Book Review - The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

The power of habit book was a fairly enjoyable read and good start to the new year. The prologue of the book is fairly captivating, it starts with a story on how a 34 year old woman who was struggling with obesity, debt, alcohol and a host of other issues turned it around, became fairly successful at work and indeed managed to run a marathon. The author quotes a Duke university finding -- "40% of the actions performed each day weren't actual decisions, but habits".  It is by forming the good habits and overwriting the old habits that we turn around our lives.

The book has three parts. The first deals with how habits emerge in individual lives, the second in organisations and the third the habits of societies. All the three sections are well laden with anecdotes and stories the make up for a interesting reading.

The first section starts with the story of Eugene Pauly, a man who was afflicted with a viral infection that affected a tissue in his brain that was primarily responsible for memory. He could not remember any recent activity, which meant he did not know whether he had just finished his breakfast or not, or which day of the week it was or the name of a stranger who just got introduced to him. While he was unable to map out the layout of either his house or his neighbourhood, he was able to visit the kitchen or walk around the block and get back to his house. How was he able to do it -- this intrigued researchers who hypothesised that he has formed a habit that was helping him operate in an auto-pilot mode without him thinking or making any decisions. This formation of "habit loop" and understanding its details is critical for us to change our actions and behaviors. The habit loop, told simplistically is just a loop of a cue, routine and reward. We perform a routine in response to a cue and reap a reward. By fiddling with the cue and rewards, you can change the routines or your actions, which could be giving up smoking or any other addiction etc. There are many other stories in this chapter that reinforces this point, including how Febreze, an air freshener became a hit after initial failures. There is also the mandatory sports story of how Dungy turned around the fortune of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Indiana colts football teams. The success of "Alcoholics Anonymous" as a movement is also quite interesting.

The second section dealt with how habits are formed and transform businesses was not as interesting as the first section, possibly because I may have less to takeaway from those than the first one. However, the stories of how new habits were created at Alcoa by Paul O'Neil and how he used it transform a company on decline to achieve new heights is clearly worth reading. One story that tries to explain how we muster enough willpower to get to gym on somedays and not others was very interesting. The author explains an experiment where a group of people were asked to have cookies and the other radish (resist cookies) and then gave them an assignment that tested how much determination they had to persist on an arduous task. The people who had spent their willpower resisting cookies fared badly as opposed to the people who had cookies and consequently had much of their willpower intact.  The author goes on to argue that those people who acknowledge their weak moments and plan for them are likely to succeed and come unscathed than those, in the battle of willpower and self improvement. There is also the section of how Target analyzes the spend patterns of its consumers to identify and possibly shape their habits. Working in the ad-tech business, this was not revolutionary to me, but I presume that this would be interesting to people who are not really familiar with Big Data and user analytics.

The third section talked about habits and societies. The primary narrative here is around the incident related to the arrest of Rosa Parks snowballed into a big revolution headed by Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the South, whereas similar events before did not make that impact. There are some interesting stories here, but clearly not as appealing to me as the first section.

The last section deals with the philosophical question of whether we are responsible for our habits. There are two main stories here, one involving the murder of a wife by the husband while he was still in sleep and had no idea of what he was doing and the other the squandering away of fortune and fall to infamy of a woman who had given in to gambling. While the former was acquitted in court, the latter was held responsible for her action. The author opines that in the former case, the man had no prior notion that he might act in a certain way while in the latter, the lady knew that she had fallen into the had habit and could have take steps to correct them, however difficult it might be.

The book concludes with a practical guide on how the readers can try and change some of the ingrained habits by identifying their cue and the craving it tries to satisfy so as to modify the routine between them. Identifying a cue is easier said than done, but the author lists some practical guidelines of how to look for them. 

 While I believe that the habit change guidelines do need to be given a fair trial, I think the  book is a good read irrespective of the outcome of that exercise; the anecdotes and stories in this book are good to read and make good conversation material, if not for anything else.