Top 180 Charles Duhigg Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier, Quintanilla’s drill instructors had told him. 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

154. “Your brain secretly wants that song, because it’s so familiar to everything else you’ve already heard and liked. It just sounds right.” There is evidence that a preference for things that sound “familiar” is a product of our neurology.”

— Charles Duhigg

155. “This workbook is for you to imagine unpleasant situations, and write out a plan for responding,” the manager said. “One of the systems we use is called the LATTE method. We Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred.”

— Charles Duhigg

156. “When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making.”

— Charles Duhigg

157. “When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves “why.”

— Charles Duhigg

158. “Phelps, even at a young age, had a capacity for obsessiveness that made him an ideal athlete. Then again, all elite performers are obsessives.”

— Charles Duhigg

159. “The secret, the alcoholics said, was God.”

— Charles Duhigg

160. “The burst of subconscious virtuousness that comes from first buying butternut squash makes it easier to put a pint of ice cream in the cart later.”

— Charles Duhigg

161. “One survey conducted in 2010 estimated that the average parent spends $6,800 on baby items before a child’s first birthday.7.9.”

— Charles Duhigg

162. “By the 1980s, a theory emerged that became generally accepted: Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say “thank you.”

— Charles Duhigg

163. “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

164. “To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next.”

— Charles Duhigg

165. “So at most companies, an unspoken compact emerges: It’s okay to be ambitious, but if you play too rough, your peers will unite against you. On the other hand, if you focus on boosting your own department, rather than undermining your rival, you’ll probably get taken care of over time.”

— Charles Duhigg

166. “The cooperation of NASCAR – or any other system, it turns out – persists only when everyone believes he has the opportunity to win.”

— Charles Duhigg

167. “Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.”

— Charles Duhigg

168. “Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.15.”

— Charles Duhigg

169. “The basal ganglia was central to recalling patterns and acting on them. The basal ganglia, in other words, stored habits even while the rest of the brain went to sleep.”

— Charles Duhigg

170. “It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.”

— Charles Duhigg

171. “When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real.”

— Charles Duhigg

172. “Studies suggest that this process of experimentation – and failure – is critical in long-term habit change. Smokers often quit and then start smoking again as many as seven times before giving up cigarettes for good. It’s tempting to see those relapses as failures, but what’s really occurring are experiments.”

— Charles Duhigg

173. “One paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.”

— Charles Duhigg

174. “People whose basal ganglia are damaged by injury or disease often become mentally paralyzed.”

— Charles Duhigg

175. “Hearing people describe their emotional lives is important because when we talk about our feelings, we’re describing not just what has happened to us, but why we made certain choices and how we make sense of the world.”

— Charles Duhigg

176. “So, to become a supercommunicator, all we need to do is listen closely to what’s said and unsaid, ask the right questions, recognize and match others’ moods, and make our own feelings easy for others to perceive. Simple, right? Well, no, of course not.”

— Charles Duhigg

177. “The best listeners aren’t just listening,” said Margaret Clark, the Yale psychologist. “They’re triggering emotions by asking questions, expressing their own emotions, doing things that prompt the other person to say something real.”

— Charles Duhigg

178. “To communicate with someone, we must connect with them. When we absorb what someone is saying and they comprehend what we say, it’s because our brains have, to some degree, aligned.”

— Charles Duhigg

179. “The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth? Unless we know what kind of discussion we’re hoping for – and what type of discussion our companions want – we’re at a disadvantage.”

— Charles Duhigg

180. “People want to visit places that satisfy their social needs.”

— Charles Duhigg

181. “John F. Kennedy told students at American University in 1963, five months before he was assassinated. “In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

— Charles Duhigg

182. “If you try to scare people into following Christ’s example, it’s not going to work for too long.”

— Charles Duhigg

183. “Specifically, we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.”

— Charles Duhigg

184. “The rat had internalized how to sprint through the maze to such a degree that it hardly needed to think at all. But that internalization – run straight, hang a left, eat the chocolate – relied upon the basal ganglia, the brain probes indicated.”

— Charles Duhigg

185. “I learned that if you listen for someone’s truth, and you put your truth next to it, you might reach them.”

— Charles Duhigg

186. “Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other. On a very basic level, if someone seems emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as well. If someone is intent on decision making, match that focus. If they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to them.”

— Charles Duhigg

187. “But conserving mental effort is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, such as a predator hiding in the bushes or a speeding car as we pull onto the street. So our basal ganglia have devised a clever system to determine when to let habits take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends.”

— Charles Duhigg

188. “Laughter might seem like a strange place to look for emotional intelligence, but, in fact, it’s an example of a basic truth of emotional communication: What’s important is not just hearing another person’s feelings but showing that we have heard them. Laughter is one way of proving that we hear how someone feels.”

— Charles Duhigg