The book talks about how habits work, and how they have the power to create (or prevent) change within 3 distinct areas of life: Personal development, organisations and work, and in society.
It also provides a handy guide for the concrete application of the toolkit for personal development.
And finally, it communicates a directive: When you know about the habits that drive your behaviour, and you know they can be changed – you have a moral imperative do so. There is no excuse; only work to be done.
I’ll present three of the core ideas in the book, without running through section by section.
How Habits Work
A habit comprises of 3 components: A trigger, a routine, and a reward.
Triggers are what start a habit. Triggers take many forms, for example a habit might be triggered by visual pattern recognition, an emotional state, a physical sensation, a conversation, and myriad other ways.
Routines are what happens in response to the trigger. They are what we tend to think of as “the habit”. Snacking, smoking, exercising, walking the dog, talking to a friend, nail-biting, beard-stroking, and millions of other automated routine behaviours. Routines can be highly complex, and still almost fully automated. Driving a car is (for most regular drivers) a highly automated process, especially when going to a common destination.
Rewards are what cement the behaviour. They make habits stick. They can be broadly grouped into positive emotional or physical stimuli. When you snack a cookie, perhaps you get a blood sugar rush, or a much-needed break from a hard problem at work, or maybe it’s the conversation with the cashier in the cafeteria you crave. Whatever it is, it’s what encodes a habit in the automated system.
It’s a 3-step loop, driven by a craving for the reward.
A simple example:
- Trigger: Arriving home from work, and feeling drained
- Routine: Get changed, go for a 30 minute jog
- Reward: Endorphine-rush that energises the rest of the evening
- Craving: Feeling full of energy
Keystone Habits
The author highlights that some habits have a greater impact than others on how people and organisations work. There exists certain spill-over effect.
Two habits are selected as examples.
The first is exercise. The author brings up multiple studies that show that the successful implementation of an exercise habit has positive spillover into many other areas of an individual’s life. This seems intuitive to me.
- A succesful positive habit sets up a structure for the day.
- In the case of exercise, it provides physiological benefits.
- A certain motivation arises from “winning the day”, something that many people can do with exercise.
The second is a habit drilled into the culture at a large organisation. The habit was a relentless focus on employee safety. That is to say, a multitude of habits were created through an intense focus on one specific company value: Safety.
The value was elevated to such a level that it was immensely rewarding to keep things safe. That meant all kinds of triggers were able to start safety-building routines, because the strong reward was applicable in all kinds of contexts.
And the routines to build safety had a significant spill-over into all kinds of other organisational excellence. To run a hyper-safe aluminium plant, you must run a hyper-effective aluminium plant.
Application Ideas
The author concludes the book with a guide to understanding and manipulating ones own habits. Perhaps as a final push to place the responsibility firmly in the readers own hands.
He recommends attacking a habit in 4 steps.
First identify the routine. This is usually easy. It’s the very thing we want to change.
Second, identify the reward. This is not as obvious as it sounds. Say you tend to complain at length to your spouse whenever a co-worker has caused you an inconvenience on any specific day. You see the routine, and you see that it’s not a good experience for your spouse, so you want to change it.
But why do you do it exactly?
- You need to speak aloud to get the thought out of your head?
- You seek sympathy?
- You feel like it lets you “get back at them”?
- You want affirmation that you are in the right, and they are in the wrong?
- You need help working out how to fix the social problem you have?
- The author recommends spending a few weeks patiently testing different routines.
So when you feel the desire to complain, try replacing it with another routine, to see if it fulfils your craving.
Some ideas to try for this specific habit:
- Write down your thoughts on a piece of paper.
- Write down a plan of action, to resolve the conflict.
- Explain to your spouse that your shoulders ache, and ask for a massage.
- Imagine spiking the co-workers morning coffee with laxative (n.b. don’t actually spike the coffee).
- Spend time gathering your thoughts about the situation your experienced, remove the names, and ask your spouse to evaluate right and wrong in a hypothetical situation instead of your concrete situation.
- Note down how you feel as a result of each of these routines. Did you manage to get the reward you were craving? Note how you can design routines that are different, and targeted at a specific potential reward. Depending on which routines work, you’ll learn what reward you are truly seeking.
Third, as the last step in identification, the author suggests trying to identify the trigger. As long as you are subverting a habit by consciously replacing the routine, it is effortful. To truly make a new habit effortless, you must understand the trigger, and place your routine before you would otherwise begin your automated behaviour.
Sometimes it is clear what kickstarts your habit, but not always.
In this case, it may be when your spouse comes home, a fairly obvious trigger. Just as easily though, the trigger might occur between 8 and 9pm while watching the evening news – with no clear indicator that anything changed. The author recommends keeping a diary of 5 items that are logged every time you complete a cycle through the habit.
- Emotion – how are you feeling?¨
- Location – where are you?
- Time – what’s the time?
- Other People – who are you with?
- Immediately preceding action – what happened right before your routine started?
By logging this every time the habit kicks in, you should fairly quickly spot a pattern.
And finally, step 4, is having a plan for change.
Decide what you want to do, who you want to be – and then build it. But don’t rely on willpower. Rely on a deep understanding of how habits work.