Top 70 Charles Duhigg Quotes

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

In California, up to 15 percent of wells in agricultural areas exceed a federal contaminant threshold, according to studies.

Technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age.

Millions of people with respiratory diseases have relied on oxygen equipment, delivered to their homes, to help them breathe.

Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.

In the past, NASDAQ has defended flash orders.

Fannie Mae has traditionally only bought and sold mortgages. But when a loan held by the company goes into foreclosure, Fannie Mae gains ownership of the underlying property until it is resold to new investors.

Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.

Because the fees associated with a reverse mortgage are high, such loans make sense only for borrowers who expect to live in their home for a number of years.

Martyrs – those killed because of their Catholic faith – can be beatified even if they don’t perform a miracle. However, all beatified individuals must stage a certifiable miracle before being made a saint.

People who start habitually exercising tend on average to eat better. They also tend to use their credit cards less and procrastinate less.

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

For Aristotle, habits reigned supreme. The behaviors that occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves.

As America becomes an older nation, it is also, by some measures, becoming sicker.

Most people probably don’t even know what toothpaste they buy; they just recognize the box on the shelf.

Cash from a reverse mortgage can be paid out in several ways, including a lump sum, a monthly payment, a line of credit, or a combination of those. If you do not need money right away, it is usually a bad idea to take all the money upfront, since it starts accumulating interest charges immediately.

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

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste.

In general, insurers say criticisms of claims-handling are unfair because most policyholders are paid promptly, and some denials are necessary to root out fraud.

Students in school cheat not to get the ‘A,’ but to avoid the ‘C.’

For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures.

In 1940, Germany toppled France in 20 days, and the panzerdivizion symbolized war’s shift from drawn-out conflicts using massive fortifications to rapid-fire engagements built around manned, motorized armor.

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.

Foxconn is hugely important, not only in China – it’s the largest employer in China – Foxconn is important around the world.

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.

When the vast baby-boom generation exploded into adolescence in the 1960s, marketers exulted. Advertising consultants, always eager to coin a phrase, began happily explaining to corporations the difference between ‘teenyboppers’ and ‘counterculture consumers.’

Some financial advisers say anyone who may move in less than seven years should not take out a reverse mortgage.

Government and other scientists have identified hundreds of chemicals that are linked to diseases in small concentrations and that are unregulated in drinking water or policed at limits that still pose serious risks.

Atrazine – a herbicide often used on corn fields, golf courses and even lawns – has become one of the most common contaminants in American drinking water.

You have to actually believe in your capacity to change for habits to permanently change.

Bank of America is the story of some of the most ambitious, aggressive bank builders on the face of the planet.

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

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They’re much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

Because reverse mortgages do not require borrowers to make immediate repayments, the interest charges are added to the debt every day, and the total amount owed grows over time.

Lawsuits against reverse mortgage companies, including the nation’s largest, Financial Freedom Senior Funding, contend that those firms helped pressure older Americans into bad investments.

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.

Someone once described Ken Lewis to me as the most competitive person in the history of the United States, including the Union Army.

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

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.

There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

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.

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

In a sense, habits never really disappear. Once formed, they always remain in our neurology.

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.

While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, flash orders are currently allowed because of a loophole in securities regulations that allows for immediate trades.

In the 1970s, New York City defaulted on its debt, and yes, the consequences were painful. Enrollment plummeted at City University campuses, which until then had offered free education. Seven thousand police officers were laid off. Crime skyrocketed. Services for the poor disappeared.

State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.

When marketers influence habits, they influence peoples’ self-identity. And so when a group or company does something that doesn’t correspond to our core values, it feels like a betrayal.

Companies are very, very good – better than consumers themselves – at knowing what consumers are actually craving.

Forty percent of all electronics sold are assembled by Foxconn.

After World War I, while France and other Allies were building military defenses modeled on trench warfare, German commanders were shaping a nimble fighting force.

When the mortgage giant Fannie Mae recruited Daniel H. Mudd, he told a friend he wanted to work for an altruistic business. Already a decorated marine and a successful executive, he wanted to be a role model to his four children – just as his father, the television journalist Roger Mudd, had been to him.

Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.

Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago persuasively argue that one of the biggest reasons for the nation’s current obesity epidemic is that food is now so much cheaper and easier to prepare.

It is almost always a bad idea to use a reverse mortgage to pay for a vacation or to buy a risky investment, like stocks or deferred annuities.

As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater.

Bromates are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, but officials are required to test for them only when water leaves a treatment plant.

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.