The following contains excerpts from the book, The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg).
The author delves into the subject of how habits are formed in our individual lives, corporations, and societies. He shows how habits can be identified and controlled to our benefit instead of our demise.
At our music school in Midland, Texas we believe music is more than sound, it is relationships. One of the most profound aspects of relationships in life is how the subject of Leadership is impacted by personal discipline.
“This book is divided into three parts. The first section focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives. It explores the neurology of habit formation, how to build new habits and change old ones…The second part examines the habits of successful companies and organizations…The third part looks at the habits of societies.”
The only way to successfully gain mastery of one’s musicianship at our music school in Midland, Texas is to develop deeply embedded habits in core competencies, which can take years to refine. However, once they have been established, a wide range of possibilities become available.
These are not just lessons for music-making, but also lessons for life.
“For companies and organizations, this insight has enormous implications. 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.”
Giving students a sense of autonomy in our music school in Midland, Texas helps motivate them to do their best. When they know that their involvement in their own personal growth is key to their success, they begin taking responsibility for their success.
“It may seem like most organizations make rational choices based on deliberate decision making, but that’s not really how companies operate at all. Instead, firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions. And these habits have more profound impacts than anyone previously understood.”
“Routines provide the hundreds of unwritten rules that companies need to operate. They allow workers to experiment with new ideas without having to ask for permission at every step. They provide a kind of ‘organizational memory,’ so that managers don’t have to reinvent the sales process every six months…But among the most important benefits of routines is that they create truces between potentially warring groups or individuals within an organization.”
“Creating successful organizations isn’t just a matter of balancing authority. For an organization to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge.”
“During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power. Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.”
“A company with dysfunctional habits can’t turn around simply because a leader orders it. Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisis- or create the perception of crisis- and cultivate the sense that something must change, until everyone is finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with each day.”
Target is one of the world’s leaders in using technology to track its customer’s buying habits. “‘It used to be that companies only knew what their customers wanted them to know,’ said Tom Davenport, one of the leading researchers on how businesses use data and analytics. ‘That world is far behind us. You’d be shocked how much information is out there- and every company buys it, because it’s the only way to survive.”
Target has learned to tap into one of the most profound buying periods of people’s lives. “What’s the biggest life event for most people? What causes the greatest disruption and ‘vulnerability to marketing interventions’? Having a baby. There’s almost no greater upheaval for most customers than the arrival of a child. As a result, new parents’ habits are more flexible at that moment than at almost any other period in an adult’s life.”
“So for companies, pregnant women are gold mines. New parents buy lots of stuff- diapers and wipes, cribs and Onesies, blankets and bottles- that stores such as Target sell at a significant profit.”
“Disney estimates the North American new baby market is worth $36.3 billion a year.”
Target found that expectant mothers shop in fairly predictable ways, and were able to “identify about twenty-five different products that, when analyzed together, allowed…to peer inside a woman’s womb.”
But people began to become leery of Target’s invasiveness. So Target had to figure out how to use their information gathering in a way that was not obvious.
The music industry keeps up with statistics of what is popular, and when the song “Hey Ya!” by OutKast first came out, it was not an instant success.
Music industry algorithms predicted songs would be runaway hits successfully, songs like Norah Jone’s Come Away With Me, Santana’s Why Don’t You and I. But listener’s just didn’t’ like “Hey Ya!”
Why? “People listen to Top 40 because they want to hear their favorite songs or songs that sound just like their favorite songs. When something different comes on, they’re offended. They don’t want anything unfamiliar.”
At our music school in Midland, Texas we teach a wide array of musical styles, always directing the student to develop the core conditioning common to all styles.
Some of the ‘stickiest’ songs, such as Crazy In Love by Beyoncé and Señorita by Justin Timberlake, or Breathe by Blu Cantrell were all predicted hits, because “they sounded familiar– like everything else on the radio- but a little more polished, a bit closer to the golden mean of the perfect song.”
“Sticky songs are what you expect to hear on the radio. Your brain secretly wants that song, because it’s so familiar to everything else you’ve already heard and liked. It just sounds right.”
“There is evidence that a preference for things that sound ‘familiar’ is a product of our neurology. Scientists have examined people’s brains as they listen to music, and have tracked which neural regions are involved in comprehending aural stimuli. Listening to music activates numerous areas of the brain, including the auditory cortex, the thalamus, and the superior parietal cortex. These same areas are also associated with pattern recognition and helping the brain decide which inputs to pay attention to and which to ignore. The areas that process music, in other words, are designed to seek out patterns and look for familiarity. This makes sense. Music, after all, is complicated. The numerous tones, pitches, overlapping melodies, and competing sounds inside almost any song- or anyone speaking on a busy street, for that matter- are so overwhelming that, without our brain’s ability to focus on some sounds and ignore others, everything would seem like a cacophony of noise.”
The above statement is one of the strongest reasons we have at our music school in Midland, Texas to encourage parents to enroll their children in music lessons.
“Our brains crave familiarity in music because familiarity is how we manage to hear without becoming distracted by all the sound.”
“That’s why songs that sound ‘familiar’ – even if you’ve never heard them before- are sticky. Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard.”
“The problem was that ‘Hey Ya!’ wasn’t familiar. Radio listeners didn’t want to make a conscious decision each time they were presented with a new song. Instead, their brains wanted to follow a habit. Much of the time, we don’t actually choose if we like or dislike a song. It would take too much mental effort. Instead, we react to the cues (‘This sounds like all the other songs I’ve ever liked’) and rewards (‘It’s fun to hum along!’) and without thinking, we either start singing, or reach over and change the station.”
“Listeners are happy to sit through a song they might say they dislike, as long as it seems like something they’ve heard before. Pregnant women are happy to use coupons they receive in the mail, unless those coupons make it obvious that Target is spying into their wombs, which is unfamiliar and kind of creepy.”
“So how do DJs convince listeners to stick with songs such as ‘Hey Ya!’ long enough for them to become familiar? How does Target convince pregnant women t to use diaper coupons without creeping them out? By dressing something new in old clothes, and making the unfamiliar seem familiar.”
“‘Hey Ya!’ needed to become part of an established listening habit to become a hit. And to become part of a habit, it had to be slightly camouflaged at first…DJs started making sure that whenever ‘Hey Ya!’ was played, it was sandwiched between songs that were already popular. ‘It’s textbook theory now,’ said Tom Webster, a radio consultant. ‘Play a new song between two consensus popular hits.”
“‘Managing a playlist is all about risk mitigation,’ said Webster. ‘Stations have to take risks on new songs, otherwise people stop listening. But what listeners really want are songs they already like. So you have to make new songs seem familiar as fast as possible.”
“The song, ‘Hey Ya!’ went on to win a Grammy, sell more than 5.5 million albums, and earn radio stations millions of dollars.
At our music school in Midland, Texas we teach students song-writing and principles of creativity that help them navigate audience expectations with the avant garde.
The answer to Target’s question “how do you advertise to a pregnant woman without revealing that you know she’s pregnant? – was essentially the same one that DJs used to hook listeners on ‘Hey Ya!’ Target started sandwiching the diaper coupons e between non-pregnancy products that made the advertisements seem anonymous, familiar, comfortable. They camouflaged what they knew.”
“Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.”