Charles Duhigg Quotes
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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.
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If you look hard enough, you'll find that many of the products we use every day - chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins - are results of manufactured habits.
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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.
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Public employee unions, in their defense, say politicians have unfairly made them into simplistic bogeymen, responsible for problems that have myriad causes. Not all government workers receive generous pensions, they note.
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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.
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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from banks and other lenders, providing those financial institutions with capital to make new loans.
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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.
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Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.
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Drinking water that does not meet a federal health guideline will not necessarily make someone ill. Many contaminants are hazardous only if consumed for years. And some researchers argue that even toxic chemicals, when consumed at extremely low doses over long periods, pose few risks.
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Monica Besra, a Bengali woman from a remote Indian village, was reportedly suffering from a malignant ovarian tumor when she went, in 1998, to a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Nuns at the mission reportedly placed a medallion with Teresa's image on Besra's abdomen, and the tumor disappeared.
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The cooperation of NASCAR - or any other system, it turns out - persists only when everyone believes he has the opportunity to win.
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Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.
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For most of Wall Street's history, stock trading was fairly straightforward: buyers and sellers gathered on exchange floors and dickered until they struck a deal.
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As homeowners see the value of their homes decline, they become more likely to delay purchases of the big items - like automobiles, electronics and home appliances - that are ballasts of the American economy. When those purchases decline, large manufacturing firms, suddenly short on funds, could begin laying off employees.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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I think there's a lot of people who right now are worried that people are going down frivolous paths, like inventing new social networks or new games, instead of inventing the cures for cancer or fundamental technologies that will change the world.
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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.
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In the past, NASDAQ has defended flash orders.
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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.
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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.