Top 147 Quotes by Charles Duhigg

If you need five minutes every hour to look at tweets or to just surf the Internet, you need to schedule that into your schedule, allow yourself to do that. Because when people start procrastinating, what they've done is, they've tried to ignore that urge. They try to deny themselves time on Facebook or time surfing the web.

Union leaders argue that pension shortfalls account for a proportionally tiny portion of governments' financial problems, and by all accounts, there are plenty of parties to blame for the growth in payrolls and obligations.

Typically, when there are corporate habits that undermine individuals, it has emerged without any sort of central planning. Nobody sits down and says, 'I'm going to create an evil habit for this corporation.'

As the United States has become an older nation, reverse mortgages have grown into a $20-billion-a-year industry, with elderly homeowners taking out more than 132,000 such loans in 2007, an increase of more than 270 percent from two years earlier.

Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.

For decades, activist shareholders were an entertaining, but largely ignored, Wall Street sideshow. Disgruntled investors would attend annual meetings to harangue executives, criticize strategies - and protest that their complaints were being ignored.