The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (with Charles Duhigg)

Well, I am honored to have Charles Duhigg on the show. Charles is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which has spent over three years on the bestseller lists and has been translated into a whopping 40 languages. He’s also the author of the book, smarter, faster, better. Another bestseller and Supercommunicators is his latest book, which has been published this year. Charles writes for the New Yorker magazine and is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School. He has been a frequent contributor on CNBC, this American Life, NPR, PBS’s, NewsHour and Frontline. I’m honored to have you on the show. Charles, welcome.

Thanks for having me on.

You know, I was just telling you the story before we started recording. I travel a heck of a lot, and every time I’m at an airport, I pop into you know, Hudson or whatever the newsstand stores are, and your book, The Power of Habit is always there. It’s unmistakable and I can’t seem to escape it <laugh>. So, congratulations on the success.

That’s good. That’s good. Thank you so much. I’m, I’m glad to hear that we we’re going for the same thing with Super communicators. That’s which came out, I guess about two months ago now. If, if we can follow you around with multiple books, and I think we’re in good shape, it’s <laugh>, it shows that something’s working

Well, your, your books are amazing, so I’m gonna definitely recommend them here and now to our audience, you know, we have a large audience, it’s great. For those that don’t know, we’re gonna do two back to back interviews with Charles. So we’re gonna talk about super communicators on the next podcast episode, but for today, we’re gonna talk about essentially the power of habit and why we do what we do in life and business, and why that’s so important, especially for us as real estate investors and entrepreneurs. You know, it’s, it’s important for us to maximize our productivity and output and focus on the things that are the highest priorities. So let’s just quickly begin, what inspired you to write this book? The Power of Habit, because it’s not often you see this.

Yeah. Most of my best books come from me having a problem that I wanna solve. And, and I think, you know, I wrote Power of Habit when, during this time in my life when I had, you know, was doing very well successfully and, and was married and had kids and everything was going pretty well, but I couldn’t get myself to wake up in the morning and go running, and I couldn’t get myself to eat healthily. And I thought to myself, if I’m so smart, like why is it so hard for me to do these things that are supposed to be simple things? And the answer, of course, is because they were habits. I had bad habits. And, and so I wanted to call up researchers and ask them, what do we know about the science of habit formation? How do, how do we change habits? How do we build them? And one of the nice things about being a reporter is that if you call folks and you say, I’m working on an article or a book, they’re much more likely to talk to you. So, so I started calling experts to ask them to solve my problems, and that’s where the book came out of.

Yeah. Well that’s, that’s a great starting point. So, I mean, if you could summarize the main idea of the book, what would that takeaway be for the reader now?

So I think that the big idea here is we tend to think of a habit as being one thing, right? We tend to think of it as this behavior, but actually what we know is that every habit has three components. There’s a cue, which is like a trigger for an automatic behavior to start. And then there’s the routine and, and that’s the behavior, right? That’s the thing we usually focus on. But then next, there’s a reward. Every habit in your life delivers a reward to you, whether you’re aware of it or not. And what’s interesting is about 40 to 45% of what we do every day is a habit. We might think of it as a decision, it might feel like a decision, but it’s actually a habit. And we get, and we’re, and that cue in that reward is shaping that behavior every single time.

So when you get in the habit of backing your car out of your driveway, when you make it safely into the street, there’s a little reward sensation in your brain that goes off. You might not notice it and you might not pay any attention, but that reward sensation is there. And what we know is that this q routine reward, this is what’s been known within psychology as the habit loop. And oftentimes we wanna focus on the behavior, we wanna focus on the routine, but if instead we focus on the cue and the reward, then we get these levers for changing our behaviors much faster and much more effectively than just trying to get ourselves to stop smoking or to eat, eat a salad rather than a sandwich every day.

Right. Well, I mean, here’s the fundamental building block. How do you define a habit? Like people think of habits as different things. Some people might think of a habit as something that I have to do or I force myself to do, and other people might be thinking of a habit as something that, oh, I just don’t think about it. I’m, I’m just in this routine and, and it’s a repetitive thing. I, I, it doesn’t really matter.

So a habit is a choice that you made at some point. Yeah. Where you stop making that choice, but you continue acting on it. Right? So brushing your teeth is a great example. When you were a kid, you had to choose to brush your teeth. Your parents harassed you to brush your teeth, right? I have two teenagers, I harass them all the time. Brush, brush your teeth. Brushing your teeth is not a, is not an inborn characteristic or habit of ours. And so it, we as kids and as young adults, we choose to brush your teeth. And then at some point, at some point it just becomes automatic, right? You step out of the shower and you actually don’t feel clean until you have that minty feeling in your mouth. Or it’s hard for you to go to bed unless you’ve brushed your teeth first.

So you made that decision, you’re not really making a decision anymore. You’re kind of going on autopilot, you’re doing it almost unthinkingly. And what’s interesting is that we know that when you do brush your teeth, or when you tie your shoes, when you put on your pants, there are these patterns that you fall into that you’re not aware of. You, you almost always will tie your shoes in the same order, either left right, or right left. When you step into pants, you’ll step either left or right first. When you go to certain restaurants that you go to all the time, you’ll almost automatically look for those items on the menu that you always look at. Yeah. There’s actually a part of our brain known as the basal ganglia that exists in every single mammal’s head. And it exists to make habits because without habits we can’t evolve.

t’s a huge stumbling block for a species if they can’t take some behaviors and make them automatic, because that way we don’t have to think about walking every single time we stand up. We don’t have to decide whether to eat the rock or the apple when we see them on the path. We let that stuff happen automatically. And as a result, we have the mental bandwidth to think about other things like inventing fire or spears or aircraft carriers. So habits are really, really important. And it starts as a decision and then it becomes automatic.

So you’re making me think of two questions here. You know, you use toothpaste and brushing your teeth as an example of a habit, right? To me, what you described is the routine part of the habit loop, but what is the cue? And more importantly, what is the reward? Because I don’t find brushing my teeth or tying my shoes as rewarding in any way, shape, or form, other than I’m not gonna trip and fall, you know, stepping on my shoelace.

Well, it’s interesting, right? There’s actually in one of the chapters, there’s a whole story about the invention of basically the toothbrushing habit in America. Yeah. And you’re right. So, so what’s the q? So for most of us, the q all, all cues fall into one of five categories. It’s usually a certain emotion. It’s the presence of certain other people. It’s a a it’s a time of day or a certain place or a proceeding behavior that’s become ritualized. So for most of us, probably brushing our teeth, the cue is either a time of day or a proceeding behavior that’s become ritualized, right? You probably crave brushing your teeth in the morning and in the evening right after you wake up and before you go to bed. For me, it’s after I get out of a shower. If I get out of a shower, I don’t really actually feel clean until my mouth feels clean.

Even if, even if I brush my teeth, like, you know, two hours ago if I take a shower, I need to brush them again just to feel clean. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So that’s the cue. And the cue is different for everyone, but they fall into one of those five categories. Now what’s the reward? Well, this is actually really interesting. So, toothpaste existed for a long time before it became popular, and people would try and sell it, and they would, they would, you know, talk about how good it was at cleaning your teeth. And they would make it all these like, interesting flavors and it just never took off. And then this one guy named Claude Hopkins, he’s the man who basically invented Pepin. He decides almost through a fluke to put some, he wanted to create a mint flavored toothpaste. And so he put this oil in it.

And this oil, in addition to tasting like mint, it also caused people’s gums to tingle. Right? We all know that feeling, you brush your teeth and you’re, it, you’re, it’s, it’s actually an abrasive, it’s something that irritates your gums, right? And what he found is that that became a reward for people. That people began to crave that feeling. They associated that sense of tingling with cleanliness. And so they began to crave that. Now, when you brush your teeth, you’re not aware of this, but there is something that causes you to feel a sense of reward. Yeah. And it doesn’t feel like a reward, like eating a piece of chocolate, right? Or going to Disneyland. But within your brain, there is a reward sensation that emerges and it’s probably tied to that tingling on your gums or to the, the suds that that build up. Yeah. Shampoo’s another great example of this Shampoo to work. Shampoo does not need to create suds, it’s just a soap. There’s no suds element of it. But shampoo makers know that if they add a chemical that causes suds to form, when you shampoo your hair, then people feel more of a sense of reward. Yeah. For washing their hair. They believe that the shampoo is working.

That is so true.

These are the rewards that people give us. That is so true. Because whenever I use a soap, whether it’s a bar soap or shampoo, or body soap, whatever they call that, if it doesn’t lather and foam Yeah. I feel like it’s a dud. I feel it’s like useless. Like it’s not working, it’s not doing anything.

And, and actually it is, right? Like pure soap, which is basically lie and a couple of other ingredients does not lather. It cleans really, really well, but it doesn’t lather. Huh? But so they add chemicals to make it lather because we’ve associated come to associate that reward with effective cleaning.

Yeah interesting. So how are habits formed? Because, you know, we, we all think about habits, we talk about habits, you know, there’s obviously factors that contribute to their formation, but consciously speaking, you know, how are these habits formed?

Well, our brain, as I mentioned, kind of does it automatically, right? Our brain will try and turn anything into a habit that it can, that’s the role of the basal ganglia is to try and save as much cognitive energy as possible. But if we wanna create a habit, let’s say we wanna start a habit for running, for instance. So there was actually a big experiment that was done by a German healthcare plan where they took a, a bunch of people and about a thousand people into a room, and they gave them this like 20 minute lecture about the importance of exercise. And then they keep about a third of them behind and they excuse everyone else. And for that third that stayed behind, they gave them an additional 10 minute lecture. And they said, okay, look, here’s what we want you to do. We want you to choose a cue right now.

Choose a cue for exercising. Like put your running shoes next to your bed so you see them when you wake up first thing in the morning, or, or you know, contact a friend who you’re gonna meet at the gym every Wednesday night. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then after you exercise, we want you to give yourself a small piece of chocolate right away, like immediately when you’re done. Now, most of us, when we exercise, we exercise and then we wait like 45 minutes before we eat something sweet or chocolate. ’cause We like to pretend like they’re not related to each other, right? But what the researchers were saying is, if you give yourself a reward right away, this behavior is gonna become more and more automatic. So six months later they tracked down everyone who had been in that room, the 700 people who had gotten just the normal lecture.

About 18% of them are exercising, which is what you’d see with any population. The 300 people who had gotten the additional just 10 minute lecture, about 29% of them are exercising. And the reason why is because they had deliberately built these cues and these rewards to help encourage their brain to make that behavior into a habit. Right? The thing about a habit is that our brain actually turns off when we’re in the grip of a habit, right? We don’t have to think about walking down the street, right? That’s why when you say, I’m gonna have a salad for lunch, and then you walk into the cafeteria and you get the same unhealthy sandwich you get every single day, it’s almost like you’re not even thinking about it like you’re on autopilot. The goal is to be able to change our bad habits into things that are healthier. And when we want to create new healthy habits like exercising, the goal is to make it so that it does feel automatic. It’s not something we have to choose to do, but something that we just do. Almost thoughtlessly.

Alright, now you have me deep thinking about this. So what is more important, the cue or the reward? ’cause The routine takes care of itself if you have the other two pieces in place.

Yeah, I mean, they’re equally important because, you know, a habit has three components. It’s like asking like, which part of the stool is most important? Which leg can I get rid of? <Laugh>, I can’t get rid of any of them. Right? You’re gonna fall over. Right? So the cue and the reward are equally important. They’re different, but they’re equally important.

Hmm. Okay. Well then let me change my question. Lemme throw this at you. If you’re trying to form a new habit, I, you know, obviously I, and ideally a good habit, not a bad habit, is it more important to focus on establishing a cue or a reward or maybe one of those first?

Both. You can’t build a stool and only put two legs on it, right? <Laugh>. Okay. Like, like so you, you need to think about the cue and the reward. If, if you, if you establish a cue and you’re not rewarding yourself for it, it’s not gonna become a habit. Right? If you have a great reward, but there’s no cue, then the behavior’s never gonna happen. So you have to have both of them.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Alright. So let’s just say we have a habit, good or bad. How does one go about breaking that habit?

Well, it, there’s something important to recognize, which is there’s this, this phrase breaking a habit, right? Yeah. And that’s actually misleading because if you have a habit you want to get rid of, you wanna change, instead of thinking about extinguishing that habit, you should think about changing the habit. Once that q routine reward, once the neurology associated with that is imprinted in our brains, it never goes away, right? There’s a woman named Dr. Ann grad at MIT, who’s done thousands and thousands of, of experiments with mice where she creates habits in their brains around completing certain mazes. Then she’ll take that mouse away from the maze for like six months a year. When she drops that mouse back in the maze, the habit appears immediately, it comes right back because it’s ingrained into our neurology. And the same thing is true of us. So, through willpower, you can try and extinguish a habit, right?

I can say, oh, I’ve been smoking for 10 years tomorrow, I’m never gonna smoke again. And, and if you have enough willpower that’ll work for a while, but then it’s some point something’s gonna happen, right? Your mother-in-law’s gonna come into town, you’re gonna have a bad day at work. All your willpower muscle is gonna be used up on something else, and you’re gonna fall back into that habit. So a much better way of thinking about this is not breaking a habit, but changing a habit. The way that we change a habit is we diagnose the cue and the reward that are, that are pushing that, that habit, and then we change the routine to something that corresponds to that old cue and to something that delivers something similar to that old reward. Right? So, for instance, take smoking many people when they smoke, it becomes a habitual activity.

And in fact, it smoking is essentially a, a habit dysfunction a hundred hours after your last cigarette. The nicotine is out of your blood system. You’re no longer addicted to nicotine. However, we all know people who crave a cigarette with their morning coffee two or three or five years after they quit smoking. If you’re craving something five years, that’s not because of an addiction. That’s because of a habit dysfunction. And in fact, many addictions are diagnosed in within the psychology community as, as habit dysfunctions. But so what happens when people smoke? Okay, so I smoke and I always have a cigarette in the morning with my coffee, right? So my cue is a time of day. It’s probably something that like, is a little bit ritualized about having that coffee, the smell of the coffee, the taste of the coffee. It makes you crave a cigarette.

What is the reward that the cigarette delivers? Well, it could be that the cigarette delivers a burst of energy. ’cause We know that that nicotine does that. It could also be that it’s just a nice way for me to like delay work. That I know that as long as I wait long enough to smoke the cigarette that, that I’m giving myself ready to get ready for work. It could be that I have a cigarette in the afternoon, not necessarily because I am craving the boost of energy that it provides, but because it’s a, it’s a way for me to get up from my chair, spend 10 minutes outside socializing with other people. So if I’ve decided that the, the reward for my cigarette habit is not necessarily the burst of energy, it’s, it’s this socialization with other people, then I can create a new habit loop, right?

Two o’clock in the afternoon, I get up from my chair and instead of going and having a cigarette and chatting with people, I walk over to someone’s desk and I chat with them for 10 minutes right In the morning. If it’s, if it’s a, you know, maybe it’s that burst of energy that comes from the cigarette, that’s the reward that I’ve diagnosed, is pushing this habit. If that’s what it is, then in the morning, instead of having one cup of coffee, I can have two cups of coffee, right? Because I need to deliver some reward that is similar to the reward that was delivered by the old behavior. It’s really just the habit loop sort of stays the same. It’s just that you’re substituting the routine for something a little bit healthier.

Habits are so much more understandable, and I can see how you can modify habits when you break it down into that, those three components, those three stool legs, especially the cue and the reward part of it. It’s just a different framework and lens to look at habits through. So in, in your book, you talk about keystone habits. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, what exactly is a keystone habit and why is it even important?

Yeah. So some habits, when they change, it sets off a chain reaction that changes other patterns in our lives as well, right? And, and people know this from their own experience. If on the days that people exercise, it’s easier to eat healthy that day, <laugh>, which doesn’t really make any sense, right? If I go running in the morning, why does that mean that I’m better at choosing a healthy lunch, you know, five hours later? And yet we know that that’s true, right? Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> it. What we also know is true, and people aren’t often aware of this happening, is that on the days you exercise, on average, people will use their credit cards less frequently. They’ll procrastinate about half as much, for instance, start doing their dishes 20 minutes earlier on average in the evening. So there’s something about exercise that for many people, sets off this chain reaction that changes other patterns in our lives as well.

And so for many people, exercise is a keystone habit. Now, that’s not true for everyone, right? If you’re someone who is always exercised, if you’re someone who is a high school athlete, starting an exercise routine might not change other patterns in your life because it doesn’t cause you to see yourself slightly differently. But for those habits that, that seem irrationally scary to us, for those habits that seem hard to change, and we can’t figure out why they’re hard to change when we change them, they will often set off chain reactions that change other parts of our lives without us having to work that hard or even realize what’s going on.

Interesting. So is there a way to identify a keystone habit? Let’s leave it at that. I wanted to expand on that question, but not complicate it.

Yeah. So I think that, again, keystone habits are different for everyone, but the thing to ask yourself is what kind of change seems irrationally scary to you? Right? For someone like myself who was not a high school athlete, when I first started running, it seemed irrationally scary. I was like, you know, I’m gonna look like an idiot. I don’t know what to wear. I don’t know what shoes to wear. Yeah, I don’t like, I don’t know what route to take. Getting out the door the first day was kind of hard, right? Because I don’t think of myself as an athlete, and I’m sure, and I would, all I could think is like, this is, I’m gonna look dumb. So that was something that was irrationally scary for me. A kind of change that felt irrationally scary. And so that’s a good signal that that’s gonna be a keystone habit because when I did start running, it changed how I saw myself, right?

Even on a subconscious level, I started thinking myself as a runner. And once you start thinking of yourself as a runner, well, runners don’t, don’t eat unhealthy sandwiches for lunch runners. Runners have the willpower that they don’t pull out their credit card sort of needlessly. Runners don’t procrastinate. And so what you’re looking for when you wanna find a keystone habit is you wanna look for that, that that change that you know, that you should make, that seems like an easy thing to change. You’ve seen other people do it, but for you, there’s this kind of almost irrational resistance. There’s this impulse on your part to be like, I, I think I can do that, but like, I’m kind of scared to find out if I can. That’s an indication that if you actually build that habit, if you change that behavior, it will set off a chain reaction that will make all kinds of other changes easier to accomplish.

Well, that’s a good segue to kind of a key question I want to ask you. When you look at successful people or highly productive people, what are some of the habits that these people have in common? You know, there’s a lot of high achievers and and goal-oriented people that listen to this show, and I’m sure many of them wondering, you know, what are some of the habits that highly productive people have?

Yeah. And, and in fact, my second book, smarter, faster, better, is basically all about that. Like, about what are, there’s, there’s generally eight habits that we’ve found are associated with, with the highest performing individuals. What I would say is this, is that almost all of them, there’s obviously habits that are your table bed, right? You gotta ante up, you gotta be able to like get yourself outta bed. You gotta have habits that help you be healthy and, and get to work on time and get your work done, provide for your family. But beyond kind of the bare minimum, what do the elites have in common? They tend to have mental habits that help them think more deeply when thinking deeply is needed, right? If you think about it, in the contemporary world, we are surrounded by distractions. And throughout history, the Killer app has always been thinking more deeply that when you’re confronted with a, with a, an important choice, and a lot of other people make, make it impulsively or a lot of pe other people make it instinctually, or they don’t sit down and kind of wave the pros and cons.

They’re really successful people. They have a habit that causes them to slow down and say, okay, let’s think about this choice before I make it. Let’s give it the time that it deserves. And sometimes that’s hard, right? Because sometimes those important choices happen during a crisis. They happen when we’re, when we’re really busy, they happen when we’re overloaded. So the, the most successful people tend to have habits that help them slow down and think more deeply. You know, one of my favorite examples of this is around innovation. One of the things that we know is that people who are very good at innovation, particularly innovation on demand, they usually have habits that do two things. First of all, encourage them to see things that they’re not familiar with, a sort of sense of curiosity. And they usually say things like, oh, I go to a play once a month, or I read a new book once a week.

They have these habits that push them to get exposed to new ideas, but that on its own is not enough. They also have habits that force them to reflect on what they’ve seen and what they’ve read. So for instance, the guy who wrote West Side Story the choreographer for that, he had this habit where he would, every, every night he would go home after he saw like a new show, or he went to like some salsa club or something like that. He would write these long letters to his friends, like 10, 15, 20 page letters. And, and the letters were terrible. Like, his friends would write back and say like, I don’t even understand what what you’re saying here, <laugh>. But he wasn’t actually writing the letters for his friends, he was writing them for himself. This habit he had of writing letters forced him to think about what he had seen that day and the connections between a salsa concert and some Shakespeare that he had seen and how he could use that in a play.

Many executives you talk to will have a routine, a habit where on Sunday they sit down and they look at their past weeks events and the upcoming weeks events, and they try and figure out what they could have done better last week and how they want to use that next week. Or they turn to their, they have, you know, executive assistants that they talk to and they say, Hey, I just learned, I read this book. Let me tell you about this cool idea in it. And again, you’re not necessarily saying that just for the person you’re talking to, you’re also saying it to yourself. It’s a habit that lets you process the information you’ve been exposed to. Many of these habits exist to help us take information and process it into knowledge. And that often comes from having habits that help us think more deeply about choices before we make them.

So are these two examples, examples of the habits that lead to deeper thinking and higher productivity? Example, one late night walks just by yourself, not fully uninterrupted example two time blocking, if you’re familiar with that concept where you, you carve out a big chunk of time in your calendar and it’s highly focused. It’s like what Cal I forgot his last name. And Deep Work Yeah. Talks about is, are those examples of habits that lead to higher productivity and habit forming?

They very well could be. I mean, look, it depends on how you’re using that time. Like, if I take a walk every night and I put on a podcast and I get really drawn into the podcast and I’m not thinking about my day and I’m not thinking about work, then it might not help me be more successful. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, right? I love listening to podcasts and it’s just, it’s a fun way. It might be a way to reward yourself at the on end of a long day. But if I take a walk at night and I’m walking around and I’m saying, okay, look, let me think about each of the meetings I had today. What went well? What could have been a better, how am I gonna use this for tomorrow? Then it probably is gonna make you productive, right? It what it doesn’t, the, the specific habit doesn’t matter as much as how you use it and that you let it become habitualize, right?

So it’s more fun to listen to a podcast than it is to think about my day when I’m taking a walk late at night. But if I want to get in the habit of thinking about my day, I need to give myself a reward when I come back from that walk, right? I need to let myself have like a glass of scotch or, you know, a nice long shower and then it’ll become easier and easier and easier to spend that time thinking about my day rather than listening to a podcast. So there’s no one magic habit that works for everyone. There’s just an approach to habits so that everyone can design the habits that work for them.

Interesting. Okay, Charles, well this is fascinating. Obviously this is a great topic and I, and I highly encourage people to, you know, learn about it and read your book. I don’t know what else to ask you. I can go on for probably hours on this topic, but if you were to give someone kind of a takeaway on habits and productivity, what would that, you know, concluding comment or takeaway be?

The more we think about the habits in our lives, the better we get at shaping them. So I think one of the things, as I mentioned, our brain kind of turns off when we’re in the grip of a habit. And, and sometimes that can make it hard to think about our own habits, right? Because we do them thoughtlessly. But the more we set aside time to think about what did I do automatically this week that that could have been a little bit better, could have been a little bit different, instead of being on autopilot should be a little bit more deliberate. That’s when we start to become the most successful versions of ourselves.

Yeah. Very interesting. Well, Charles, I appreciate you coming on the book, is the Power of Habit, why we do what we do in Life and Business. It’s a great book and I encourage everybody to pick it up. So I appreciate you coming on the show and thank you for your time.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. Well, I hope you enjoy today’s interview with Charles. It is a fascinating topic and something that at least I personally have been thinking about for a long, long time is just the habits that I have, the good ones, the bad ones, the habits that I need to create. I just love personal development and psychology. It’s always been an interest to me.

Anyway, that is it for today. Download the free report, The Ultimate Guide to Passive Real Estate Investing available on our website at noradarealestate.com. If you are interested in investing or exploring the idea of investing in real estate, get your free strategy session with my team of investment counselors. Just contact us through the website. That’s probably the fastest and easiest way. If you have a question about real estate investing, guess what? I would love to see it and try to answer that on the show. Maybe in person too. I’ll just reply to your email, time permitting. But again, remember to subscribe to the show and help us spread the word. Share the show with your friends and family. Visit us on iTunes. Leave us a rating and review. Thank you for listening. We will see you all on our next episode.

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