On my recent tour of North Carolina I had the opportunity to finish a great book given to me by my dear friend, Marcie Roggow. Marcie, Thank YOU! Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit, Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business, will change the way you look at your business, your clients and most importantly yourself.

The book explains and explores the nature of habits and habit creation. Whether we realize it or not, habits are powerful things. They control most of what we do and why we do it. Learning how they operate and what can be done to change them is a worthwhile endeavor. The sections on how major businesses from Starbucks, to Alcoa to Target are full of well documented and practical approaches that allowed these businesses to succeed based on the habits of people that they either leveraged or changed.

Charles Duhigg is an investigative reporter for the New York Times. He is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk Awards, and was part of a team of finalists for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. he is a frequent contributor to This American Life, NPR, PBS Newshour, and Frontline. A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two kids.

If you are into education you will find some fascinating reading in the section which deals with the habit of Success at Starbucks and what companies such as that have done to create training that actually teaches people greater skills in areas such as willpower, discipline and other life skills that are hard to come by but absolutely hard to come by in the world of education. It will make you wonder what types of education we are missing that are key ingredients for success in any industry such as relationship building, time management and how to cope with stress and distractions. Fascinating I tell you, simply fascinating.

One of the great assets of the book is the Appendix entitled A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas. It is a framework for understanding how habits work and a guide to experimenting with how they might change. It is laid out in an easy to follow and implement step by step approach.

You can find the book in all of the major bookstores, on Amazon and just about anywhere else. We should all read it. If you would like more information you can find out more with a simple Google search, or better yet, just visit Mr. Duhigg’s website.