Charles Duhigg Quotes

Good advertising can make people buy your product even if it sucks ... A dollar spent on brainwashing is more cost-effective than a dollar spent on product improvement.

The amazing thing is that we're part of people's daily lives, like brushing their teeth. It's just something they do throughout the day while working, buying things, deciding what to do after work and much more. Google has been accepted as part of people's lives.

All I know about what people think of my gear is what a couple of my friends tell me, and one of them always wants to borrow money, so I'm not sure how reliable he is.

Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds.

Habits are funny things. What's funny, or rather tragic, is that bad habits are so predictable and avoidable. Despite this, there are people by the millions who insist on acquiring habits that are bad, expensive, and create problems. The habit they weren't going to get, got them!

Some people dye their hair yellow or put rings in their noses. I decided I wasn't going to open an account. Put it the other way round - there was no reason that I should.

Every good product I've ever seen is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. They wanted to use it themselves.

People don't want gadgets, they want services.

Once we know that people are human and have some Homer Simpson in them, then there's a lot that can be done to manipulate them.

Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it; People become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarily, we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.

People's lives are forever controlled by two emotions: fear and greed.

Her hair is ridiculous," I said. "I know. That was the only thing I said about her that was true. When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can't really fully and honestly take those back, you know? I mean, there are highlights. And there are streaks. And then there are skunk stripes.

One problem we discovered, for example, was that our "create a new account" button was in the wrong place...By simply moving it to the left side, mirroring the way people read, we saw a huge improvement in the way people used the site.

We focus a lot on the quality of experience, speed, reliability. It’s not sexy from a lot of people’s perspective, it’s not glitzy in the feature set, but it’s what people come to rely on.

You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair," said Anne reproachfully. "People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is.

When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy.

Emotions are far more contagious than any disease. A smile or a panic will spread through a group of people far faster than any virus ever could. When you walk into the office or a negotiation, then, wash your bad mood away before you see us. Don't cough on us, don't sneeze on us, sure, but don't bring your grouchiness, your skepticism or your fear in here either. It might spread.

It has become harder and harder in the United States to make films unhampered by outside influences. I've always been able to steer clear of that and keep the business people out of my hair completely.

She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at - stirring people's emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power...I only realized later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me.

People rarely buy what they need. They buy what they want.

I'm 47, I have gray hair, and yet people still come up to me on the street who are in their twenties, who weren't even born when 'Singles' was made... well, they were pretty tiny, anyway... and they say, 'Oh, I love that movie.' And I always say, 'How OLD are you?'

Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.

People always ask me how long it takes to do my hair. I don’t know, I’m never there.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.