Charles Duhigg, (born 1974) is an American journalist and non-fiction author. He is a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter for The New York Times. He is also the author of The Power of Habit, about the science of habit formation in our lives, companies and societies, and Smarter Faster Better, about the science of productivity.

Duhigg is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. Since 2006, he has been a reporter at The New York Times. Duhigg was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series of 10 articles about the business practices of Apple and other technology companies. The series of articles was named “The iEconomy.”

He graduated from Yale University and received an MBA from Harvard Business School.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

In The Power of Habit, published in 2012, Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature, and its potential for transformation. Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, NFL locker rooms and the largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions, and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death. At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. Do something enough and it becomes a habit, good or bad. Duhigg explained this in the book by research on memory loss. For example, the research found that patients suffering from memory loss could not show someone where the kitchen is when asked, but once they got hungry they would get up and go to the kitchen automatically. This is made possible by the habit loop of cue, routine, and reward. The cue makes the brain find the routine as it anticipates the reward. A classic example is stress and smoking, the cue is stress, the routine is smoking, the reward is the feeling the cigarette brings.

The Power of Habit begins with anecdotal accounts of people who changed destructive habits in their lives and one account of a man who had absolutely no short term memory, but was able to function as a result of habits already ingrained within him. The latter case demonstrated that there was something distinctive between one part of our brain and another. So, the author takes the reader on a tour of a lab at M.I.T. where scientists have been researching a golf ball-sized lump in the brain called the basal ganglia, since 1990. Apparently, the basal ganglia stores habits while the rest of the brain works less and less because the “chunks” of actions stored in that section of the brain take over . Arriving at this understanding, researchers were able to use different experiments to ascertain a “habit loop.” They noticed that a certain cue triggers a set of automatic reactions, such that the being feels rewarded. As a result of being rewarded, there is an even stronger response to the same cue on the next occasion.

What kinds of cues work? The Power of Habit tells the story of Claude Hopkins, an advertising legend who created the demand for toothpaste by creating a craving. Hopkins noticed in dental research that there is a film that forms on our teeth. He decided to get people to “feel” the mucin plaques on their teeth by calling them “the film” and suggesting that beauty comes from eliminating the film. By identifying a cue (the film that is almost always there) and suggesting a reward (getting rid of that film), he established a multi-million dollar product. Duhigg goes on to tell the story of Procter & Gamble's attempts to market Febreze, the air freshener that started out as a failure. Even though it was extremely effective in getting rid of odors, it didn’t sell because people in odiferous situations became used to the odors. They weren’t getting the cue. So, there had to be a better way to cue the reward, and that came to be with pleasant fragrances and the idea of “finishing” a task with beautiful smelling Febreze (a tactic that is still being used in dozens of new products in this product line to the present day. The habit loop works even better when a craving is attached to it.

Habits are not endemic to people alone - organizations and societies also have habits, which why they are so resistant to change. The key to getting rid of a destructive habit is to replace it with a constructive one.

This is easier said than done, however: it requires real effort to identify a habit, and great will power (which can be cultivated, according to Duhigg) to change it. But it can be done. Successful individuals have changed their lives by changing destructive habits. Successful executives have turned around companies by changing corporate habits. And leaders have transformed societies.

Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, we can transform our businesses, our communities and our lives.

“Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”

“The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.”

“Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”

“This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: THE HABIT LOOP”

“Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”

In this book, published in 2016, Duhigg explores the science of productivity, and why, in today’s world, managing how you think—rather than what you think—can transform your life.

Duhigg explains why we should all have a “bias toward action” as a precursor to creative results. He gives compelling data of how visualizing our results, in fact, help us achieve our desired outcomes.

In Smarter Faster Better, Duhigg explains the importance of creating mental models to take control of a situation through various interviews including Marine Corps, Google, the original team that created Saturday Night Live and General Electric. You know when you're stuck in traffic on the freeway and you see an exit approaching and you want to take it even though you know it will take longer to get home? That's our brains getting excited about taking control. It feels better because you feel like you're in charge. Control is the key. A useful method for triggering motivation is to find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control. Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control. The specific choice matters less than deciding that we are in control.

Duhigg writes about internal locus of control (believing that your life is within your control) vs external locus of control (believing that things mostly just happen to you). He explains that having an internal locus of control (believing control comes from the inside, not the outside) tends to increase productivity. We can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control by rewarding initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed itself. We should applaud a child that shows defiant stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.

Our mind can learn and remember how good it feels to be in control. Unless we practice self-determination and give ourselves rewards for subversive assertiveness, our capacity for self motivation can fade. We need to prove to ourselves that our choices are meaningful.

For enhancing decision making, Duhigg suggests one should involve probabilistic possibilities of a significant outcome in terms of both, negative or positive. That’s the fundamental of calculating odds. Along with that, the author has also enhanced on how data is important to us and how an organization of any form can learn something from it by its implementation.

Taking real life case studies, Duhigg examines what it means to be productive and common trends in smart, productive and successful people. Duhigg gives eight common trends that promote productivity.

Teams should have a sense of psychological security to succeed. Google, in their two year research into what makes teams successful, found that how teams work matters more than who is on them. Most importantly, teams need psychological safety. And psychological safety comes down to two things: - by everyone feeling that they have an equal voice, that everyone feels they can speak up ("equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking"), and - that the team has "'high average social sensitivity' - a way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt, based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves and the expressions on their faces."

Productive individuals tend to focus quickly on the problems before them and set both smart and stretch goals. A study by MIT researchers about a firm's most productive workers found that the superstars worked on less projects than other employees (five projects compared to 10 - 12 that others were working on). "The superstars weren't choosing tasks that leveraged existing skills. Instead, they were signing up for projects that required them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities. That's why the superstars only worked on five projects at a time: meeting new people and learning new skills take a lot of additional hours." Superstars also tended to work on assignments in their early stages. This is when a project is also more information rich. They were exposed to more people, ideas and information than other people. They were also much more prone to generate mental models. "Finally, the superstars also shared a particular behavior, almost an intellectual and conversational tic: They loved to generate theories - lots and lots of theories, about all kinds of topics, such as why certain accounts were succeeding or failing, or why some clients were happy or disgruntled, or how different management styles influenced various employees. They were somewhat obsessive, in fact, about trying to explain the world to themselves and their colleagues as they went about their days."

"To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge".

Innovation is crucial to success and can be achieved through a few different means. "'Creativity is just connecting things,' Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. 'When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they'd had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they'd had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people.'" "We can create the conditions that help creativity to flourish. We know, for example, that innovation becomes more likely when old ideas are mixed in new ways."

Finally, manipulating and working with data engages individuals and promotes success. When you have to do something in order to be able to take in information, it makes you learn more and remember more. An example of how using disfluency helps you learn more/absorb more data is taking notes by hand rather than typing them, and afterwards you remember much more about what is said by a lecturer (or in a meeting). (Study published in 2014 by researchers from Princeton and UCLA)

“The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.”

“People who believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers. This instinct for control is so central to how our brains develop that infants, once they learn to feed themselves, will resist adults’ attempts at control, even if submission is more likely to get food into their mouths.”

“Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.”

“If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.”