Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war. Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines—habits—that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done.

Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the orther team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.

As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.

The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because when you think about it, all of your old routines sort of go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new kinds of things.

The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.

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.