foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpaste-now every company adds sodium laureth sulfate to make toothpaste foam more. There’s no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when there’s a bunch of suds around their mouth. Once the customer starts expecting that foam, the habit starts growing.”
Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier. It’s as true now as it was almost a century ago. Every night, millions of people scrub their teeth in order to get a tingling feeling; every morning, millions put on their jogging shoes to capture an endorphin rush they’ve learned to crave.
And when they get home, after they clean the kitchen or tidy their bedrooms, some of them will spray a bit of Febreze.
3
How to Create New Habits
I.
The game clock at the far end of the field says there are eight minutes and nineteen seconds left when Tony Dungy, the new head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers-one of the worst teams in the National Football League, not to mention the history of professional football-starts to feel a tiny glimmer of hope. [64]
It’s late on a Sunday afternoon, November 17, 1996. [65] The Buccaneers are playing in San Diego against the Chargers, a team that appeared in the Super Bowl the previous year. The Bucs are losing, 17 to 16. They’ve been losing all game. They’ve been losing all season. They’ve been losing all decade. The Buccaneers have not won a game on the West Coast in sixteen years, and many of the team’s current players were in grade school the last time the Bucs had a victorious season. So far this year, their record is 2-8. In one of those games, the Detroit Lions-a team so bad it would later be described as putting the “less” in “hopeless”-beat the Bucs 21 to 6, and then, three weeks later, beat them again, 27 to 0. [66] One newspaper columnist has started referring to the Bucs as “America’s Orange Doormat.” [67] ESPN is predicting that Dungy, who got his job only in January, could be fired before the year is done.
On the sidelines, however, as Dungy watches his team arrange itself for the next play, it feels like the sun has finally broken through the clouds. He doesn’t smile. He never lets his emotions show during a game. But something is taking place on the field, something he’s been working toward for years. As the jeers from the hostile crowd of fifty thousand rain down upon him, Tony Dungy sees something that no one else does. He sees proof that his plan is starting to work.
Tony Dungy had waited an eternity for this job. For seventeen years, he prowled the sidelines as an assistant coach, first at the University of Minnesota, then with the Pittsburgh Steelers, then the Kansas City Chiefs, and then back to Minnesota with the Vikings. Four times in the past decade, he had been invited to interview for head coaching positions with NFL teams.
All four times, the interviews hadn’t gone well.
Part of the problem was Dungy’s coaching philosophy. In his job interviews, he would patiently explain his belief that the key to winning was changing players’ habits. He wanted to get players to stop making so many decisions during a game, he said. He wanted them to react automatically, habitually. If he could instill the right habits, his team would win. Period.
“Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”
How, the owners would ask, are you going to create those new habits?
Oh, no, he wasn’t going to create
So rather than creating new habits, Dungy was going to
His coaching strategy embodied an axiom, a Golden Rule of habit change that study after study has shown is among the most powerful tools for creating change. Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits.
Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.
That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.
The Golden Rule has influenced treatments for alcoholism, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and hundreds of other destructive behaviors, and understanding it can help anyone change their own habits. (Attempts to give up snacking, for instance, will often fail unless there’s a new routine to satisfy old cues and reward urges. A smoker usually can’t quit unless she finds some activity to replace cigarettes when her nicotine craving is triggered.)
Four times Dungy explained his habit-based philosophy to team owners. Four times they listened politely, thanked him for his time, and then hired someone else.
Then, in 1996, the woeful Buccaneers called. Dungy flew to Tampa Bay and, once again, laid out his plan for how they could win. The day after the final interview, they offered him the job.
THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE
You Can’t Extinguish a Bad Habit, You Can Only Change It.
HOW IT WORKS: USE THE SAME CUE. PROVIDE THE SAME REWARD. CHANGE THE ROUTINE.
Dungy’s system would eventually turn the Bucs into one of the league’s winningest teams. He would become the only coach in NFL history to reach the play-offs in ten consecutive years, the first African American coach to win a Super Bowl, and one of the most respected figures in professional athletics. His coaching techniques would spread throughout the league and all of sports. His approach would help illuminate how to remake the habits in anyone’s life.
But all of that would come later. Today, in San Diego, Dungy just wanted to win.
From the sidelines, Dungy looks up at the clock: 8:19 remaining. The Bucs have been behind all game and have
