唐•德雷柏（DON DRAPER）是美剧《广告狂人》中一个好色的男主角，而与克劳德•霍普金斯（Claude Hopkins）相比，他只能算是一个胆小鬼。霍普金斯是20世纪最耀眼的广告天才——他能让数百万妇女选择购买高露洁公司的肥皂，只因为埃及艳后曾用过此种香皂；他也能让全世界的人开始关注膨化小麦，只因为他说这种食品是用枪打出来的，直到各种谷物最后都膨化到本身大小的8倍。
霍普金斯最大的成就是让普通人开始有刷牙的习惯。他当时找了一个销售培梭丹特牙膏的工作，这个工作最大的挑战是那个时候只有一少部分人有刷牙的习惯。因此，他开始考虑怎么改变一个国家所有人的生活习惯——给人们一个每天应该刷牙的触发点（比如，如果不刷，牙齿表面就会形成一层“牙垢”），并且如果保持这种新习惯一定会有回报（比如，可以拥有更加迷人的微笑）。在培梭丹特牙膏发布之前，只有7%的美国人家里有牙膏；而仅10年之后，65%的人家里都有牙膏了。
霍普金斯是印证了Charles Duhigg《习惯的力量》这本书观点的众多著名角色中的一个。Duhigg是《纽约时报》的记者兼主持人，他的研究始于1982年William Jame的观察结果——“如果我们的一生有具体的表现形式，那一定是各种习惯的集合。”。我们总认为日常生活中的各种选择是原因和意志的结果，但多数情况下它们其实是潜意识和习惯的产物：好习惯能让我们的生活更加有效率（试想一下如果生活中每件事都事必躬亲会怎样），而坏习惯则会让我们不知不觉间走向自我毁灭。
但是霍普金斯在James的理论基础上作了两点完善。关于习惯的科学研究经过几十年的沉闷期后，终于在近几年有了突破。生物学家研究了习惯与大脑皮层的连接方式，营销人员也观察了他们是如何形成某种行为习惯的。Duhigg全身心专注于这个方向的研究。James是一个宿命论者，他曾把习惯比作水，“只要不停往更宽、更深的方向流去，就能给自己开凿出一条通道”；然而，一旦它的流动只停止片刻，就需从新通道以前的路开始重新积累”。Duhigg坚持认为水流可以改变方向——因此建议我们学习一些这方面的技巧。
《习惯的力量》这本书共分为三个部分。第一部分主要讲个人。这部分内容向我们说明了根深蒂固的习惯是如何影响一个人的日常生活，同时分析了这些习惯如何才能被打破和重新养成。例如，Duhigg先生怀疑人可能会被可预测的规律所迷惑。高露洁的营销人员用一些小奖赏强化了这些规律：自动贩卖机公司增加了附近美女的数量，就是为了吸引顾客过来。但是人们也可以选择改变固有的路线，逃过这次圈套；匿名戒酒互助社在某些方面也做得很成功，因为它把一个习惯（去酒吧喝得酩酊大醉）用另一个习惯（去会议室与大家讨论你对酒精的痴迷）取代了。
这本书的第二部分主要在讲组织。Duhigg向读者展示了美国铝业公司（Alcoa）是如何通过创建完美的安全记录，让自己转变为铝业巨头；霍华德•舒尔茨（Howard Schultz）又是如何因为专注于客户服务，让星巴克成为咖啡业中的龙头老大。改变这些“固有习惯”能产生一种连锁反应，让新习惯贯穿到组织中去，同时改变原有的其他习惯。
本书的最后一部分关注了社会的习惯——Walter Bagehot称作“习惯的蛋糕”。Duhigg认为一些最伟大的社会改革或是在调整社会习惯，或是在煽动公平这种抽象概念的过程中完成的。民权运动在解放马丁•路德•金称为“胆战心惊的种族”上迈进了巨大的一步，而这一切则是从Rosa Parks打破阿拉巴马州所有黑人一直遵循的习惯，坚持坐在公共汽车的白人专座上开始的。而同性恋权利运动则是在它要求美国国会图书馆尊重同性恋的人权，把有关同性恋类的书籍从“非正常性关系，包括性犯罪”这种带有歧视性描述的类别重新划分到更加中性的类别开始的。Rick Warren通过对祈祷会做宣传，把美国最大的教堂Saddleback教堂变为一个福音派的典型教堂，最终让去教堂成为美国人日常生活中必不可少的一部分。
《习惯的力量》这本书还留下了许多开放性的问题。例如，把沉迷酒精与醉心纸杯蛋糕划分到同一类别下，是否合理？本书作者也喜欢如变魔术般制造出无穷无尽的学术研究，好像要和马尔科姆•格拉德威尔（Malcolm Gladwell）媲美似的。除过少许瑕疵，这还算是一本顶好的书——基于庞大的研究事实，表达方式很贴近生活，在提供严肃思考及如何打破习惯的有效建议上达到了很好的平衡。
DON DRAPER, the womanising star of “Mad Men”, an ad-agency TV drama, is a mere piker compared with Claude Hopkins. Hopkins was the most flamboyant advertising genius of the early 20th century—the man who convinced millions of women to buy Palmolive soap on the basis that Cleopatra had washed with it, and got the world talking about puffed wheat with the claim that it was “shot from guns” until the grains puffed to eight times their normal size.
Hopkins’s greatest achievement was to persuade ordinary people to start cleaning their teeth. He landed the job of selling a new brand of toothpaste called Pepsodent. Hopkins realised that the biggest barrier to selling it was that only a few people bothered to clean their teeth. So he set about changing the habits of a nation—giving people a trigger to justify daily brushing (a “cloudy film” forms on your teeth if you don’t) and promising a reward if you stick to your new habit (a beautiful smile). Before Pepsodent’s launch, only 7% of Americans owned a tube of toothpaste; a decade later, 65% did.
Hopkins is one of dozens of flamboyant characters who parade through the pages of Charles Duhigg’s “The Power of Habit”. Mr Duhigg, a New York Times reporter and broadcaster, takes as his starting point William James’s observation, in 1892, that “all our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” We like to think of our daily choices as the result of reason and will. But for the most part they are the products of unconscious habits: habits that at best make our lives more efficient (imagine if you really did have to agonise about everything) and at worse trap us in self-destructive behaviour.
But Mr Duhigg improves on James in two ways. The scientific study of habits has taken off in recent years after decades in the doldrums. Biologists have investigated the way that habits are wired into the cerebral cortex and marketers have looked at the way that they shape behaviour. Mr Duhigg has immersed himself in this literature. James was a fatalist. He once compared habits to water which “hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself before”. Mr Duhigg insists that it is possible to divert the water—provided that we learn a few tricks.
“The Power of Habit” is divided into three parts. The first focuses on individuals. It shows how entrenched habits shape individual lives and analyses how those habits can be broken and rearranged. Mr Duhigg argues, for example, that people can be trapped by a predictable cycle: you flag in midafternoon, you eat a biscuit, you feel much better. Pavlovian marketers reinforce these routines by fiddling with the rewards: slot-machine companies have increased the number of near misses because they help to keep people hooked. But people can also escape from the trap by changing the routine. Alcoholics Anonymous has proved so successful in part because it replaces one routine (going to the bar and getting drunk) with another (going to meetings and talking about your addiction).
The second part of the book concentrates on organisations. Mr Duhigg shows how managers can change entire firms by changing a handful of “keystone habits”. Paul O’Neill transformed Alcoa, an aluminium giant, by aiming to establish a perfect safety record. Howard Schultz turned Starbucks into a coffee superpower by focusing his employees on customer service. Changing these “keystone habits” creates a chain reaction, with the new habits rippling through the organisation and changing other habits as they go.
The book’s final part looks at the habits of societies—what Walter Bagehot, an early editor of The Economist, called “the cake of custom”. Mr Duhigg argues that some of the greatest social reformations have been produced as much by rewiring social habits as by agitating for grand abstractions like justice. The civil-rights movement took a huge step forward in freeing what Martin Luther King called a “fear-ridden people” when Rosa Parks refused to do what Alabama’s blacks had routinely done before and sit in a blacks-only section of a bus. The gay-rights movement began to go mainstream when it persuaded the Library of Congress to reclassify books on gay rights from “abnormal sexual relations, including sexual crimes” to a more neutral classification. Rick Warren turned Saddleback Church, one of the biggest in America, into an Evangelical role model by marketing prayer meetings so that churchgoing became embedded in the fabric of people’s daily lives.
“The Power of Habit” leaves many questions unanswered. Is it reasonable, for example, to put a serious addiction like alcoholism in the same category as a predilection for cupcakes? The author also has a penchant for producing endless bits of academic research out of his magician’s hat as if trying to outdo Malcolm Gladwell. Minor gripes aside, this is a first-rate book—based on an impressive mass of research, written in a lively style and providing just the right balance of intellectual seriousness with practical advice on how to break our bad habits.
