The Power of Habit (Part Three)

The Power of Habit (Part Three)

Studies indicate that keystone habits can have the same impact in peoples' lives, as well. For example, until about 20 years ago, conventional wisdom held that the best way for people to lose weight was to radically alter their lives. Doctors would give obese patients strict diets and tell them to join a gym, attend regular counseling sessions and shift their daily routines by walking up stairs, for instance, instead of taking the elevator. Only by completely shaking up someone's life, the thinking went, could their bad habits be reformed.

But when researchers studied the effectiveness of these methods over prolonged periods, they discovered they were failures. Patients would use the stairs for a few weeks, but by the end of the month, it was too much hassle. They began diets and joined gyms, but after the initial burst of enthusiasm wore off, they slid back into their old eating and TV-watching habits. Piling on so much change at once made it impossible for any of it to stick.

Then, in 2009 a group of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health published a study of a different approach to weight loss. They had assembled a group of 1600 obese people and asked them to concentrate on writing down everything they ate at least one day per week.

It was hard at first. The subjects forgot to carry their food journals, or would snack and not note it. Slowly, however, people started recording their meals once a week - and sometimes, more often. Many participants started keeping a daily food log. Eventually, it became a habit. Then, something unexpected happened. The participants started looking at their entries and finding patterns they didn't know existed. Some noticed they always seemed to snack at about 10 a.m., so they began keeping an apple or banana on their desks for midmorning munchies. Others started using their journals to plan future menus, and when dinner rolled around, they ate the healthy meal they had written down, rather than junk food from the fridge.

The researchers hadn't suggested any of these behaviors. They had simply asked everyone to write down what they ate once a week. But this keystone habit - food journaling - created a structure that helped other habits to flourish. Six months into the study, people who kept daily food records had lost twice as much weight as everyone else.

O'Neill left Alcoa in 2000, but the legacy of his keystone habit lives on. In 2010, 82 percent of Alcoa locations didn't lose one employee day due to injury, close to an all-time high. On average, workers are more likely to get injured at a software company, animating cartoons for movie studios, or doing taxes as an accountant than handling molten aluminum at Alcoa.

"When I was made a plant manager," one current Alcoa executive named said Jeff Shockey said, "the first day I pulled into the parking lot I saw all these parking spaces near the front doors with people's titles on them. The head guy for this or that. People who were important got the best parking spots."

"The first thing I did was tell a maintenance manager to paint over all the titles. I wanted whoever got to work earliest to get the best spot. Everyone understood the message: Every person matters. It was an extension of what Paul was doing around worker safety. It electrified the plant. Pretty soon, everyone was getting to work earlier each day."