200+ Best Charles Duhigg Quotes of All Time

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Looking for the best Charles Duhigg quotes of all time? In this post, you’ll discover the ultimate collection of 200+ famous Charles Duhigg quotes to inspire and motivate you.

Best Charles Duhigg Quotes min

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer-prize winning American journalist and non-fiction author. He is the author of two books on habits and productivity, entitled ‘The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business’ and ‘Smarter Faster Better’.

Below are some of Charles Duhigg’s quotes that will make you stay focused and be aware of your habits.

Best Charles Duhigg Quotes

“Once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it.” – Charles Duhigg

“Changing any habit requires determination.” – Charles Duhigg

“Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you choose pressure-release moments ahead of time—if, in other words, you plan for failure, and then plan for recovery—you’re more likely to snap back faster.” – Charles Duhigg

“Sometimes it looks like people with great self-control aren’t working hard—but that’s because they’ve made it automatic.” – Charles Duhigg

“Stretch goals “serve as jolting events that disrupt complacency and promote new ways of thinking,” – Charles Duhigg

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” – Charles Duhigg

“Change occurs among other people,” – Charles Duhigg

“The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.” – Charles Duhigg

“This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Motivational Quotes

“In the age of automation, knowing how to manage your focus is more critical than ever before.” – Charles Duhigg

“Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you right.” – Charles Duhigg

“At some point, if you’re changing a really deep-seated behavior, you’re going to have a moment of weakness.” – Charles Duhigg

“The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things.” – Charles Duhigg

“The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.” – Charles Duhigg

“The waste from power plants is essentially what is left over when you burn coal. And as we all know, coal is a relatively dirty mineral.” – Charles Duhigg

“Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.” – Charles Duhigg

“Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.” – Charles Duhigg

“Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals.” – Charles Duhigg

“Exercise spills over. There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.” – Charles Duhigg 

“Alcoholics crave a drink because it offers escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain.” – Charles Duhigg

“Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings.” – Charles Duhigg

“No one can predict tomorrow with absolute confidence. But the mistake some people make is trying to avoid making any predictions because their thirst for certainty is so strong and their fear of doubt too overwhelming.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Inspirational Quotes

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“We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not.” – Charles Duhigg 

“Creativity is just connecting things.” – Charles Duhigg

“People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign.” – Charles Duhigg 

“Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.” – Charles Duhigg

“Duke University found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.” – Charles Duhigg

“Small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.” – Charles Duhigg

“Shampoo doesn’t have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair.” – Charles Duhigg 

“The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants.” – Charles Duhigg

“Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.” – Charles Duhigg

“Goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans.” – Charles Duhigg

“See the future as multiple possibilities rather than one predetermined outcome.” – Charles Duhigg 

“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.” – Charles Duhigg

“Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.” – Charles Duhigg

“Want to exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up, and a reward, such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that smoothie, or about the endorphin rush you’ll feel. Allow yourself to anticipate the reward. Eventually, that craving will make it easier to push through the gym doors every day.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Quotes on the Power of Habit

“And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit.” – Charles Duhigg

“As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.” – Charles Duhigg

“But to change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.” – Charles Duhigg

“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.” – Charles Duhigg

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

“Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.” – Charles Duhigg

“Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs.” – Charles Duhigg

“Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.” – Charles Duhigg

“Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.” – Charles Duhigg

“Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.” – Charles Duhigg

“How are you going to study tonight? What are you going to do tomorrow? How do you know you’re ready for your test?’ It trained me to set goals.” – Charles Duhigg

“I think I’m smart, and I know I was a good mom. But there wasn’t a lot I could point to and say, that’s why I’m special.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you want to do something that requires willpower—like going for a run after work—you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day.” – Charles Duhigg

“It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.” – Charles Duhigg

“Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.” – Charles Duhigg

“Simply giving employees a sense of agency- a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority – can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.” – Charles Duhigg

“Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.” – Charles Duhigg

“So at most companies, an unspoken compact emerges: It’s okay to be ambitious, but if you play too rough, your peers will unite against you. On the other hand, if you focus on boosting your own department, rather than undermining your rival, you’ll probably get taken care of over time.” – Charles Duhigg

“Someday soon, say predictive analytics experts, it will be possible for companies to know our tastes and predict our habits better than we know ourselves.” – Charles Duhigg

“Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence.” – Charles Duhigg

“The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.” – Charles Duhigg

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

“The key to victory was creating the right routines.” – Charles Duhigg

“There’s nothing you can’t do if you get the habits right.” – Charles Duhigg

“There’s a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.” – Charles Duhigg

“This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.” – Charles Duhigg

“This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.” – Charles Duhigg

“Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.” – Charles Duhigg

“When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically.” – Charles Duhigg

“Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.” – Charles Duhigg

“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.” – Charles Duhigg

“A habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I see a cue, I will do a routine in order to get a reward. To re-engineer that formula, we need to begin making choices again.” – Charles Duhigg

“How we eat and sleep and talk to our kids, how we unthinkingly spend our time, attention and money — those are habits that we know exist. And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work.” – Charles Duhigg

“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.” – Charles Duhigg

“The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.” – Charles Duhigg

“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.” – Charles Duhigg

“Habit Change Framework: Identify the routine, Experiment with rewards, Isolate the cue.” – Charles Duhigg

“Even though it’s hard to learn how to back your car out the driveway at first, once it becomes a habit, you can do it almost automatically and think about something else, like the meeting that you need to go to today or what’s on the radio.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Quotes on Effort

“Grit, which they defined as the tendency to work strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.” – Charles Duhigg

“But conserving mental effort is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, such as a predator hiding in the bushes or a speeding car as we pull onto the street. So our basal ganglia have devised a clever system to determine when to let habits take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends.” – Charles Duhigg

“The only way to reduce errors by 70 percent was to make every single employee, in effect, a quality assurance auditor. Everyone had to take responsibility for catching mistakes. But most factory workers didn’t know enough about the engines to identify every small defect as it occurred. The only solution, managers decided, was a massive retraining effort. Except” – Charles Duhigg

“You can’t suddenly say, ‘I want a brand new habit tomorrow,’ and expect it to be easy and effortless.” – Charles Duhigg

“General Atomics, the progenitor of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, started life in 1955 when a major military contractor, General Dynamics, feared that the military hardware market might dry up. It began exploring peacetime uses of atomic energy, but abandoned the effort when cold-war military spending took off.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Quotes on Belief

“There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.” – Charles Duhigg

“Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.” – Charles Duhigg

“The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine. At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there’s one other ingredient that’s necessary: belief.” – Charles Duhigg

“Later, he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change.” – Charles Duhigg

“We call it ‘psychological safety,’ ” she said. Psychological safety is a “shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.” – Charles Duhigg

“habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted. But that’s not enough. For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.” – Charles Duhigg

“Belief seems critical. You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.” – Charles Duhigg

“I wouldn’t have said this a year ago—that’s how fast our understanding is changing,” said Tonigan, the University of New Mexico researcher, “but belief seems critical. You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.” – Charles Duhigg

“The evidence is clear: If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group. Belief is essential, and it grows out of a communal experience, even if that community is only as large as two people.” – Charles Duhigg

“It wasn’t God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a difference. Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.” – Charles Duhigg

“For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Quotes on Decisions

“Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.” – Charles Duhigg

“Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.” – Charles Duhigg

“However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits’ routines, and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it — and every chapter in this book is devoted to illustrating a different aspect of why that control is real.” – Charles Duhigg

“There is a woman named Wendy Wood, who did a study when she was at Duke, and she followed around college students to try to figure out how much of their day was decision-making versus how much was habit. And what she found was that about 45 percent of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.” – Charles Duhigg

“The discovery of the habit loop is important because it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks.” – Charles Duhigg

“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.” – Charles Duhigg

“The paradox of learning how to make better decisions is that it requires developing a comfort with doubt. There” – Charles Duhigg

“Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.” – Charles Duhigg

“Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values that, in the heat of a difficult decision or a moment of uncertainty, we might otherwise forget.” – Charles Duhigg

“We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention.” – Charles Duhigg

“Bureaucrats and politicians, rather than making decisions, were responding to cues with automatic routines in order to get rewards such as promotions or reelection.” – Charles Duhigg

“Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react.” – Charles Duhigg

“All we can do is learn how to make the best decisions that are in front of us, and trust that, over time, the odds will be in our favor.” – Charles Duhigg

“The Agile methodology, as it came to be known, emphasized collaboration, frequent testing, rapid iteration, and pushing decision making to whoever was closest to a problem.” – Charles Duhigg

“Many of our most important decisions are, in fact, attempts to forecast the future.” – Charles Duhigg

“Good decision making is contingent on a basic ability to envision what happens next.” – Charles Duhigg

“How do we learn to make better decisions? In part, by training ourselves to think probabilistically. To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures—to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously—and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true.” – Charles Duhigg

“This, ultimately, is one of the most important secrets to learning how to make better decisions. Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.” – Charles Duhigg

“Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you can become more motivated, more focused, better at setting goals and making good decisions, then you’re a long way down the path to becoming more productive.” – Charles Duhigg

“Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It’s about making certain decisions in certain ways.” – Charles Duhigg

“You’re helping us understand how a decision becomes an automatic behavior.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Quotes on Focus

“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.” – Charles Duhigg

“Determined and focused people tend to work harder and get tasks done more promptly. They stay married longer and have deeper networks of friends. They often have higher-paying jobs. But this questionnaire is not intended to test personal organization. Rather, it’s designed to measure a personality.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause widespread shifts. However, identifying keystone habits is tricky. To find them, you have to know where to look.” – Charles Duhigg

“Giving everyone new habits has become a focus of the church.” – Charles Duhigg

“At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit: willpower. Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you want to do a better job of paying attention to what really matters, of not getting overwhelmed and distracted by the constant flow of emails and conversations and interruptions that are part of every day, of knowing where to focus and what to ignore, get into the habit of telling yourself stories.” – Charles Duhigg

“They learn how to distract themselves from temptations. And once you’ve gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is practiced at helping you focus on a goal.” – Charles Duhigg

“They focused on the craving for that reward when temptations arose, cultivated the craving into a mild obsession. And their cravings for that reward, researchers found, crowded out the temptation to drop the diet. The craving drove the habit loop.” – Charles Duhigg

“It’s not just individuals who are capable of such shifts. When companies focus on changing habits, whole organizations can transform. Firms such as Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Alcoa, and Target” – Charles Duhigg

“By focusing on one pattern—what is known as a “keystone habit”—Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well. It’s not” – Charles Duhigg

“A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.” – Charles Duhigg

“The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.” – Charles Duhigg

“Every habit is made of three parts… a cue, a routine and a habit. Most people focus on the routine and behavior, but these cues and rewards are really the way you make something into a habit.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Quotes on Giving

“What studies say the number one best way to start an exercise habit is to give yourself a reward that you genuinely enjoy.” – Charles Duhigg

“Often in companies, you’ll see tensions between sales and marketing. Sales people will want to give discounts to clients because they often get paid a commission based on how much they sell. So they’re always pushing to give discounts because that will increase sales. Marketing, however, is judged by overall profitability.” – Charles Duhigg

“Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.” – Charles Duhigg

“In a flash order transaction, buy or sell orders are shown to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds before they are routed to everyone else. They are widely considered to give the few investors with access to the technology an unfair advantage, even by some of the marketplaces that offer the flash orders for a fee.” – Charles Duhigg

“We know there are certain chemicals that are designed to give us a rush of pleasure. But, one of the most amazing things about being human is our capacity to override that pleasure. To either say, ‘I don’t need that pleasure right now. I’m going to ignore the craving.’ Or to find something else that we find a deeper sense of reward from.” – Charles Duhigg

“Our brain is essentially programmed to enjoy carbohydrates because they give us a sense of fullness and a rush of pleasure. When people go on low-carb diets, they start to almost subconsciously experience distress from eating carbohydrates.” – Charles Duhigg

“A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.” – Charles Duhigg

“The secret to making that happen, he says, is giving everyone a voice and finding people willing to be sensitive enough to listen to one another” – Charles Duhigg

“Because there’s no craving that has made sunscreen into a daily habit. Some companies are trying to fix that by giving sunscreens a tingling sensation or something that lets people know they’ve applied it to their skin.” – Charles Duhigg

“When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. That’s ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that works only when people feel like they can trust one another. It only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.” – Charles Duhigg

“For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling. And the surest way to achieve that is to give people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own.” – Charles Duhigg

“That’s how our mind learns and remembers how good it feels to be in control. And unless we practice self-determination and give ourselves emotional rewards for subversive assertiveness, our capacity for self-motivation can fade.” – Charles Duhigg

“Motivation becomes easier when we transform a chore into a choice. Doing so gives us a sense of control.” – Charles Duhigg

“Even if you give people better habits, it doesn’t repair why they started drinking in the first place. Eventually they’ll have a bad day, and no new routine is going to make everything seem okay. What can make a difference is believing that they can cope with that stress without alcohol.” – Charles Duhigg

“Understanding the cues and cravings driving your habits won’t make them suddenly disappear—but it will give you a way to plan how to change the pattern.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Quotes on Life

“Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.” – Charles Duhigg

“What we know from lab studies is that it’s never too late to break a habit. Habits are malleable throughout your entire life. But we also know that the best way to change a habit is to understand its structure – that once you tell people about the cue and the reward and you force them to recognize what those factors are in a behavior, it becomes much, much easier to change.” – Charles Duhigg

“Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.” – Charles Duhigg

“Hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it.” – Charles Duhigg

“Hank Paulson, the happy capitalist warrior who spent his life pursuing and defending free markets, is now the biggest interventionist Treasury secretary we’ve had since the Great Depression.” – Charles Duhigg

“The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation’s housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer.” – Charles Duhigg

“It’s easy to forget, given her scandal-tinged life and tragic death, how incredibly talented Whitney Houston was. She holds the world record as the most-awarded female act of all time, with over 415 major recognitions during her career. She is the only artist to chart seven consecutive number one songs.” – Charles Duhigg

“A huge amount of success in life comes from learning as a child how to make good habits. It’s good to help kids understand that when they do certain things habitually, they’re reinforcing patterns.” – Charles Duhigg

“And what’s the biggest life event for most people? What causes the greatest disruption and “vulnerability to marketing interventions”? Having a baby. There’s almost no greater upheaval for most customers than the arrival of a child. As a result, new parents’ habits are more flexible at that moment than at almost any other period in an adult’s life.” – Charles Duhigg

“you have to be comfortable not knowing exactly where life is going. That’s how I’ve learned to keep the anxiety away.” – Charles Duhigg

“We can develop this intuition by studying statistics, playing games like poker, thinking through life’s potential pitfalls and successes, or helping our kids work through their anxieties by writing them down and patiently calculating the odds.” – Charles Duhigg

“Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain.” – Charles Duhigg

“For most people who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering disasters.” – Charles Duhigg

“Researchers began finding that habit replacement worked pretty well for many people until the stresses of life—such as finding out your mom has cancer, or your marriage is coming apart—got too high, at which point alcoholics often fell off the wagon.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you’ll be more likely to apply them in your life.” – Charles Duhigg

“People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event.” – Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg Quotes from Smarter Faster Better

“Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort.” – Charles Duhigg

“People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and see they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.” – Charles Duhigg

“When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more.” – Charles Duhigg

“Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control.” – Charles Duhigg

“Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a team of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012.” – Charles Duhigg

“We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier.” – Charles Duhigg

“To teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals.” – Charles Duhigg

“These small acts of defiance were, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor. But they are psychologically powerful because the subversives saw the rebellions as evidence that they were still in control of their own lives.” – Charles Duhigg

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

“We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.” – Charles Duhigg

“Self-motivation is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.” – Charles Duhigg

“Saturday Night Live has been held up as a model of great team dynamics. It is cited in college textbooks as an example of what groups can achieve when the right conditions are in place and a team intensely bonds. The group that created Saturday Night Live came together so successfully, this theory goes, because a communal culture replaced individual needs.” – Charles Duhigg

“For psychological safety to emerge among a group, teammates don’t have to be friends. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard.” – Charles Duhigg

“Teams success when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.” – Charles Duhigg

“People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades. Moreover, experience shows that anyone can learn to habitually construct mental models. By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes.” – Charles Duhigg

“Narrate your life as it’s occurring, and then when your boss suddenly asks a question or an urgent note arrives and you have only minutes to reply, the spotlight in your head will be ready to shine the right way.” – Charles Duhigg

“To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention, we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next.” – Charles Duhigg

“Numerous academic studies have examined the impact of stretch goals, and have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity.” – Charles Duhigg

“Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.” – Charles Duhigg

“If you’re confronted with a list of only far-reaching objectives, you’re more likely to get discouraged and turn away.” – Charles Duhigg

“No one goes to work wanting to suck. If you put people in a position to succeed, they will.” – Charles Duhigg

“The only culture that was a consistent winner were the commitment firms. Hands down, a commitment culture outperformed every other type of management style in almost every meaningful way.” – Charles Duhigg

“Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decision-making authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success.” – Charles Duhigg

“To become better at predicting the future — at making good decisions — we need to know the difference between what we hope will happen and what is more and less likely to occur.” – Charles Duhigg

“What matters is committing to odds that pay off in the long run.” – Charles Duhigg

“Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.” – Charles Duhigg

“My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” – Charles Duhigg

“When people have a willpower failure, it’s because they haven’t anticipated a situation that’s going to come along.” – Charles Duhigg

“Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say ‘thank you.’” – Charles Duhigg

Famous Charles Duhigg Quotes

“Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.” – Charles Duhigg

“Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.” – Charles Duhigg 

“Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings. But we ́re often not conscious of the cravings that drive our behaviors.” – Charles Duhigg

“Calling out people for not voting, what experts term ‘public shaming,’ can prod someone to cast a ballot.” – Charles Duhigg

“For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures.” – Charles Duhigg

“Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.” – Charles Duhigg

“You’re much better off creating positive rewards, complimenting people for acting correctly, rather than punishing them when they act incorrectly.” – Charles Duhigg

“We love to receive praise, but usually we’re not certain what message, precisely, we should take from it. On the other hand, when someone points out our flaws, we realize immediately that something needs to change.” – Charles Duhigg

“Entrepreneurs do not try and create new types of smartphone technologies now because they know it’s pointless: They’re going to get sued almost immediately.” – Charles Duhigg

“Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.” – Charles Duhigg

“Everyone dies, and before that, most people eventually lose some of their faculties. So some people worry that as marketers get better at targeting the elderly, the line between advertising and unscrupulous manipulation will be harder to discern.” – Charles Duhigg

“Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.” – Charles Duhigg

“You have to actually believe in your capacity to change for habits to permanently change.” – Charles Duhigg

FAQs | Motivational Charles Duhigg quotes

Here are some frequently asked questions about Charles Duhigg and his famous quotes.

Who is Charles Duhigg?

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer-prize winning American journalist and non-fiction author. He is the author of two books on habits and productivity, entitled ‘The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business’ and ‘Smarter Faster Better’.

Final thoughts on Charles Duhigg quotes

I hope you enjoyed this epic list of the best inspirational Charles Duhigg quotes.

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

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Charles Duhigg

#1 YouTuber, businessman & philanthropist

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