The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg Read Free Book Online Page A

hadn’t been able to revive him. He was gone. After his death, he would be celebrated by researchers, the images of his brain studied in hundreds of labs and medical schools.

    “I know he would have been really proud to know how much he contributed to science,” Beverly told me. “He told me once, pretty soon after we got married, that he wanted to do something important with his life, something that mattered. And he did. He just never remembered any of it.”

THE CRAVING BRAIN
How to Create New Habits

I.

    One day in the early 1900s, a prominent American executive named Claude C. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with a new business idea. The friend had discovered an amazing product, he explained, that he was convinced would be a hit. It was a toothpaste, a minty, frothy concoction he called “Pepsodent.” There were some dicey investors involved—one of them had a string of busted land deals; another, it was rumored, was connected to the mob—but this venture, the friend promised, was going to be huge. If, that is,Hopkins would consent to help design a national promotional campaign. 2.1

    Hopkins, at the time, was at the top of a booming industry that had hardly existed a few decades earlier: advertising. Hopkins was the man who had convinced Americans to buy Schlitz beer by boasting that the company cleaned their bottles “with live steam,” while neglecting to mention that every other company used the exact same method. He had seduced millions of women into purchasingPalmolive soap by proclaiming that Cleopatra had washed with it, despite the sputtering protests of outraged historians. He had made Puffed Wheat famous by saying that it was “shot from guns” until the grains puffed “to eight times normal size.” He had turned dozens of previously unknown products—Quaker Oats, Goodyear tires, the Bissell carpet sweeper, Van Camp’s pork and beans—into household names. And in the process, he had made himself so rich that his best-selling autobiography,
My Life in Advertising,
devoted long passages to the difficulties of spending so much money.

    Claude Hopkins was best known for a series of rules he coined explaining how to create new habits among consumers. These rules would transform industries and eventually became conventional wisdom among marketers, educational reformers, public health professionals, politicians, and CEOs. Even today, Hopkins’s rules influence everything from how we buy cleaning supplies to the tools governments use for eradicating disease. They are fundamental to creating any new routine.

    However, when his old friend approached Hopkins about Pepsodent, the ad man expressed only mild interest. It was no secret that the health of Americans’ teeth was in steep decline.As the nation had become wealthier, people had started buying larger amounts of sugary, processed foods. 2.2 When the government started drafting men for World War I, so many recruits had rotting teeth that officials said poor dental hygiene was a national security risk.

    Yet as Hopkins knew, selling toothpaste was financial suicide. There was already an army of door-to-door salesmen hawking dubious tooth powders and elixirs, most of them going broke.

    The problem was that hardly anyone bought toothpaste because, despite the nation’s dental problems,hardly anyone brushed their teeth. 2.3

    So Hopkins gave his friend’s proposal a bit of thought, and then declined. He’d stick with soaps and cereals, he said. “I did not see a way to educate the laity in technical tooth-paste theories,” Hopkinsexplained in his autobiography. The friend, however, was persistent. He came back again and again, appealing to Hopkins’s considerable ego until, eventually, the ad man gave in.

    “I finally agreed to undertake the campaign if he gave me a six months’ option on a block of stock,” Hopkins wrote. The friend agreed.

    It would be the wisest financial decision of Hopkins’s life.

    Within five years of