Book Report

    The book I chose to red is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. This book consists of three parts. Part one talks about habits in individuals. Things like why people make unhealthy choices or healthy choices. Why people are in harmful patterns, and dissecting those harmful patterns with tips to alter them. The second part talks about habit in businesses. This explains a lot of companies prosper my focusing on one thing, and how things sell to the public. The last part is habits in society. A major topic within this part was how societies join together to cause change and what is required to incite those waves of change amongst entire communities and populations. This section talked a lot about the civil rights movement and how it was sparked through people's ability to join together and make a difference. Here is a video talking about some of the biggest lessons learned from this book.

https://youtu.be/5Ws2WfeD6d8

    My favorite part of the book was when Dungy was the coach of The Bucs and was trying to win Superbowl by a very specific technique. Dungy only focused of simple and basic plays where a cue resulted in a routine. He wanted to drill those plays into his players head so they become habit. The purpose of this is for the players to act without thinking leaving no room for mistakes. I liked this part because I really do see how doing something so often leads to muscle memory and even the most complicated stressful things become second nature. Like someone who is obsessively rock climbs but has no fear. This reminded me of the Yerkes-Dodson Law. The Yerkes-Dodson law displays when stimulation increases so does arousal but when optimal arousal is reached performance begins to decline. This is a major concept in sports psychology. Furthermore, the Cusp Catastrophe Model says that cognitive and physical arousal engage to alter one's performance. If arousal continues when performance is optimal catastrophe will ensue. Dungy wanted his players to be so calm and comfortable in their plays that the arousal never gets too high. They never stress or stop to think so arousal doesn't keep elevating causing performance to drop. This was one of my favorite take-aways from the book as a reminder to always stay calm and stress free to best achieve whatever I'm trying to accomplish.

    One thought I've had after reading this book is using techniques from the business portion of the book to aid climate change. A big suggestion I learned from this section is to focus on one change at a time .  In the book it was the safety of the employees, maybe as a society we can really focus on one major thing that is impacting our environment. Like supplying every infrastructure with solar panels to decrease greenhouse emissions. Maybe other positive changes will follow naturally just like the business that only focused on the safety of employees.