The Power of Habit

Great nuggets of information:
- Habits consist of a: cue, routine, reward
- Habits are encoded in the brain in the basal ganglia
- Habits are rewritten by figuring out a new cue/reward to replace an old one. Punishment does nothing to erase a habit.

Later in the book, it slid into tangential topics like addiction and the organization habits of companies. Would have liked it better if Duhigg spent more time on case studies of ways that different people successfully retrained bad habits in themselves. Or perhaps present an approach toward building more awareness of our habits and a greater reserve of the self-control needed to reprogram one's habits.

I found this book well organized, clear, concise and quite enjoyably readable. Now I have a better grasp of why I can establish a new habit only to have it vanish in thin air months later. It has not only anecdotes to illustrate it's ideas but also clear explanations of the neurology behind the premises posited. At first I thought maybe I'd only read the first section about individual habits as that's what I'm concentrating on. It turns out I'm glad I didn't because the other two sections (Habits of Successful Organizations and Habits of Societies) both had valuable insights. If you're at all interested in personal habits, organizational psychology, or changing society this is worth the read.