“Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.”

Hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it.

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.

Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.

The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.

Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.

Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real.

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.

Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.

Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work.

It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

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

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.

The same process that makes AA so effective-the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe-happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

I fear for the future of the planet. But in a funny way, I’m even sanguine about that.

The best way to renew thought is to go outside the human imagination.

You have the ability to choose which way you want to go. You have to believe great things are going to happen in your life. Do everything you can – prepare, pray and achieve – to make it happen.

Don’t power yourself or blast through; rock with the way things are.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

There’s no great person that lived that didn’t go through scrutiny or ridicule and prosecution in all types of ways, to be who they are in history.

Become more humble as the market goes your way.

In a way, a jail is a place where you can rest, read books and live with yourself.