The Power of Habit in English

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been undeservedly lucky throughout my life to work with people who are more talented than I am, and to get to steal their wisdom and gracefulness and pass it off as my own.

APPENDIX A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas The difficult thing about studying the science of habits is that most people, when they hear about this field of research, want to know the secret formula for quickly changing any habit. If scientists have discovered how these patterns work, then it stands to reason that they must have also found a recipe for rapid change, right?

AFTERWORD Some Things Learned About Weight Loss, Smoking, Procrastination, and Teaching A few months after The Power of Habit was published, I was at my desk at The New York Times when an email appeared in my in-box.

THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Are We Responsible for Our Habits? I. The morning the trouble began—years before she realized there was even trouble in the first place—Angie Bachmann was sitting at home, staring at the television, so bored that she was giving serious thought to reorganizing the silverware drawer.

SADDLEBACK CHURCH AND THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT How Movements Happen I. The 6 P.M. Cleveland Avenue bus pulled to the curb and the petite forty-two-year-old African American woman in rimless glasses and a conservative brown jacket climbed on board, reached into her purse, and dropped a ten-cent fare into the till.

HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits I. Andrew Pole had just started working as a data expert for Target when a few colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk one day and asked the kind of question Pole had been born to answer: “Can your computers figure out which customers are pregnant, even if they don’t want us to know?”

THE POWER OF A CRISIS How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and Design I. The patient was already unconscious when he was wheeled into the operating room at Rhode Island Hospital.

STARBUCKS AND THE HABIT OF SUCCESS When Willpower Becomes Automatic I. The first time Travis Leach saw his father overdose, he was nine years old.

KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL Which Habits Matter Most I. On a blustery October day in 1987, a herd of prominent Wall Street investors and stock analysts gathered in the ballroom of a posh Manhattan hotel.

THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE Why Transformation Occurs I. The game clock at the far end of the field says there are eight minutes and nineteen seconds left when Tony Dungy, the new head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—one of the worst teams in the National Football League, not to mention the history of professional football— starts to feel a tiny glimmer of hope.

THE CRAVING BRAIN How to Create New Habits I. One day in the early 1900s, a prominent American executive named Claude C. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with a new business idea.

THE HABIT LOOP How Habits Work I. In the fall of 1993, a man who would upend much of what we know about habits walked into a laboratory in San Diego for a scheduled appointment.

PROLOGUE The Habit Cure She was the scientists’ favorite participant. Lisa Allen, according to her file, was thirty-four years old, had started smoking and drinking when she was sixteen, and had struggled with obesity for most of her life.