Charles Duhigg: The Power of Habit [Best of]
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2017
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ever wonder how to kill a bad habit or start a good one? How to stop eating ice cream at 11 pm or smoking or procrastinating? How to exercise every day, without fail?
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Power of Habit, (https://amzn.to/3jhgYHS) Charles Duhigg, did too. But he went beyond wondering and spent a few years researching the science behind habits. What he discovered was pretty mind-blowing.
Not only is there a huge amount of mythology and misinformation around these hidden routines, but the people who understand the real psychology of habit formation are using it not just to change their own behavior, but to "influence" the buying decisions of hundreds of millions of consumers. Including you.
In this episode of Good Life Project, Duhigg reveals how one of the biggest retailers in the world, Target, uses habit analysis to figure out which customers are pregnant and leverages that information to cultivate new buying habits. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
He shares how to tap the neuroscience of habit to create your own positive behaviors (hint: chocolate after exercise may not be such a bad thing). He reveals why old habits never really die and what to do about it.
Duhigg takes us behind the scenes of major corporations and shows how to use the science of habit to transform a failing business into a success story in ways you'd never suspect. And he shares how these ideas can be tapped to create larger shifts in cultures and societies for good or, if misused, not-so-good.
[We first aired this conversation in July 2012. I'm so excited to share this "Best Of" episode with you now as we head into the year to come to think about the habits we want to create].
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What do you think a private conversation sounds like? |
| 0:04.3 | WhatsApp has multiple layers to protect your conversations. |
| 0:08.0 | Enter ending encryption makes personal messages unreadable to anyone on the outside. |
| 0:12.9 | Password protect individual chats with chat lock, |
| 0:15.7 | and view once makes photos and videos disappear after they're seen. |
| 0:19.4 | With all these features working together, |
| 0:21.5 | this is what a truly private conversation sounds like. |
| 0:26.5 | WhatsApp message privately with multiple layers of protection. |
| 0:35.1 | So this tends to be the time of year that we look at a little thing called habits. |
| 0:41.7 | During the holiday season, we tend to beat ourselves up for the habits that we don't love ourselves. |
| 0:47.7 | And as we turn the page on the new year very often, we tend to look at the habits that we'd love to leave behind. |
| 0:53.3 | And we'd love to break and the habits we'd love to make and how those might actually work and come alive in our lives. |
| 0:59.1 | And a while back, we sat down with Charles DuHig, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter in the author of a book, |
| 1:06.9 | a massive book that was all over the place called The Power of Habit, |
| 1:10.7 | about how the science of habit formation in our lives, companies and societies really happens. |
| 1:16.5 | The truth behind had actually make and change habits. |
| 1:20.7 | It was massively eye-opening to me. |
| 1:23.0 | And I thought that as we move through this time of year and start to look ahead at the habits we'd love to create in the year to come, |
| 1:30.0 | it would be a good idea to revisit that conversation with Charles and to share it with you. |
| 1:35.9 | You will hear the quality of the recording is a little bit different than our current recordings, |
| 1:42.3 | which happened in our studio. |
| 1:43.7 | This was actually taped back when Charles was on staff. |
... |
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