this questionnaire is not intended to test personal organization. Rather, it’s designed to measure a personality.”

— Charles Duhigg

126. “Or consider “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down, or almost any song by the group Maroon 5. Those bands are so featureless that critics and listeners created a new music category – “bath rock” – to describe their tepid sounds.”

— Charles Duhigg

127. “Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain.”

— Charles Duhigg

128. “The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.”

— Charles Duhigg

129. “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

130. “Why does my brain decide that one memory is more important than another?”

— Charles Duhigg

131. “That psychology was grounded in two basic rules: First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards.”

— Charles Duhigg

132. “Every choice we make in life is an experiment.”

— Charles Duhigg

133. “The waste from power plants is essentially what is left over when you burn coal. And as we all know, coal is a relatively dirty mineral.”

— Charles Duhigg

134. “When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly.”

— Charles Duhigg

135. “Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.”

— Charles Duhigg

136. “AA succeeds because it helps alcoholics use the same cues, and get the same reward, but it shifts the routine.”

— Charles Duhigg

137. “Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that no one can mount a coup.”

— Charles Duhigg

138. “At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit: willpower. Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.”

— Charles Duhigg

139. “Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.”

— Charles Duhigg

140. “It’s okay to be ambitious, but if you play too rough, your peers will unite against you.”

— Charles Duhigg

141. “Julia’s study group at Yale, for instance, felt draining because the norms – the tussles over leadership, the pressure to constantly demonstrate expertise, the tendency to critique – had put her on guard. In contrast, the norms of her case competition team – enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, withholding criticisms, encouraging people to take a leadership role or hang back as they wanted – allowed everyone to be friendly and unconstrained. Coordination was easy.”

— Charles Duhigg

142. “Michaels himself, still the show’s executive producer, says the reason why Saturday Night Live has succeeded is because he works hard to force people to become a team. The secret to making that happen, he says, is giving everyone a voice and finding people willing to be sensitive enough to listen to one another.”

— Charles Duhigg

143. “The problem with these tactics, however, is that they treat each shopper exactly the same. They’re fairly primitive, one-size-fits-all solutions for triggering buying habits.”

— Charles Duhigg

144. “Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.”

— Charles Duhigg

145. “Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life. People whose basal ganglia are damaged by injury or disease often become mentally paralyzed. They have trouble performing basic activities, such as opening a door or deciding what to eat.”

— Charles Duhigg

146. “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.”

— Charles Duhigg

147. “Eventually we figured out it was best to concentrate on these tiny moments of success and build them into mental triggers. We worked them into a routine. There’s a series of things we do before every race that are designed to give Michael a sense of building victory.”

— Charles Duhigg

148. “Most commitment companies avoided layoffs unless there was no other alternative. They invested heavily in training. There were higher levels of teamwork and psychological safety. Commitment companies might not have had lavish cafeterias, but they offered generous maternity leaves, daycare programs, and work-from-home options.”

— Charles Duhigg

149. “We all have a natural proclivity to be optimistic, to ignore our mistakes and forget others’ tiny errors. But making good predictions relies on realistic assumptions, and those are based on our experiences. If we pay attention only to good news, we’re handicapping ourselves.”

— Charles Duhigg

150. “Alcoholics crave a drink because it offers escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release.”

— Charles Duhigg