If you want to do something that requires willpower - like going for a run after work - you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day.

Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It's not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.

When people have a willpower failure, it's because they haven't anticipated a situation that's going to come along.

Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.

However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consiously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits' routines, and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it -- and every chapter in this book is devoted to illustrating a different aspect of why that control is real.

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.

The cooperation of NASCAR - or any other system, it turns out - persists only when everyone believes he has the opportunity to win.