The Power of Habit – Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

points. There’s the What What Why system of giving criticism and the Connect, Discover, and Respond system for taking orders when things become hectic. There are learned habits to help baristas tell the difference between patrons who just want their coffee (“A hurried customer speaks with a sense of urgency and may seem impatient or look at their watch”) and those who need a bit more coddling (“A regular customer knows other baristas by name and normally orders the same beverage each day”). Throughout the training manuals are dozens of blank pages where employees can write out plans that anticipate how they will surmount inflection points. Then they practice those plans, again and again, until they become automatic. [147]

This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives. When the Scottish patients filled out their booklets, or Travis studied the LATTE method, they decided ahead of time how to react to a cue-a painful muscle or an angry customer. When the cue arrived, the routine occurred.

Starbucks isn’t the only company to use such training methods. For instance, at Deloitte Consulting, the largest tax and financial services company in the world, employees are trained in a curriculum named “Moments That Matter,” which focuses on dealing with inflection points such as when a client complains about fees, when a colleague is fired, or when a Deloitte consultant has made a mistake. For each of those moments, there are preprogrammed routines-Get Curious, Say What No One Else Will, Apply the 5/5/5 Rule-that guide employees in how they should respond. At the Container Store, employees receive more than 185 hours of training in their first year alone. They are taught to recognize inflection points such as an angry coworker or an overwhelmed customer, and habits, such as routines for calming shoppers or defusing a confrontation. When a customer comes in who seems overwhelmed, for example, an employee immediately asks them to visualize the space in their home they are hoping to organize, and describe how they’ll feel when everything is in its place. “We’ve had customers come up to us and say, ‘This is better than a visit to my shrink,’ ” the company’s CEO told a reporter. [148]

IV.

Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a colossus, isn’t so different from Travis in some ways. [149] He grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and two siblings. When he was seven years old, Schultz’s father broke his ankle and lost his job driving a diaper truck. That was all it took to throw the family into crisis. His father, after his ankle healed, began cycling through a series of lower-paying jobs. “My dad never found his way,” Schultz told me. “I saw his self-esteem get battered. I felt like there was so much more he could have accomplished.”

Schultz’s school was a wild, overcrowded place with asphalt playgrounds and kids playing football, basketball, softball, punch ball, slap ball, and any other game they could devise. If your team lost, it could take an hour to get another turn. So Schultz made sure his team always won, no matter the cost. He would come home with bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees, which his mother would gently rinse with a wet cloth. “You don’t quit,” she told him.

His competitiveness earned him a college football scholarship (he broke his jaw and never played a game), a communications degree, and eventually a job as a Xerox salesman in New York City. He’d wake up every morning, go to a new midtown office building, take the elevator to the top floor, and go door-to-door, politely inquiring if anyone was interested in toner or copy machines. Then he’d ride the elevator down one floor and start all over again.

By the early 1980s, Schultz was working for a plastics manufacturer when he noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate number of coffee drip cones. Schultz flew out and fell in love with the company. Two years later, when he heard that Starbucks, then just six stores, was for sale, he asked everyone he knew for money and bought it.

That was 1987. Within three years, there were eighty-four stores; within six years, more than a thousand. Today, there are seventeen thousand stores in more than fifty countries.

Why did Schultz turn out so different from all the other kids on that playground? Some of his old classmates are today cops and firemen in Brooklyn. Others are in prison. Schultz is worth more than $1 billion. He’s been heralded as one of the greatest CEOs of the twentieth century. Where did he find the determination-the willpower-to climb from a housing project to a private jet?

“I don’t really know,” he told me. “My mom always said, ‘You’re going to be the first person to go to college, you’re going to be a professional, you’re going to make us all proud.’ She would ask these little questions, ‘How are you going to study tonight? What are you going to do tomorrow? How do you know you’re ready for your test?’ It trained me to set goals.

“I’ve been really lucky,” he said. “And I really, genuinely believe that if you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you right.”

Schultz’s focus on employee training and customer service made Starbucks into one of the most successful companies in the world. For years, he was personally involved in almost every aspect of how the company was run. In 2000, exhausted, he handed over day-to-day operations to other executives, at which point, Starbucks began to stumble. Within a few years, customers were complaining about the quality of the drinks and customer service. Executives, focused on a frantic expansion, often ignored the complaints. Employees grew unhappy. Surveys indicated people were starting to equate Starbucks with tepid coffee and empty smiles.

So Schultz stepped back into the chief executive position in 2008. Among his priorities was restructuring the company’s training program to renew its focus on a variety of issues, including bolstering employees’-or “partners,” in Starbucks’ lingo-willpower and self-confidence. “We had to start earning customer and partner trust again,” Schultz told me.

At about the same time, a new wave of studies was appearing that looked at the science of willpower in a slightly different way. Researchers had noticed that some people, like Travis, were able to create willpower habits relatively easily. Others, however, struggled, no matter how much training and support they received. What was causing the difference?

Mark Muraven, who was by then a professor at the University of Albany, set up a new experiment. [150] He put undergraduates in a room that contained a plate of warm, fresh cookies and asked them to ignore the treats. Half the participants were treated kindly. “We ask that you please don’t eat the cookies. Is that okay?” a researcher said. She then discussed the purpose of the experiment, explaining that it was to measure their ability to resist temptations. She thanked them for contributing their time. “If you have any suggestions or thoughts about how we can improve this experiment, please let me know. We want you to help us make this experience as good as possible.”

The other half of the participants weren’t coddled the same way. They were simply given orders.

“You must not eat the cookies,” the researcher told them. She didn’t explain the experiment’s goals, compliment them, or show any interest in their feedback. She told them to follow the instructions. “We’ll start now,” she said.

The students from both groups had to ignore the warm cookies for five minutes after the researcher left the room. None gave in to temptation.

Then the researcher returned. She asked each student to look at a computer monitor. It was programmed to flash numbers on the screen, one at a time, for five hundred milliseconds apiece. The participants were asked to hit the space bar every time they saw a “6” followed by a “4.” This has become a standard way to measure willpower-paying attention to a boring sequence of flashing numbers requires a focus akin to working on an impossible puzzle.

Students who had been treated kindly did well on the computer test. Whenever a “6” flashed and a “4” followed, they pounced on the space bar. They were able to maintain their focus for the entire twelve minutes. Despite ignoring the cookies, they had willpower to spare.

Students who had been treated rudely, on the other hand, did terribly. They kept forgetting to hit the space bar. They said they were tired and couldn’t focus. Their willpower muscle, researchers determined, had been fatigued by the brusque instructions.