Charles Duhigg Quotes
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You can't suddenly say, 'I want a brand new habit tomorrow,' and expect it to be easy and effortless.
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It almost goes without saying that when you are a startup, one of the first things you do is you start setting aside money to defend yourself from patent lawsuits, because any successful company, even moderately successful, is going to get hit by a patent lawsuit from someone who's just trying to look for a payout.
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Students in school cheat not to get the 'A,' but to avoid the 'C.'
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Everyone dies, and before that, most people eventually lose some of their faculties. So some people worry that as marketers get better at targeting the elderly, the line between advertising and unscrupulous manipulation will be harder to discern.
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Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.
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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.
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For years, agency officials said that atrazine in drinking water posed almost no risk to humans or the environment.
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Many environmental advocates argue that agricultural pollution will be reduced only through stronger federal laws.
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Typically, when there are corporate habits that undermine individuals, it has emerged without any sort of central planning. Nobody sits down and says, 'I'm going to create an evil habit for this corporation.'
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As the United States has become an older nation, reverse mortgages have grown into a $20-billion-a-year industry, with elderly homeowners taking out more than 132,000 such loans in 2007, an increase of more than 270 percent from two years earlier.
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The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.
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Unlike other sports, which are largely determined by individual athletic ability or team strength, NASCAR requires its competitors to cooperate in order to win.
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As the nation's elderly population grows, dozens of industries have tried to harness the political might of older Americans for corporate goals.
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For decades, activist shareholders were an entertaining, but largely ignored, Wall Street sideshow. Disgruntled investors would attend annual meetings to harangue executives, criticize strategies - and protest that their complaints were being ignored.
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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.
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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.'
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We like songs that are familiar.
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Medicare's top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system.
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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.
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Between 1857 and 1929, while regulators largely stood idle, the American economy swung through 19 national boom-and-bust gyrations that sometimes threatened to wipe out whole industries within months.
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Since cowardice must occur at a time and place where an enemy either has already appeared or may yet turn up, servicemen in peacetime - and ordinary civilians - can breathe a sigh of relief. If you are yellow-bellied back home, you're not technically a coward.
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Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.
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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.
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Someone once described Ken Lewis to me as the most competitive person in the history of the United States, including the Union Army.