The Power of Habit Characters

The author of The Power of Habit is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes about the intersection of business, technology, and psychology. He first became interested in habits while reporting from Baghdad for The Los Angeles Times in the early 2000s.

Bob Bowman was Michael Phelps’s childhood swimming coach. He taught Phelps many key habits, like following a consistent warm-up routine and visualizing the perfect race.

Reza Habib is a psychologist and neuroscientist who studies how compulsive gamblers form their habits. His research shows that the habit loop completely overtakes these gamblers’ brains while they play, which means that they essentially lose control of their free will.

E.D. Nixon was the leader of the NAACP in Montgomery, Alabama during the 1950s. He helped connect Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to launch the Montgomery bus boycott.

Beverly Pauly was Eugene Pauly’s wife. She cared for him after his illness.

Michael Phelps is the world-champion American swimmer and 23-time Olympic gold medalist. Duhigg cites Phelps’s pre-race routine as an example of how routines and keystone habits contribute to success.

Howard Schultz is the longtime CEO of Starbucks. Duhigg argues that Starbucks is so successful because Schultz learned about the importance of willpower early in life, then built Starbucks’s employee training strategies around teaching willpower as a habit.

Wolfram Schultz is a German neuroscientist who studies habit formation in his lab at the University of Cambridge. His experiments have shown that monkeys (like Julio) form habits when they form cravings—or learn to associate a habit loop’s cues with its rewards.

Larry Squire is the world-renowned psychologist, neuroscientist, and memory researcher who studied Eugene Pauly after his illness. Pauly helped Squire understand the difference between ordinary conscious memory and the unconscious memory associated with habits.

Drake Stimson is the mathematician and marketer who led the advertising campaign for Proctor & Gamble’s odor-eliminating spray, Febreze. He struggled to convincingly sell the product at first, but eventually realized that people would use it if they learned to use it as a reward for cleaning.

Bill Wilson was the New York man who found God, quit drinking, and started Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s.