A new year is right around the corner, and with it will come the usual host of resolutions—sadly, rarely kept. To be more precise, more than 40% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions and just 8% achieve their goals. Sometimes the goals they set are too daunting, sometimes too vague. And, perhaps the biggest problem with the whole resolution business is that people focus on goals rather than processes.
In 2012 Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times, wrote The Power of Habit, which spent 62 weeks on the paper’s best seller lists and was named one of the best books of the year by The Wall Street Journal and theFinancial Times. It is now being reissued with an afterword by the author.
I reviewed the book when it first came out and thought I would write a new post now that I have the reissued edition. But then I reread my original piece and decided that I probably couldn’t improve on it. So instead I’ll republish it here.
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“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,” William James wrote in 1892. Well, that might be a bit of an overstatement: a researcher in 2006 knocked that “mass” down to “over 40 percent.” Whatever the percentage, we are creatures of habit. In The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change It (Random House, 2012) Charles Duhigg explores the work that neurologists, psychologists, sociologists, and marketers have done over the past two decades to figure out how habits work and how they change. It’s a fascinating tale. (more…)