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Her money comes to you through PRX. Hey everybody. Welcome to Her Money, it's Gene Chatsky. I am on the road this week actually moderating a conference called Think 19,

which is run by an organization called Co-op that provides technology for many, many,

if not most of the nation's credit unions and on the roster at

this conference is Charles Doeighig who is the author of the Power of Habit which I have talked about on this show many, many times because it's

not only one of my favorite books, it's actually made a big impact on how I look at life, how I look at money.

And so I was so excited that we were going to be able to grab him,

quite literally, for the podcast.

We are in a makeshift studio so it doesn't sound exactly the way it

does when we are in our typical home at CDM now you know why. And Charles, welcome, I am so happy to have you here.

It's such a huge street to be able to do this.

So take us back to before you wrote The Power of Habit. What made you take a look at habits to begin with

and what were you looking to change in your own life?

So I was a reporter at the New York Times. I'm now a reporter at the New Yorker but at that at that point I was

ready for the New York Times and my first son was about to be born. I'm a first child.

And my wife and I actually had this so my wife is a scientist and we had this idea, we're like, okay, look, we're about to have a baby, and this shows how much we did not know about having a baby. We're like, look, we're about to have a baby. We're going to remake our lives completely. We're going to do everything right.

We're going to go read all the studies about how to be happy and how to be productive and how to be efficient.

And we're going to live by all those studies as soon as the baby is born

which of course looking on looking back on it is like insane right because as you and

...