Quotes from Wendy Wood

Fully 43 percent of the time, our actions are habitual, performed without conscious thought. We had provided the first scientific estimate of how often people act out of habit. It turned out to be a lot higher than science at the time had assumed.

Aristotle is reputed to have said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit

Their conscious selves expected diminishing returns. The average estimate of new endings was about five, which was fewer than they had produced in the initial four minutes. They were then given an additional four minutes to work. The actual number of new endings they generated was 20 percent higher than they estimated. They didn't give persistence enough credit.

They have a set pattern, and they follow it. They are not making decisions. Here's the very happy implication: the worst, most effortful run will be that first one. Or the second, perhaps. But effort doesn't last (in fact, if it does, you're doing it wrong). Habits will form and take the effort off your hands.

It was something they did without thinking. They had formed meditation habits. High "self-controllers" achieved desired outcomes by streamlining, not struggling.

Self-control is simple when you understand that it involves putting yourself in the right situations to develop the right habits.

The good effects that we popularly ascribe to "self-control" are, it seems, more accurately captured by situational control.24 The studies and stories just cited established this mechanism, a mechanism that will undergird every part of habit formation.

What I began to realize was that habit refers to how you perform an action, not what the action is.

In psychology we have a name for the automatic scripts our brains piece together when we repeatedly do the same thing in the same way: procedural memory. It's such an important repository of information that only the most frequently repeated patterns get stored like this.

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power.

If we are in the right situation, we can achieve similar results to those who are more disciplined. Even if we don't have "it" at a young age, we can arrange our world in a way that enables our success

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power" Alfred Whitehead math text

anxious executives continued to exploit what had made the company successful in the first place and avoided exploring new innovations and growth. That kind of exploit-over-explore outlook is likely to leave the company larder bare of new products and put it at risk of becoming the next Blockbuster, Polaroid, or Compaq

As Wegner explained, "We stay awake worrying that we cannot sleep, and we spend all day mentally in the refrigerator when we are hoping to diet.

The diminutive chains of habit are seldom heavy enough to be felt, till they are too strong to be broken. —Samuel Johnson

The storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength. —Ho Chi Minh

He called it the double law of habit.3 Basically it means this: repetition strengthens our tendency to act, but it also weakens our sensation of that act.

By separating habitual cues from conscious awareness, the study showed that we eat in response to available cues: as long as there's food on our plate, we keep going.