Charles Duhigg
Fraudulent and improper payments have long bedeviled Medicare, a $466 billion program. In particular, payments for durable medical equipment, like power wheelchairs and diabetic test kits, are ripe for fraud.Collection: Medical
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.Collection: Learning
Prosecutors say it would be next to impossible to get one teen to testify in court that another had slipped him or her a copied disc at lunchtime. And besides, isn't sharing music a time-honored part of teen friendship?Collection: Teen
Many environmental advocates argue that agricultural pollution will be reduced only through stronger federal laws.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Computers
Some officials overseeing local water systems have tried to go above and beyond what is legally required. But they have encountered resistance, sometimes from the very residents they are trying to protect, who say that if their water is legal, it must be safe.Collection: Legal
Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.Collection: Diet
Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.Collection: Effort
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.Collection: Choices
If you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they'll prove you rightCollection: People
If you believe you can change - if you make it a habit - the change becomes real.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Responsibility
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. It's not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Strong
The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.Collection: Golden
The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.Collection: Focus
This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Powerful
Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the orther team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.Collection: Team
Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.Collection: Self
Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.Collection: Winning
Shampoo doesn’t have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpaste—now every company adds sodium laureth sulfate to make toothpaste foam more. There’s no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when there’s a bunch of suds around their mouth. Once the customer starts expecting that foam, the habit starts growing.Collection: Feel Better
However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consiously 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.Collection: Real
Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.Collection: Creating
Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.Collection: Effort
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.Collection: People
Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Believe
The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Agency
Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.Collection: War
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Believe
America is the Saudi Arabia of coal.Collection: America
The cooperation of NASCAR - or any other system, it turns out - persists only when everyone believes he has the opportunity to win.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Dirty
What studies say the number one best way to start an exercise habit is to give yourself a reward that you genuinely enjoy.Collection: Exercise
At some point, if you're changing a really deep-seated behavior, you're going to have a moment of weakness.Collection: Weakness
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.Collection: Old Habits
For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.Collection: Believe
Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.Collection: Morning
Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.Collection: Habit
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.Collection: Real
Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.Collection: Routine
Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.Collection: Risk
Hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it.Collection: Knowing
If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.Collection: Old Habits
Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.Collection: Community