Charles Duhigg

“The key is, don't try and extinguish the habit, rather try and change it, find a new behavior, like eating M&Ms, that corresponds to the old cue, and that delivers something similar to the old reward. And in doing so, you're kind of overriding that neural pathway inside your brain.”

“I actually did come up with a phrase Keystone Habit. My wife is a biologist and there's this concept of Keystone Species. And so I was talking through this idea... it just makes it so easy to like take the next step and like go out the door, right? Like you probably at this point, when you are running, you're not even thinking about running as you start.”

“There's this phrase in the CEO world, something like you don't rise to your willpower, you fall to your systems, or something like that, where it's like the system is what dictates whether you're going to be successful or not, not like willpower or not how you feel. And the point being at a company, you have to have systems because that's what you default to.”

“Our brain actually is kind of skeptical of our stated preferences, but it pays attention to how we behave to figure out who we really are. And so this act of cleaning up every day at three o'clock... it's not about organizing the clutter, it's about revealing to ourselves, proving to ourselves that we are the kinds of people who do this.”

“I was talking to Jim Collins, the guy who wrote Good to Great last night on stage because he has a new book out. And he talked about the bewildering fog of success. And that year, 2013, was exactly that for me. Like on paper, it was the best year of my life. I had a best-selling book. I won a Pulitzer Prize. In reality, it was like the hardest year of my life.”