Group items tagged

diagnose the cue and the reward.

every cue falls into usually one of five categories.

t’s usually a time of day, a certain place, the presence of certain other people, a particular emotion, or kind of a set of behaviors that’s become ritualized.

And that’s the reward that I was craving, was socialization.

keystone habits. Some habits seem to have a disproportionate influence

And in a lot of people’s lives a keystone habit is exercise. When they start exercising, they start using their credit cards less. They start procrastinating less. They do their dishes earlier. Something about exercise makes other habits more malleable.

So O’Neill actually said, I want to make workers more safe. I want to change worker safety habits. And everyone could sign on to that. What he was actually saying was, I want to make every single factory more efficient and more productive and producing a higher quality product, because that’s how we make things safer. But if he had come in and he had ordered greater efficiency, everyone would have rebelled, all the workers at least. But you come in and you say, I want to make everything safer, that’s something everyone can sign onto.

But 5% of your job as a CEO is making the big strategy choice. 95% is managing small choices, managing what your culture is going to be like, managing how you structure the rewards and the incentives that determine how people kind of automatically behave.

And when psychologists have looked at quantum changers, what they found is these are people who suddenly became very deliberate about their habits. There’s something almost magical about understanding how habits work, because studies show that once you understand, once you think about the structure of a habit, it becomes easier to change that habit. And once you change that habit, you start making these small, incremental adjustments to your day that over a year or over a decade can add up to a huge difference.