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

There’s a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.

Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.

At some point, if you’re changing a really deep-seated behavior, you’re going to have a moment of weakness.

Simply giving employees a sense of agency- a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority – can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.

Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.

Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.

The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.

If you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you right.

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.

There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

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

Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.

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

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.

It’s hard to go out in front of people with an acoustic guitar and improvise for 30 or 40 minutes, but I had a compulsion to do it. I just had to in a way that I can’t really explain.

Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader’s eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.

Everything is getting bigger. The way to go now is to program in a little more sophistication.

Being Number One isn’t everything to me, but for those few hours on the court it’s way ahead of whatever’s in second place.

I feel that I’ve often pointed out that there are countless aspects of life and nature that scientists and scientific thinkers cannot explain.

Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics – religion, death, existentialism – to the screen. … But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.

I am a firm believer in if you can’t get it the old fashioned way, you don’t need it.