Transform Your Life with Four Simple Steps to Create a New Identity

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1. Habit formation, change, use and abuse (and some fun stories). New York Times investigative reporter Charles Duhigg has assembled a compelling set of stories about the overarching influence habit plays in our lives, its neurological underpinnings, how habits develop, how they may be altered, and how they may be used to undermine us. Duhigg’s curiosity leads him to variegated and interesting applications of the concept of habit formation, from Tony Dungy’s quest for a super bowl ring to the selling of Pepsodent, a milestone in advertising history.These stories of corporate manipulation are among Duhigg’s most persuasive. Most appalling was his story of an Iowa housewife who married early and accomplished little, except that she was adept at gambling. Her humdrum life became rewarding when she was able to order comped suites for friends’ weddings because Harrah’s valued her patronage so highly. Her anxiety was always relieved when she sat down at the black jack table. Harrah’s casino showered her with personal attention. Even after she went bankrupt, Harrah’s continued to call, making offers of benefits she could not refuse. Finally, after many hard knocks, she was given a second chance when her parents left a nice inheritance. Of course, she continued to answer Harrah’s calls (they got upset when she declined to come) and gambled the inheritance away.Then there is Boutique Target, spending vast sums to find statistical changes in spending patterns when women get pregnant. Once identified as a likely pregnancy (when her receipts show increased purchases of lotions, expanded waist pants, etc.), a woman begins to receive relevant discount offers, subtly hidden within coupon books. Pregnant women are “a gold mine,” leading to infant, child, and family expenditures worth thousands. The Boutique is going to be sure they get their share of the action. Like Harrah’s, they take advantage of customer habit to influence purchases to their benefit.To the good, Duhigg recounts the story of a young man named Travis whose drug-addicted parents taught him none of the social skills required for success or even for holding down a menial job. He was a bright kid who knew that when the house was clean, that meant mom and dad had switched from heroin to meth and things were about to get seriously out of control. Travis dropped out of school, failed at McDonald’s, then got a break when he was hired as a barista at Starbucks.It seems that Starbucks had determined that world domination was based on convincing large numbers of people to pay four dollars a throw for a cup of coffee. This meant not only the addition of special nutrients such as heavy cream and sugary Italian flavoring, but also the emphatic recognition of the customer’s personal value to the outlet. Starbucks taught its baristas to show care and consideration for customers. Travis took fifty hours of in-house courses, equivalent of a college semester, learning habits of positive customer relations. He wrote out and memorized the LATTE method: Listen to the customer. Acknowledge their complaint. Take action by solving the problem. Explain why the problem occurred. Travis paid attention. At age 26, he managed two Starbucks outlets, had no debt and a 401K. Travis had been socialized by a corporation.The first third of the book deals with habit formation (cue, craving, routine, reward) and an appendix tells the reader how to change habits. The program is a bit reductive and sounds like cognitive behavioral therapy by another name, which it pretty much is. Nuances of interpersonal differences, the effects of various psychological states and diagnoses, the limits imposed by life circumstance, these are not factors that Duhigg treats in detail.To his credit, Duhigg deals with higher functions than the simple changing of unconscious processes, like changing a pattern of cookie eating in the afternoon (a rather facile but helpful piece about his own habit change). His discussion of the success of Alcoholics Anonymous includes speculations that belief is sometimes necessary to overcome a life-long, pervasive habit, such as alcohol addiction. It is insufficient to deal with the physical addiction and to replace the habit with a new routine (e.g., calling a sponsor or going to a meeting instead of a bar).The application of a belief that things can get better has been shown to assist addicts who suffer stress or temptation. Duhigg points out that when the chips were down, Tony Dungy’s football team failed to apply the positive habits that had taken them to the playoffs. They failed to believe that the habits would work in the clutch. After Dungy lost a son, the team thereafter came together for his sake and won the Superbowl. Duhigg attributes the win to belief. It seems equally likely that this success came from increased motivation and affiliation among team members rallying around their beloved coach.In my experience, clients often change when they embrace values more important to them than the rewards of a self-destructive habit. Rather than drinking, the client chooses to establish habits consistent with enhancing a child’s life. A four-decade smoker stops cold turkey when his new love demands kissing sweet breath. It is the researcher’s job to perform the experiments necessary to establish such a point. Duhigg, as a reporter, has done a yeoman’s job of ferreting out the available findings and interviewing the authors. He cannot be held responsible for what social science has not yet ascertained.What Duhigg does best is to spin a fine story, from Paul O’Neill turning Alcoa around by concentrating on habits of safety to the seeming exclusion of everything else (he knew that establishment of habits of safe production would lead to habits of efficient production), to the story of Travis’s socialization at Starbucks. If he goes a bit far afield by shoe horning the Montgomery bus boycott into a story of habit change, so what? It’s still a fun story and well worth reading. The world may not change, but lots of people will be better off for having read this book.

2. Now I Understand How to Create Lasting Change. Following a prologue in which a subject transforms utterly transforms herself, Duhigg lays out the structure of the book. “Part One: The Habits of Individuals” is broken into three chapters.Chapter 1, “The Habit Loop” describes the (wait for it…) the habit loop, which is the foundation for everything that follows. This is a 3-step process, in which a cue triggers a routine which is reinforced by a reward. Duhigg does a great job of describing the science that describes this pattern, and the science which explains it, without making the information so dry that you can’t absorb it.Chapter 2, “The Craving Brain,” examines individuals who suffered neurological damage and the impact that habits had on their ability to perform various functions and routines. This chapter had heart: imagining the daily lives of these individuals and their caregivers brought some real drama to the study of how habits operate in our brains. The point of the chapter was basically that habits are surprisingly delicate, to use Duhigg’s term, and can be easily disrupted, with the right information.Chapter 3, “The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs” focused on the coaching career of of NFL coach Tony Dungy, and how he used his understanding of habits to transform the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indiana Colts. The Golden Rule is You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. Midway through Chapter 3 Duhigg breaks away from NFL to consider Alcoholics Anonymous. If Chapter 2 is the heart of Part One, then Chapter 3 is the soul: both AA and Dungy’s football program achieve their greatest success when the people operating under their respective guidance both arrive at belief in something greater than the individual. Duhigg shares more than that in this chapter, but there is a ton of information in this chapter about how habits can be disrupted to make way for more positive patterns.In Chapter 4, “Keystone Habits, Or the Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most,” Duhigg offers Paul O’Neill of Alcoa to illustrate how altering a single habit in an organization (albeit in a highly focused and disciplined manner) can transform the total organization.Chapter 5, “Starbucks and the Habit of Success,” opens with a powerful story of a young man who was raised by drug addicts, and his subsequent struggles to maintain his employment. His pattern of failure changed when he went to work at Starbucks. This chapter discusses the importance of willpower and its limitations, how willpower can be strengthened, and planning for success.Chapter 6, “The Power of a Crisis,” uses the examples of doctor error in a Rhode Island hospital, which Duhigg asserts was made inevitable by the toxic atmosphere in the workplace, and a fire in King’s Cross Station, London, which was made inevitable by strictly observed divisions of labor, to provide opportunities for transforming the cultures of those two organizations into something stronger and more effective than could have been created as Paul O’Neill did, just by sheer force of leadership.Chapter 7, “How Target Knows What You Want Before You Do” is probably the most widely read section of the book, as it was excerpted by the New York Times (Duhigg’s employer) and Forbes, among others. It’s readable and informative, and fairly creepy in disclosing how much information we unwittingly distribute about ourselves, and how unlikely we are to curtail the activities that make it possible for Target to know a woman is pregnant before any of her immediate family members do.Several reviewers have described these sections as “filler,” but I found that they addressed complaints common to people who claim to want to change their habits but lack willpower, and provided guideposts to an attentive reader for what qualities set one up for success. I did not find these sections to be filler, but powerful illustrations of how a thorough understanding of the mechanisms behind habits can provide the tools for large scale change, and a discussion of the nature of personal responsibility. Although the sections were more directly addressing corporate bodies, the information was driven by the individuals within those organizations and therefore applicable to me and my own private attempts to alter my habits.Part Three was an interesting summing up. Chapter 8, “Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott” addressed the components that made those movements (if one can call a mega-church a movement) successful. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, particularly, was really interesting: we celebrate Rosa Parks’s heroism, deservedly, but the fact is, several other individuals had made similar stands without sparking the Civil Rights Movement. Duhigg’s explanation for why Parks had the right stuff to make it happen makes for informative reading (the short version being, Parks was a genuinely nice and widely connected member of Montgomery society).Chapter 9, “The Neurology of Free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?” puts all the preceding information in perspective. It contrasts Brian Thomas, an Englishman who killed his wife while sleepwalking, with Angie Bachmann, a compulsive gambler who lost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. He describes the neurology of sleepwalking activity and of a compulsive activity such as gambling (or drinking, or binge eating) and concludes that habits are under are control and can be altered, which argues for self-awareness and personal responsibility.The information provided in the body of the book was enough for me to understand how to create a road map for how to change my habits, but Duhigg did provide a digest of the material in his Appendix, “A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas.” Overall, I found this book to be both readable and powerful, and I look forward to implementing what I’ve learned to further my own goals.

3. A MASTER book of other books. THIS IS THE GREATEST BOOK EVER PUBLISHED IN THE LAST 10 YEARS!!!If I could give this book 10 stars, I would! This book beats many other books. This book is so exciting to read that I read it three times! The beginning of the book said it extremely well — This book is about an unique kind of leadership that has the natural recurring pattern of inspiring, influencing and affecting people. It is about a very small group of leaders that achieve disproportionate amount of influences in their industries/areas compare to other leaders. The most prominent example is, of course, Steve Jobs who displayed a recurring pattern of changing one industry after another.(Of all the books that study Steve Jobs, this is probably the best one although it is not a book on Jobs’ biography. However, this book offers the best angle to understand his motivation and influence.)The core of this book is about the kind of WHYs that a special kind of leaders has that enable them to have the natural recurring pattern of inspiring, influencing and changing people and industries. The prime examples of this kind of leaders quoted in this book are Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Wright Brothers.This book is revolutionary. All the top business schools should reevaluate their curriculum based on this book! All the top business consultants should reconsider their theories and recommendations based on this book! All the writers on leadership should read this book and revise their theories! All political leaders in the world should read this book! All board of directors of corporations should read this book and learn how to select the next CEOs! …This book can be considered the MASTER book to be read before reading books like “From Good to Great”, “Stall Points”, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and the follow-on books, “Crossing the Chasm” …The central theme of this book is WHY — the essence, the core, the purpose of a person’s life, of leadership, and the starting point of a corporation. Without the clarity of this WHY, the life of a person, the leadership, and the products and services offered by a corporation are all fuzzy and treated as commodities. This is so very true. Look around us: Though we (persons, organizations and corporations) are special in some ways, yet we are almost all commodities — except the very few that display the recurring pattern of major changes and influences such as Jobs, Apple and Google. These are the ones that have the clarity of WHY and the discipline of diligently and strictly enforcing their HOWs (principles, methods, criteria) in producing the WHATs (behaviors, products and services).There are three views of WHY + HOW + WHAT presented in this book:1. Looking from the top — the WHY in the center, the HOW in the middle and the WHAT in the outer layer form a GOLDEN CIRCLE.2. Looking from the side — the WHY at the top layer, the HOW in the middle layer and the WHAT in the bottom layer form a cone.3. Viewing in three dimensions — with the external world attached to the base of WHAT, the whole thing is a megaphone for the leader or corporation to sound out its WHY.These views are wonderful ways for us to look at leadership, to understand the life cycle of a corporation, and summarily see why companies thrived and why they died. These views can even be applied to our personal lives.Of course, this book has some blemishes. But these defects do not distract from its greatness.1. The grammar is terrible. The whole book should be reviewed by a competent editor.2. The WHYs are not strictly examined and evaluated. This book treats all WHYs from leaders, entrepreneurs and corporations as equal when in fact they are not. Probably most of the WHYs are the rewording of WHATs in disguise. Maybe a lot of WHYs are re-branded HOWs. Perhaps only a small number of WHYs can have the recurring pattern of inspiration and influence. I hope the future editions of this book can elucidate this point.3. The HOWs gets much less treatment than the WHYs and WHATs in the book. It would be great if this topic is covered in more detail.4. Maybe 60% of this book is about corporations and not on leadership as claimed in the beginning of the book. I hope the author can focus more on the recurring pattern of inspiration and influence of leadership.5. Not everything stated in this book is correct. The points discussed in this book about Jobs and Apple are good examples. Please read “Inside Apple” and Jobs biographies for more correct views on Jobs and Apple.At the first reading, the book seems repetitious. The WHY, HOW and WHAT get repeated over and over. However, on the 2nd and 3rd reading, this apparent repetition disappears and you can see the different points that the author was trying to emphasize.I would like to recommend some future topics or books for Simon Sinek:a) Qualify and rank levels of WHYs — not all WHYs are equal. Probably some are top-notch while most are mediocre. Also, tell us how to construct best kinds of WHYs.b) Compare the WHYs to big tech companies, the WHYs of big Wall Street firms (if they have any???) and the WHYs of big retail companies.c) Compare the WHYs of big empires in historyd) Compare the WHYs of nations in WWI and WWIIe) Compare the WHYs of great leaders in historyf) Compare the WHYs of great geniusesg) Consider how WHYs can be incorporated into Teachers’ College (Ed College). It is the teachers who educate our future generations. They need to be thoroughly immersed in the understanding of The Golden Circle, The Cone and The Megaphone.h) Consider how WHYs can be incorporated into the K-12 and the college educationg) Consider how WHYs can be incorporated into and how HOWs can be enforced in our political systems. We have far too many politicians and not enough true leadersi) Consider how WHYs can be incorporated into our law schools. Our lawyers really need a strong dose of treatment.In summary, this book is dynamic. It’s a dynamite! It’s the best book I have read in the last 10 years!

4. If you wish to lead and inspire people, build a great company and/or spread a worthwhile idea, then you must read this book. Brilliant Book.I recently read a book that had a simple message that basically could be told in half a page worth of words – and as it happens it actually was. But then the author kept on going and going and going and filled up a book in excess of 200 pages just on the very same idea seen from different angles and with different examples.In truth I found that book was boring indeed and found I’m, not a subscriber of a book that basically has just one idea.Now, Simon Sinek’s book “ Start With Why” is actually also about just one idea and like the other book that one idea is really told in less than half a page worth of words and yet this book too extends beyond 200 pages. But this book I loved. It’s a brilliant book indeed. Yes, possibly a little too labored and long at times, but with speed-reading, you are soon past those passages and back into the great stuff again.The difference is that the book uses so many great explorations of the importance and the applications of his idea. It brings anecdotes and references to stories of successful companies from their usage their “why” and how they turned not so successful when they swayed away from their “why”.The idea is greatly exemplified in the book by references to Apple and Steve Jobs, to Richard Branson and Virgin, to Helb Kelleher and SoutWest Airlines, to Bill Gates and Microsoft, Walt Disney and Disney, Martin Luther King and “I have a dream”, Howard Schultz and Starbucks, Michael Dell and Dell Computer and several more.You probably already know the stories of what happened to the companies when Steve Jobs left Apple (was ousted), when Howard Schultz left Starbucks and Michael Dell left Dell Computer – and then you probably know how these companies started to perform again once they came back.It contains great lessons for the rest of us who hold aspirations of leadership and entrepreneurial success and who are trying to build businesses. In other words this book is a great book along the lines of the best books on Mission and Visions. In addition, however, it also spells of the how and shows the importance of the people behind the visionary leader who have been instrumental in making the how work out for the companies – like Steve Wozniak of Apple and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft just to name two of them.Then there’s the “what” – which honestly I didn’t focus on too much when reading the book – or was it because the book didn’t focus much on it either? Either way, the why is the important and the interesting part (great to have a good “how” along the way too – as even I have experienced in at least one of my previous companies).There’s much more I could say about this book, but then I would rather just say: “Just go get it and read it for yourself”.Too much valuable stuff in there for you not to read it. Especially if you wish to lead people and/or if you wish to build a grand company, cause or spread a worthwhile idea.In closing, however, I must say, I also love the brutally honest way Simon Sinek shares his thoughts. He even calls Bill Gates a social misfit (but have no doubt, retains utmost respect for him and his brilliance).Mikkel Pitzner, Serial Entrepreneur, multiple best-selling author and author of forthcoming book: “The Automated Millionaire”.

5. Great workbook to journal the DYL experience. Fantastic accompaniment to the Designing Your Life book. I found the workbook to be essential beyond the “try stuff exercises”. Many of the resources are found on the website, but I think having the workbook is a nice way to journal the experience offered through the DYL book.

6. Highly recommended. Great complement to the book. I highly recommend this book AND workbook to literally everyone. It helps you learn about your likes/dislikes and strengths/ weaknesses to give you better options at work and in life.

7. A great supplement tool to the original book if you want to change your life. The workbook is an additional tool to the “Designing Your Life” book, which is a great book if you want to change your life. I work with midlife clients who wish to change their life before it is too late. This book is an excellent tool for individuals to evaluate their lives and determine what they want. I am sure the course on which the book is based is even more helpful.

8. لسى ما قريته بس الجوده حلوه مره والكاتب سايمون يعني اكيد الكتاب رهيب وفيه رسومات بالكتاب حبيت مره

9. Finally a journal for a creative! Lovely and original. As a creative and visual person, I find the My Self-Reflection and Coloring Journal incredibly fulfilling. It blends thought-provoking questions with beautiful coloring pages that help me unwind and express myself. Each day, I celebrate small victories through this journal, enhancing my mindfulness and stress relief. The original designs cater perfectly to my artistic side. This journal is a must-have for anyone seeking a creative way to explore inner peace and emotional well-being.

10. love it. lots of self reflections quotes. thanks

11. I absolutely love this book!It is well written, clear and incredibly helpful to understand ourselves, and how our brain works.I use this new knowledge every day.Thank you.

12. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. A very good book! It’s full of practical wisdom and timeless lessons for both personal and professional growth. Definitely worth reading more than once!

13. 7 Habits is one of the best book I ave continuously studying for the past 25 years. This book has been so applicable to my personal quest to become a better person.

14. Will help instill goodness. This was given as a gift for someone who took a class with this book as the subject.They said the book is great and helped them immensely. It is recommended to everyone to read. Will foster goodness within one’s life.

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