Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.
Charles Duhigg
For Aristotle, habits reigned supreme. The behaviors that occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves.
Every habit is made of three parts... a cue, a routine and a habit. Most people focus on the routine and behavior, but these cues and rewards are really the way you make something into a habit.
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.
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.
When marketers influence habits, they influence peoples' self-identity. And so when a group or company does something that doesn't correspond to our core values, it feels like a betrayal.
Millions of people with respiratory diseases have relied on oxygen equipment, delivered to their homes, to help them breathe.
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.
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.
In the 1970s, New York City defaulted on its debt, and yes, the consequences were painful. Enrollment plummeted at City University campuses, which until then had offered free education. Seven thousand police officers were laid off. Crime skyrocketed. Services for the poor disappeared.
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.
Consumer habits are key to understanding how to launch a product.
Someone will write a resolution that says, 'I want to exercise more,' or 'I want to lose 15 pounds' - which is great, that's a great goal to have - but every study tells us that if you pose things in abstract, goal-related terms, it's much less likely that you will accomplish it than if you structure it as an actual activity.
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.
America is the Saudi Arabia of coal.
Forty percent of all electronics sold are assembled by Foxconn.
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.
Actually, attorneys say, copying a purchased CD for even one friend violates the federal copyright code most of the time.
Entrepreneurs do not try and create new types of smartphone technologies now because they know it's pointless: They're going to get sued almost immediately.
There is a woman named Wendy Wood, who did a study when she was at Duke, and she followed around college students to try to figure out how much of their day was decision-making versus how much was habit. And what she found was that about 45 percent of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.
In the past, NASDAQ has defended flash orders.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was passed in 1974 after tests discovered carcinogens, lead and dangerous bacteria flowing from faucets in New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Boston and elsewhere.
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.
A few decades ago, many people didn't drink water outside of a meal. Then beverage companies started bottling the production of far-off springs, and now office workers unthinkingly sip bottled water all day long.
It's easy to forget, given her scandal-tinged life and tragic death, how incredibly talented Whitney Houston was. She holds the world record as the most-awarded female act of all time, with over 415 major recognitions during her career. She is the only artist to chart seven consecutive number one songs.
In 1980, a woman promised her dying sister to change how Americans thought about breast cancer. Thirty years later, the result - the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation - is one of the nation's largest non-profits, and one of the most successful triumphs in public health marketing and changing health habits.
Vast databases of names and personal information, sold to thieves by large publicly traded companies, have put almost anyone within reach of fraudulent telemarketers.
Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.
Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.
The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation's housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer.
The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.
Analysts say that one reason Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were privatized in the first place was to prevent political whims from dominating the mortgage marketplace.
We know there are certain chemicals that are designed to give us a rush of pleasure. But, one of the most amazing things about being human is our capacity to override that pleasure. To either say, 'I don't need that pleasure right now. I'm going to ignore the craving.' Or to find something else that we find a deeper sense of reward from.
One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation's sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste.
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.
When people have a willpower failure, it's because they haven't anticipated a situation that's going to come along.
Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.
Barium, which is commonly found in power plant waste and scrubber wastewater, has been linked to heart problems and diseases in other organs.
The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things.
Companies are very, very good - better than consumers themselves - at knowing what consumers are actually craving.
Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.
There is no central government database that allows officials to monitor water tests by local systems.
If Freddie Mac is unable to raise capital, it could spark a political and financial crisis.
As the nation's elderly population grows, dozens of industries have tried to harness the political might of older Americans for corporate goals.
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.'
When most individuals or most companies are talking about trying to create healthy habits, the key is to identify which habit or habits seem most important.
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.
Students in school cheat not to get the 'A,' but to avoid the 'C.'
Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.
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.
