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xv-xvi "All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits." William James wrote in 1892. Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they're not. They're habits... One paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren't actual decisions, but habits.
xix "Understanding habits is the most important thing I've learned in the army... once you see everything as a bunch of habits, it's like someone gave you a flashlight and a crowbar and you can get to work." [JLJ - love the flashlight and crowbar analogy... looks like insight and leverage to me]
xx "I'm telling you, if a hick like me can learn this stuff, anyone can. I tell my soldiers all the time, there's nothing you can't do if you get the habits right." [JLJ - perhaps this also applies to a machine playing a game.]
p.17 Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
p.19 To deal with this uncertainty, the brain spends a lot of effort at the beginning of a habit looking for something - a cue - that offers a hint as to which pattern to use... This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future... Over time, this loop - cue, routine, reward... becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined... Eventually... a habit is born. [JLJ - great. So humans are "programmed" by a loop that curiously explores the environment and tries to make sense out of it, eventually settling on finding clever cues which prompt an effective behavior routine, for the situation we are in.]
p.25 habits, as much as memory and reason, are at the root of how we behave. We might not remember the experiences that create our habits, but once they are lodged within our brains they influence how we act - often without our realization... Researchers have learned that cues can be almost anything... Routines can be incredibly complex or fantastically simple... Habits are powerful... They shape our lives far more than we realize - they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense. [JLJ - ummm yeah... I keep on adding every book I browse to my personal web page out of habit. The text you are reading was written due to my current habit to pack-rat everything a read to the Internet. Silly idea was to share my thoughts with those who were interested.]
p.27 By learning to observe the cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.
p.33 The secret to success, [advertising notable] Hopkins would later boast, was that he had found a certain kind of cue and reward that fueled a particular habit. It's an alchemy so powerful that even today the basic principles are still used by... designers... around the world... Hopkins... created a craving. And that craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work. The craving is what powers the habit loop.
p.35 these appeals... relied upon a cue... that was universal and impossible to ignore... Hopkins had found a cue that was simple... and was so easy to trigger that an advertisement could cause people to comply automatically.
p.36 First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards... There's also a third rule that must be satisfied to create a habit
p.41 Find an obvious cue and clearly define the reward.
p.43 How do you build a new habit when there's no cue to trigger usage, and when the consumers who most need it don't appreciate the reward?
p.49 This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.
p.51 Only when your brain starts expecting the reward... will it [JLJ - the habit] become automatic... The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come.
p.55 The formula had worked. They had found simple and obvious cues. They had clearly defined the reward. But only once they created a sense of craving... did [JLJ - the product being discussed] become a hit. That craving is an essential part of the formula for creating new habits
p.57 why was Pepsodent different? ...Pepsodent created a craving.
p.58 "Consumers need some kind of signal that a product is working." Tracy Sinclair... told me.
p.59 The craving drove the habit loop.
p.62 Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.
p.64-65 [Buccaneer defensive end Regan] Upshaw has practiced how to react to each of these cues so many times that, at this point, he doesn't have to think about what to do. He just follows his habits.
p.65 And that's when [Chargers quarterback Stan] Humphries makes his mistake. He starts thinking.
p.79 "What precisely are you looking at? Where are your eyes?" [JLJ - where is your attention?]
p.80 The brilliance of this system was that it removed the need for decision making... because everything was a reaction - and eventually a habit - rather than a choice... Eventually, the patterns became so familiar to players that they unfolded automatically when the team took the field. [JLJ - needless to say, this applies to a machine playing a game. What if we made the machine do nothing but react to sequential strings of plausible moves, react in order to determine how much it should "care" about a move or move sequence? The machine might then appear to be making "decisions" and "choices" about which move to play, when in fact it is just reading and responding to cues with pre-programmed routines. That would be a clever kind of system, wouldn't it?]
p.100-101 Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are "keystone habits," ...Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything. Keystone habits say that success doesn't depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.
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